CREATING HAVK

How a modest team of Dubliners elevated the art of game physics

- BY LEWIS PACKWOOD

One of the first things that greets us at Havok’s main office in Leopardstown, about half an hour’s drive south of Dublin city centre, is a Gravity Gun. The model sits on a low table in the reception area, in between two glass cabinets holding trophies, mixed-reality headsets and assorted other memorabilia from Havok’s first 25 years. But the Gravity Gun has earned its place in the spotlight.

Half-Life 2 was a watershed moment for videogames in general, but for Havok, which helped Valve put this fundamental force in the hands of players? “That was something that really showed the world what was possible with using physics as a more integral part of the game, rather than just an additional visual effect,” says David Coghlan, Havok’s general manager, who joined the company in 2003, just before its big breakthrough moment.

Today, the company is housed within the glass-fronted corporate shell of Microsoft’s Dublin campus. Sealed off behind a keycard-accessed barricade, the Havok office is a kind of enclave, branded in yellow and black. Still, separate as it might feel, existing within one of the world’s biggest companies is an awfully long way — figuratively if not geographically — from Havok’s humble beginnings in the computer science department of Trinity College Dublin.

“We were part of a research group that was called the Image Synthesis Group, and a lot of the work was actually about image generation and realtime ray tracing,” says Havok technical director Dave Gargan, one of that initial group. At that point they had yet to work on a videogame; some of their earliest work came from elsewhere.