Erik Wolpaw is writer and co-founder of the Old Man Murray project. Together with Chet Faliszek, they founded an outline as a review site with an extremely sarcastic tone criticizing the bias and controversy within the medium.
Some of the website notes were taking into consideration by Gabe Newell — the CEO of Valve while producing Half-Life. Not only OMM's material was taken into consideration by the video game bosses, but they also rose surprising discussions like the text about Start to Crate metrics variously criticizing the level design basing on crates and boxes as an efficient place to store items in games.
After the Newell's guidelines, Wolpaw was accepted as a writer on multiple Valve projects: Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and 2, Portal, Left 4 Dead and Portal 2. Being a scripter to those titles, Erik also worked for Double Fine Productions and wrote both Psychonauts.
Not only the video game industry was influenced by OMM's texts — Scott Pilgrim's author Brian Lee O'Malley named Old … full text