Yahn Bernier

Yahn Bernier has been working as a Software Development Engineer at Valve Corporation since February 1998.

Despite having a lifelong love of games and teaching himself to program at the age of 12, Yahn never thought he could get a job making them, so instead he graduated from Harvard with a degree in chemistry and became an Atlanta patent lawyer. He was lured back into the world of gaming during the spring of 1996 when id Software released Qtest, the original test version of the Quake engine. Yahn became interested in the engine's use of BSP (a map format) trees, and after someone on the web reverse-engineered them, he set about writing a 3D tool to take level data and build a BSP tree and output it to this format. He got that little side project working during the summer before Quake shipped and it occurred to him that he had the beginnings of a Quake editor. Yahn's BSP Quake Editor was released in the summer of 1996, and it was this program that started getting him attention from game companies such as Ritual Entertainment, Ion Storm, and Valve.

Some time in the fall of 1997, Yahn built a special version of BSP for Dario Casali and Dave Riller at Valve — they needed a special version because Valve had modified the Quake engine it had licensed to support 16-bit color. Yahn happily created this version, not knowing that Valve already had an official in-house editor, Worldcraft, which they had purchased from Ben Morris at the same time they hired him on to continue working with it. As a result, BSP became jokingly known inside of Valve as "that other editor"’ and level designers using it were subject to a bit of a hard time by management.

After joining Valve officially in February 1998, Yahn worked on Half-Life's multiplayer code, and was hard at work on Team Fortress 2 as of 2003.

Another fact about Yahn: his favorite phrase, when imbibing too freely, is "Yucca will assimilate you."