Game Informer has a new interview with Valve's Doug Lombardi online, and in it, he reveals that the Old Man Murray writing team are back together at Valve and working on the previously GSW-mentioned Portal - explaining why the Portal trailer was actually pretty damn funny.

Portal itself, as we pointed out, "is a great 'rags to riches' story (OK, maybe mild wealth!), since, as we mentioned in our Gamasutra report: the "spatial portal dropping concept, using a gun for placement... is based on IGF Student Showcase winning title Narbacular Drop."

Valve's Lombardi discusses the process of hiring the Narbacular Drop developers, and also reveals: "The writing for that is being done by Chet [Faliszek] and Erik [Wolpaw] who used to be Old Man Murray. They’re at Valve now and one of their first projects they’ve been tasked with is to do the writing for Portal. So if you were a fan of Old Man Murray you’re going to be a fan of that voice in Portal because it’s the same wry cynicism."

Chet has been at Valve for a while in some technical role, we thought (?), and Erik previously worked on Psychonauts for Double Fine before hopping on board the Valve train, and we'd like to point out a couple of things - firstly, that Valve hires some great writers _as_ pure writers (Marc Laidlaw being the other great example), and secondly, that OMM was more influential than they might have ever imagined on the game biz, given their elevated state of sarcasm at any given point.