No recent wiki edits to this page.  Ken Birdwell was one of the
first Valve Emplyees. With a background mostly in simulation and
medical software, Ken's primary focus at Valve has been
Animation software. He is a pioneer in animation in video games
as he was the first person in the industry in introduce skeletal
systems in the face for speech and realistic rag doll physics on
a body.  He took his ideas even further with Half-Life 2
adding more facial muscles such as eye muscles believing that
they were very important to a characters ability to express
believable emotion. All Half-life 2's characters skeletal
systems are interconnected like a humans. This makes the
animation of the characters much more realistic and while valve
is continually improving their engine engine the system he lay
down in the Source engine back in 2004 would be tough to match
even with todays high budgeted games.  He is the only Valve
employee to actually grow up here in Bellevue, and spends
countless hours regaling his office mates w