Recently, gamers noticed one of the episodes of the Kiwi Talkz podcast. Then Valve veteran, who worked on the Portal and Half-Life franchises, gave an interview.
Lead designer of Portal 2, Josh Weier, shared his memories — he literally began to live at work, and his wife did not like it very much:
My wife was fed up with this project. This game became something like a mistress for me, because I worked so many hours and was very immersed. That's all I was thinking about: "What will we face tomorrow? Where will we go in terms of design?" It was constant stress: "Will we ruin everything? Will we do something that people won't like?".
At a certain point, Josh's wife threatened to file for divorce if he continued to work in this mode:
It seems that in the last three weeks [of development] my wife literally said to me: "If you don't stop, we'll get divorced." So the next day I called and said that I couldn't come to the office... It wasn't so bad, because in fact we had already finished enough of the main things, and everything was fine. But the experience was very strange: it was as if I switched from "giving my all at work by 200%" to "I need to get away from this, I need to take a step back."