This omnificent developer, best known for its legendary Half-Life series of first-person action games, has spent the last 14 years inspiring gamers and the industry with bold new ideas. But Valve, an independent studio of over 250 world-class artists that Forbes magazine estimates is worth as much as $4 billion, thinks different. Game companies get ossified into a schedule of releasing new sequels like clockwork every 12 or 24 months. Spend enough time around the video game industry and a pattern emerges that’s as regimented as Wolpaw’s sleep.

The question is, will he be awake when this happens? Tonight, February 16, 2011, might be the night Portal 2, the new video game Wolpaw co-wrote at Valve in Seattle, will be finished after more than three arduous years of development. Tiptoeing around the house in darkness, Erik puts on a flannel button-down, says goodbye to his wife Diana, checks that his 11-month-old son Jack is soundly sleeping, and pulls out of the driveway in his Ford Taurus. “But nothing was as exciting as eight hours of sleep.” “It was great to be bad-ass until 8 p.m.,” he now says. These days he’s approaching middle age, but even back when he was in high school in Cleveland, Ohio – and nearly flunking out – neither girls nor his activities as part of a mischievous hacker group known for credit card fraud could shake his inveterate sleep routine. The same eight hours he gets every night.

His body just knows it’s time to get up at the same moment every day, but only after a luxurious eight hours of sleep. It's four int he morning and Erik Wolpaw’s alarm clock doesn’t go off.

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