Known for their inventive videogame series, stemming off Half-Life and resulting in such creations as Portal, Team Fortress, Counter-Strike and Left 4 Dead, Valve is beginning to step into the feature film business. Their Steam distribution service is currently making available their first feature-length film with the fitting Indie Game: The Movie. Now, Variety reports that the company is stepping into the production side.

They’ve teamed with Shane Acker, coming off his Tim Burton-produced animation 9, as well as the Irish outfit Brown Bag Films to develop a new feature titled Deep. In the action adventure, Acker continues in a post-apocalyptic landscape, this time following WWIII with a setting underwater in fallen ships. The film will follow “Sullivan, a captain of a nuclear sub. He makes contact with a splinter group of superior scientific intelligence, the Wayfarers, which has the power to save the earth. But that could come at a terrible cost.”

I’ve always been curious at videogame companies stepping into the feature film world, but aside from a few great cutscenes, the animations aren’t usually as detailed as those coming from the big houses like Pixar and even DreamWorks. Since Valve aren’t developing an actual Half-Life film, I’d  be interested to see what the come up with here, with their Source game engine being used to do “real-time rendering, and editing, simplified character animation and economical lighting.”

Currently being written by Jack Barton Mitchell, Deep is aiming for a $18.7 million production with distribution talk happening.

What do you think about videogame companies mixing with Hollywood?