Valve continues to hire Linux developers

Valve Software continues to hire renowned Linux experts, which is logical, given the company's stated intentions to launch a new OS and rumors of a Valve Box console. Most recently, the leading developers of the DarkPlaces engine (cross-platform first-person shooters Xonotic and Nexuiz) and the creator of the cross-platform game Battle for Wesnoth joined Valve.

The new acquisition of the corporation is Sam Lanting, who previously worked at Loki Software, where before the bankruptcy of the company he ported some Windows-games to Linux, for example, Rune, Tribes 2, Railroad Tycoon II and many other hits of the late 90s. His experience in working with Linux is more than 10 years, it was Sam who created and continues to develop the popular cross-platform library Simple DirectMedia Layerused when writing multimedia programs (mainly games) not only on Linux and Mac OS X, but also on Windows.

After the bankruptcy of Loki Software, Sam worked as a lead developer at Blizzard, where he was porting World of Warcraft to Linux, but the company decided to close the project. Sam confirmed hiring on the SDL mailing list on Friday . To assess the seriousness of the igrodel’s intentions, it’s worth remembering that the Linux team in Valve, according to publicly available information, is not so small:

• Mike Sertain, who worked in the 90s on Microsoft Exchange, then on the Xbox team, and later on at RAD Game Tools, where he worked on Pixomatic software rendering. Following Intel’s takeover of Pixomatic by Intel, Mike teamed with Michael Abrash, now a wearer with Valve, to design the Larrabee architecture . Sertine has been with Valve since 2011, and is currently deeply involved in the Steam client project for Linux. Mike is also a Linux kernel bug reporter.
• Rick Johnson, who started at Raven Software over twenty years ago, later worked at Activision, Gearbox Software, and joined Valve in 2008.
• Scott Ludwig, back in the 80s working on Windows 1.0. Since 2004, he worked for several years at Google, and later joined Valve.
• Forest Hale, creator of the DarkPlaces open source game engine, an offshoot of the idTech 2 engine. Forest was porting Quake Live to Mac OS X and Linux.
• David White, a former Google engineer who created the open-source Battle for Wesnoth strategy.
• Starting next week, Sam Lating.
• As you know, Valve employee desks have wheels. During his last visit to the office, Michael Larabel noticed that Gabe Newell pushed his workplace to the Linux-sharashka, right where Sertayn was sitting.

According to Michael Larabel , despite the stellar line-up, the corporation is still trying to hire more Linux kernel developers, driver experts, and other "extremely gifted Linux developers."