The Story of Valve Part One

my former co host Chris Palette used to say. Today, I'm gonna cover a topic that I have received numerous requests to cover in the past. Multiple people have asked me throughout the last few years to cover this topic, and that is the company Valve. So to day, I'm going to start down that pathway. But spoiler alert, that story is pretty complex and pretty long, so it's going to be more than a single part. I will do

at least two parts on this topic. I do not know exactly how long it's going to go, because I've only done enough research for one part. In full, I suspect I will have enough to do three episodes about Valve entirely to cover the full aspect of it. Unless I really truncate things in part two. But since it's too early for me to say, I'm not sure, I

will tell you another spoiler alert. This story could also be called the Half Life story because the beginning of Valve is very much concentrated on the development of their first game, that is Half Life. And if you had not guessed up to this point and you have not heard of them before, Valve is a game developer company, or at least that's how they started out. Today they're known more for something else. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

They play a really important role in PC gaming, first as the publisher of games and then of course as the operator of the most successful online store for PC games. But how did it all get started in the first place. Well, you know me, I'm not gonna begin this episode with the start date for the company itself. That's way too simplistic. We need to look at the people who founded Valve, where they came from, and how they got to where they are. And those two people, the co founders of

Valve are Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington. Now, Gabe Newell was born on November third, nineteen sixty two, in Washington, State. After he graduated high school, he enrolled in Havid University. He attended classes at Harvard from nineteen eighty until nineteen eighty three, at which point he chose to drop out of school and work for a little company called micro offt The dropping out of school motif becomes a popular

one in this episode. That doesn't mean that, kids, you should drop out of school if you want to become millionaires, because trust me, it doesn't work out that way for everyone. But in this case it worked out pretty well well. He didn't just make the decision spontaneously to drop out of Harvard. What actually happened was he was visiting his brother, who worked for Microsoft out in Washington, and according to Newell himself, he was getting in trouble with Steve Developers

Developers Developers Bomber for distracting his brother at work. See it turned out his brother was so busy developing at Microsoft that he couldn't take time off to go and see the sites in Seattle with his brother Gabe. So instead Gabe went to hang out with his brother over at Microsoft. But because you know, he wanted to spend time with his brother, he was taking some attention away from his brother's tasks. Bomber said, Hey, I don't mind if you hang out, but if you're gonna hang out,

you're gonna do some work. So Balmber actually put Gabe Newell to work at Microsoft. Newell would later on say that he learned more about computers and software development in those three months working with Microsoft than he ever did in his undergraduate studies over at Harvard, and so he made the decision to quit school and started Microsoft full time. He began to work mainly on the Windows operating system.

You might be familiar with it, or as Newell described it, he was the producer of the first three releases of Windows. He joined the ranks of what was known as the Microsoft millionaires. These were employees during the relatively early days of Microsoft who ended up making more than a million dollars through their stock options with the company. So, Microsoft, like a lot of software companies out there, would reward

their employees with stock options. As it turns out, Microsoft was remarkably successful, as we all know, and so the people who had been rewarded with those stock options made out like bandits, except for the fact that they actually earned the money that they earned. Right they created the value in that company, and so the company grew exponentially, and as a result, so did the value of those stock options, So people like Gabe Newell became millionaires, at

least on paper. Well. Mike Harrington, the other co founder of Valve, attended the University of Oregon before he too dropped out of school. Now, he went originally to go work for a company called Dynamics, that's d Y in a m i X. This was a software company that created titles for PC games publisher Activision. So in the world of PC games, you typically have a couple of

different entities. Sometimes they can be one and the same, but typically you will have game developers who actually make the games you play, and game publishers that take the games that other people have made and then published them or get them out to consumers put them out on the market. So in this case, Dynamics was a game developer and Mike Harrington was working for Dynamics. They would create games for Activision, which would then go on to

publish them. Now this would be a seven when he was working for Dynamics and he leaves that company to go and work for Microsoft. So he joins Microsoft in seven whereas Newell had joined a couple of years earlier. At Microsoft, Harrington worked as a software developer and later a manager on a few big projects, including Windows in T and the infamous software bomb known as Microsoft Bob. His wife, Monica Harrington, was the communications man up from

Microsoft Bob. Although they were not married when Harrington first went to go work for Microsoft, they met at Microsoft. According to Monica Harrington, she was the one who was really interested in getting married. They started dating for a while. She wanted to marry him, he was not certain yet if that's what he wanted, and then they broke up. Then they decided to just kind of go on a

date together. They weren't even really going out. They just spent the day together, and at the end of that day, Harrington decided that in fact, he did want to marry Monica, and he proposed and she accepted. And I think that's a very sweet story. However, that sweet story is somewhat balanced out by the terrible disaster that was Microsoft Bob.

Microsoft Bob is an incredible story, so incredible that I actually did a full episode of tech Stuff about that disastrous software release if you want to learn more about it. And I encourage you to do so, because it is an amazing story. You can listen to the Tech Stuff episode titled what About Microsoft Bob, which published on May eighth,

two thousand thirteen. It's really the software package of the millennium in my estimation, and Lauren Vogelbaum was my co host on that episode, So if you guys, miss Lauren, you should go back and listen to that episode and learn all about that attempt to create an operating system for the average person that ended up being a complete and total failure in all sense of the word. Anyway, Harrington also became a Microsoft millionaire because he was also

awarded stock options. And you had Newell and Harrington to Microsoft employees who were at least on paper millionaires. But what were they gonna do with all this filthy lucre. The answer to that question followed a former Microsoft employees path, and this is where we have to talk about another guy named Michael A. Brash. Now A Brash attended the University of Pennsylvania and had been programming since the early nineteen eighties, and like Newell and Harrington, his work focused

on lots of different types of software. Now he cut his teeth on building computer games, one of them being Space Strike, which was essentially a clone of Space Invaders. By the early nineteen nineties, he had joined Microsoft, and he credits the science fiction novel snow Crash, which was written by Neil Stevenson, with inspiring him to work on

a networked three D engine. In the world of snow Crash, there is a virtual reality kind of Internet construct that characters can enter into, and they have avatars within this virtual world that they inhabit, and they can do all sorts of stuff in the virtual world as a result of that, and our main character, hero protagonist, which is a great name, is one of the early developers in

this metaverse that is created in the world of snow Crash. Now, we have a Brash who wants to create a three D networked engine, and he's at Microsoft, and he tries to convince people in Microsoft that this is a project worth pursuing, but he doesn't get anywhere. No one really shows any interest in supporting such a project. It doesn't really align with Microsoft's plans at that point. So a Brash ended up having a meeting with John Carmack of

IT software fame. This was a and Carmack and A Brash started talking about networked persistent Internet game servers, and Carmack had already tried to lure A Brash away from Microsoft a couple of times in the past, but A Bresh had always resisted this because Microsoft was a stable and lucrative gig. Those stock options were no joke. A Bresh would be leaving a guaranteed job with security to go work for ID software, and he had never really

been tempted to seriously consider it before. But with this conversation about these persistent game engines and the fact that that seemed to be a step toward what A Bresh envisioned as the future of the Internet, this future that was envisioned in Neil stevenson snow Crash, A Brash felt the sirens call and decided to go join in Software finally after all those other failed attempts to lure him away.

So he was eager to try and create this metaverse like the one in Stevenson's book, and he felt that CarMax approach might be the right way to try this. His departure from Microsoft to work for a game studio we kind of serve as a sort of inspiration for Newell and Harrington, they would not consider leaving for another couple of years, So a brash leaves in n in ninety six. That's when Harrington and Newell started to consider

doing something similar. Uh. Now, Abresh would later on become an important liaison and even later still an employee over at Valve Software. But that's getting ahead of the story a bit. Let's talk about Harrington and Newell's decision to strike out on their own and leave Microsoft behind. Harrington was actually the one to make the first move, as he would say later on in interviews, I like developing software,

good working environments, and games. I put all together and decided that I couldn't just leave Microsoft and do nothing. But he also knew he couldn't just do this by himself, so he started to search around and see if there was any interest among his co workers in striking out and trying to create a new company. But he wasn't meeting with a whole lot of enthusiasm. Most people were interested in just pursuing research projects, whether it was at

Microsoft or striking out independently. But they didn't they didn't really want to develop software. They were wanting to to kind of push the envelope in finding out what you can do with code, which is kind of cool, but it wasn't really what Harrington was interested in. There was one notable exception, Gabe Newell. Newell seemed interested in this concept of going out and creating a game company. Harrington and Newell decided that they would fund the company themselves.

They would cash in their stock options and fund this whole formation of their new company out of pocket, and they called the company Valve. Here's a fun bet of trivia. They had other names that they were considering before they settled on Valve. The next in line, the second most popular of the contenders was hollow Box, so Valve could have been called hollow Box had they gone a different way. Now.

The two had agreed already that they wanted their company name to be something cool, but not be reflective of some sort of macho, testosterone driven bro version of gaming. They didn't want it to be you know, kicking the pants games or anything like that, or or you know, uh, biden nerd games. They didn't want something that had that sense to it. They wanted something a little less aggressive,

I guess is the right word. They ended up signing the limited liability company agreement for Valve on August twenty four. That was a really big day for game Newell because it wasn't just the day that Valve Software was officially born, it was also his wedding day. He got married on that day, so he took some time out from his wedding day to sign the official papers to form this company. It was also a big day for Harrington as well. His wife, Monica was a little leery about this Elves

Software venture. When she first heard that Harrington wanted to do this. She thought it was going to end up being some sort of modest little side project, that it was going to end up being a company run out of their garage, which wouldn't be unusual in Silicon Valley. If you've been listening to tech stuff, you know that in Silicon Valley, which granted isn't in Washington, it's in California, that it was a place where numerous companies got their

start in garages. You had like Apple getting started in a garage, and HP and lots of other ones. Microsoft too got started in a garage, although that was in Washington, not in California. But it turns out this was not what Newell and Harrington had in mind. Instead, they signed a five year lease on an office space in Kirkland, Washington. So this was real business here, and Monica Harrington was a little bit nervous about it. She wasn't sure that this was going to pan out to be a good

economic decision. Fortunately, her her worries were ultimately unfounded, although it wasn't exactly smooth sailing from the start. Now, the question then was what sort of game should they develop? And it might seem unusual that a couple of people would leave a very lucrative job to go form a company and not already have a firm idea of where they wanted to go, but that's kind of what was

happening with Valve in those early days. Now, they were both interested in the burgeoning world of three D games, specifically first person shooters. Keep in mind, in the mid ninety nineties these were just starting to take off games like Wolfenstein three D and Doom. They were really creating

a whole new genre of games for the PC. So they wanted to create a first person shooter in that Vein they wanted to have sort of a science fiction in horror motif, but rather than start completely from scratch, where they'd have to build everything from the ground up, they decided that they would take elements that already existed and then improve upon them, because that would be easier than just building a game engine from the ground up.

That's enormously complicated, and they honestly didn't have any experience in developing game engines on that level at this point, So they decided that they would take the work out of creating those underlying physics of the game off of their plates. And they were able to get in touch with A Brash. Remember he had been working for Microsoft and then in ninety four he went to work for ID Software. Well, they touched Base with a Brash. They said, hey,

we've decided we're going to create this game company. We know you went to work for ID Software. We wondered if maybe there was some way we could work with you guys to get the source code for your Quake engine and use that as the basis for our game engine for the game we want to create. And A. Bresh was able to secure for them a meeting for them to come over to ID Software and meet with

the various executives over there and kind of pitch their idea. Now, in an interview, A Bresh would elaborate on this and he said, quote, I don't recall that when they came down to it, there was a lot of great chemistry. Let's put it this way. It wasn't like when nine inch Nails came to visit that was a cool thing. These were guys that worked on stuff like Microsoft, Bob

and home automation. You're not going to walk into the coolest game company on the face of the earth and have the guys say, Wow, nice to hang out with you. End quote. Yikes. Nevertheless, they were able to secure this meeting, and through that they were able to get a licensing agreement for the Quake source code. And then they got to work, and that work involved modifying that Quake engine.

So while they didn't have to build a physics engine from the ground up, they did seriously rework the Quake engine itself. Now. To do that, they looked for people in the Quake community, which was filled with enterprising coders who were bending quakes code to their will. So these weren't people who worked for ID Software. These were people who were using the Quake source code themselves. Are using the Quake Engine to create their own modified games and levels.

So two of those developers who were in this world were John Guthrie and Steve Bond. The two of them were living out of Florida and they had launched a fan site called Quake Command, and they both received invitations from Gabe Newell to come to Washington and visit the Valve office. And they were both very skeptical of this offer. At first. They didn't think that this was really a serious at ump to get them to come look at

a game development development company. They neither of them anticipated that ever becoming a reality, but Steve Bond eventually agreed to this and gave Newell flew him out to Seattle, Washington, and gave him a car rental and a hotel and had him stay for several days, and by the end of it, Bond was convinced that Valve was the place he wanted to work, and so he joined the company. A couple of like a week later, Guthrie would also

join the company. He would drop out of college in order to do so, so the tradition would continue another college dropout to join Valve Software. Newell and Harrington. Meanwhile, we're making other hires. They were luring people away from companies like three D Realms and Microsoft, and once they had their base team together, they began to work on

modifying the Quake engine. According to some estimates, they ended up changing about seventy of that source code to create Half Life, and that game at the time didn't have that name. It wasn't called Half Life. It had a code name called Quiver. Part of that massive modification was the addition of skeletal animation valve, depended upon a developer named Ken Birdwell. Birdwell's background was a bit unusual for

the video game industry. He had actually made a name for himself developing software that would scan a person's foot so that a custom shoe in Soul company could design an insul for that person. So he was looking at technology to actually look at the contours of a person's foot in order to design insuls that would support that person inside a shoe. It's kind of cool, but he was the developer who actually created the skeletal animation system

that drastically simplified the animation process. So instead of having to control all the elements of a body so that at you could animate things on a very granular level, the body ends up being essentially a skin laid over top a digital skeleton which has various joints and points of articulation. The skeletal animation system would end up indicating how those skeletons could move, and that was developed by Birdwell.

Birdwell was even able to solve the problem of talking characters by creating virtual bones around the mouths and then animating those virtual bones, which sounds both fascinating and super duper creepy. By the time all of these modifications were done, the team was really working on a new game engine. It really wasn't Quake anymore, so they gave it a new name. It was called gold Source or g O L D s r C. Now, an early challenge for the team ended up not being technical in nature. It

was all on the business side. See Valve was set up as a game developer coup, but they were not a game publishing company. Remember I talked earlier about their being developers and publishers, so they needed to find someone out there who could publish their game. They just couldn't handle that side of the business on their own, especially not as a startup, So Newell and Harrington started looking around, but they encountered resistance from a lot of established game publishers.

They found this really frustrating. Newell mentioned that it was particularly difficult for him. He's had achieved really great success and respect within the world of Microsoft, and yet he was getting trouble even landing a meeting with some of these game publishers. He said it was really kind of insulting in a way, although if you think about it, he was moving from developing operating system software to developing game software. So from a publisher's standpoint, they were saying, well,

this is apples and oranges. You you haven't proved that you know what you're doing in this world, so I don't really think that it's a good use of our time. But then they got lucky. Newell would end up writing to Ken Williams, who was one of the real pioneers of PC games and the founder of Sierra Online. Williams had been looking for a game in that three D first person shooter genre, something similar to Quake. He had resisted getting into that field when it first started launching.

He wasn't sure that it was going to be very popular, and then he really regretted the fact that he didn't jump on it earlier. So when he got this email, he got excited because he had already been thinking about possibly getting into that realm and here was a company saying we're creating a game in that realm, but we need a publisher. Could we maybe work with you? And so Williams said, it was the right email at the

right time. Now, I have a lot more to say about the early days of Valve Software in the development of Half Life, but before I get into that, let's take a quick break and thank our sponsor. So game Newell was given the chance to bring a team to Sierra Online and present Valves pitch to Sierra and say, hey, will you publish our game the day that they got the invite, the or the day they were supposed to have the meeting. It's snowed in Seattle. Now, this is

not something that commonly happens in Seattle. Despite the fact that it's in the Upper Northwest, they actually don't get that much snow in the city itself, and as a result, the city kind of shut down. It's sort of the way Atlanta shuts down whenever we get snow, or more frequently, when we get ice. So there was some issues here, but Newell was absolutely determined to make this meeting, so he and his team piled into a four wheel drive vehicle.

They skidded their way across town and they got to Sierra Online's headquarters, where there was all of one employee in the building. Fortunately, that one employee was Ken Williams, the guy who really mattered in the case of this particular conversation. So Newell would later on say that kid Williams was sold on the pitch and shut the presentation down early before they could even deliver their big finish, like the big push to get Sierra Online support. That

was a great sign they landed the agreement. While Williams was instrumental in getting things moving, he actually would not stick around. He would end up leaving Sierra not long after this meeting took place, and Scott Lynch would then become the head of Sierra Studios, which become the new incarnation of Sierra Online. I have to do a full episode about Sierra at some point, I'm sure, because they

were very important in the early days of PC gaming. Also, the relationship between Sierra and Valve would not remain rosy forever, but that is something will really have to explore in a future episode on this topic because it happens after

this one ends. Spoiler alert. Well, it would be two years before this game, code named Quiver, would launch, so from nine the game is in development, and that game would become one of the benchmarks for the first person shooter genre, and it was of course called Half Life. The thing that really set Half Life apart from other first person shooter games of the era was the fact that it was so dependent upon story. Now, in the nineteen nineties, the first person shooter games that were coming

out were pretty light in the story department. Typically, the story was reduced to just a basic premise. So here's an example in the first episode of Wolfenstein three D, which had three episodes. In the original game, you would play as a World War two American soldier who was trying to escape a fortress that was held by Nazis.

That's it. That was the extent of the story. In Doom, you're a space marine who's fighting off demonic creatures in a futuristic setting, and that was pretty much the extent of the story in the first Doom game. Neither of those games had really much of a narrative attached to them. It was really just a setting, kind of a flavor and atmosphere for you to play through, but there was no real story developing throughout the game. Newell and Harrington

wanted to make Half Life a completely different experience. Now. They weren't sure that their approach was going to work out. It wasn't a proven thing at all. No one had really done it. In fact, Newell would say in later interviews that he was more than a little anxious about putting so much focus on the story of Half Life. I mean, keep in mind, the company Valve was being funded through Newell and Harrington's stock option sales. They weren't.

They have never accepted money from outside investors. It was always self funded and always a private company. So Newell knew that the emphasis up to that point was just how can I blow stuff up? He said, you know, he would say that people were more concerned how can I fire a rocket launcher faster in this first person shooter game than I could in this other first person shooter game. They weren't looking for story because no one

had really done it yet. Newell knew that Half Life would need to have all the cool gimmicks and weapons that the other first person shooters had, but he also wanted there to be more to the game than just great level design and challenging enemies. They took inspiration from

a Stephen King novella. It's called The Mist. It's coincidentally one of my favorite works by Stephen King, partly because when he writes in novella form, he has to be much more concise than he is as a novelist, so it's not as rambly as some of his other work. The story follows a father and son as they try to survive when otherworldly Missed appears to creep out from a secret military installation and envelope a small New England community.

The founders of Valve liked that idea, this idea of a secret military research project where something goes terribly wrong, and that would be the core of their games conflict, but neither Nwell or Harrington had any experience in world

building on that scale. They wanted to bring someone in who could really help guide the story and invent it along with their vision and create a really realistic setting, a believable setting, if not realistic, at least believable, and populate that setting with interesting, complex characters, so they recruited Mark laid Law to join the team as the story

developer and script writer for half Life. Laid Law was born in nineteen sixty in Los Angeles, and like Harrington, he had attended the University of Oregon quote for a bit in quote. According to his own website, he worked in administrative support and was writing fiction on the side, in both short and long forms. He would join Valve in nine seven as their head script writer for games,

and he would stay on with Valve until two thousand sixteen. Now, some of you may not be familiar with half Life, and I have to confess personally, I have never played the half Life games. It's one of the more egregious gaps in my PC gaming history. I have played a game that ties into the half Life universe, but that as close as I ever got, and that's going to have to wait till the next episode anyway, But what

the heck was the story behind Half Life. The player controls the game's protagonist, a physicist named Gordon Freeman, and Freeman sets off a catastrophic event when he places some material into an anti mass spectrometer in order to analyze it. This process causes the whole thing to go boom in scientific terms, and this opens up a rift into another dimension. That dimension is called Zen x e n. It is

then Freeman's mission to escape the lab. The lab is called Black Mesa Research Facility, and he has to fight off Zen critters as well as human marines who have been sent in to cover up the disaster before anyone outside the research facility can learn of it. Freeman eventually discovers that Black Mesa had already actually made contact with the Zen dimension before the rift opened up, so it

wasn't totally his fault. He also learns that there is a massively powerful entity in the dimension that is keeping the rift open from the other side and sending in critters and waves into our dimension, and so it becomes Freeman's job to travel to the Zen dimension and kill this being, known as the Nihalanth or Niehlenth. I apologize because I've not actually played the game, so I don't even know how it's pronounced within the world of Half Life, and I could be wrong in both of those attempts,

and I probably am. At the end of the game, Freeman is visited by a mysterious government agent who offers Freeman a job, and if the player accepts the job, the agent puts Freeman into stasis, you know, kind of like a cryogenic freezing sort of thing, and if the player refuses, the agent transports Freeman into an area filled with zen critters who will eventually overwhelm you and kill you. Spoiler alert, I guess for a game that came out so, I think nineteen years is a good a speriod, I

think we're past it now. Honestly, to make the game work, Valve needed to populate it with characters who could talk with the main character and flesh out the plot in stages. They wanted to reveal the story as you played the game, and not just have a big data dump at the very beginning, and then Freeman would just be reduced to the role of a walking weapon. They wanted more than that, so in the beginning they weren't even really sure that

they would be able to do this. If they would have the technical technical ability to create a game where the story is parsed out in bits and pieces as you play, so that unfolds as you experience it, Bid Birdwell's skeletal animation software would end up helping out a lot but they still had plenty to do so. Another technical challenge they faced was creating AI models for the

enemies the players would face. They wanted the game's adversaries to use realistic tactics and work together rather than just rushing mindlessly yet the player. If you've played other early first person shooter games, you know that frequently the monsters or enemies you face just start firing at you as soon as they have line of sight, and that's it. They just wherever they are, they move in a certain way, and they fire at you. They wanted something different for

Half Life. They wanted to have a way for the AI to work together so that you had to make really strategic decisions as you played the game, and this would also set Half Life apart from its competitors. The level design for the game was done in stages. First, the team would develop a general outline for each level. Designers would then create the architecture for that level using the game engine, and then the team would reconvene to

create interactive elements in each level. Laid Law said that the process was both inspiring and terrifying because they were making all of this up as they were going along. There was no other game to follow as model. They were having to be pioneers in this field. Valve would announce the game in nine, although of course it would

be another year before it would actually be released. They did do an early demonstration in my hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, because that's where E three nine happened, over at the Georgia Dome. I wish that I had been in the industry back in those days because I might have gone to that, But that was years before I got into writing and podcasting about technology. You can still find the teaser trailer that they showed for Half Life at that

E three presentation. It's on YouTube. It's pretty primitive compared to the actual Half Life game that was eventually published. The trailer promised that the game's publication date was going to be November nine, which would turn out to be more than a little ambitious by the tune of a full year. Still, the limited gameplay the team could show off at E three was enough to win Half Life the title of best Game at the show, even though the game itself was far from complete. They really were

just showing concepts and some general gameplay elements. Ultimately, as they got back to work at Valve. Sometime around August, they decided that the game really was not going to be ready for that holiday release that they had planned. Not only that, but they didn't feel like they had

really made the best decisions in developing the game. They had spent a lot of effort creating the tools necessary to build the game, but they were doing that at the same time that they were building the game itself. They realized that they had really done great work in creating the tools, but that the game was nowhere close to what they had envisioned when they first set out. So they made a super tough decision, which was to scrap everything that they had been building. The AI, the levels,

everything had to oh. The general idea, the story was the same, but they were going to rebuild everything using the tools that they had developed over the past year. So year one Valve was creating the tools set needed to build Half Life, whereas year one was supposed to be the development and publication of Half Life. It pushed them back quite a bit. This also created a little

bit of a strain with their relationship with Sierra. The company had been expecting to publish a game at the end of as it turns out the developers said, sorry, we're starting over. They used what they learned building the early version of the game to reinvent it. Birdwell would describe Half Life as really being half life to the game Half Life that published. Birdwell says, well, that's technically half life too, because it was so different from the

original version we built and then ultimately scrapped. So they said that while they could have released the original game and it would have been playable, it just wasn't what they wanted to accomplish in the company focused solely on getting Half Life developed and out the door. They had begun development on a second title called Prospero I assume, named after the character from Shakespeare's classic The Tempest. Prospero is a great character. Oh brave new world to have

such people in it. Actually it's Prospero's daughter who says that. But never mind that anyway. Prospero was never meant to be. It was suspended indefinitely, ultimately canceled in favor of completing Half Life. Valve would push the publishing date for Half Life back a quarter, then another quarter, then another. Nuell would later say that Valve had basically messed up Sierra's quarterly results for five quarters in a row because of these delays, and that it was a source of embarrassment

for him. However, in September, Valve published how Off Life Day one. This was a demo version of the game. It was not the full game. It was about a fifth of what the final game would be, so around of what Half Life would be. It was meant to be a demo for audio card developers and graphics card developers, and that was all it was meant to be. It was just supposed to be within the industry. It wasn't

meant to be released to the public. However, it ended up getting leaked on the internet, as these things tend to happen, and so lots of people began to download the demo version of Half Life. That leak ended up being an incredibly effective marketing tool for Valve and Sierra. Valve had been pretty secretive about Half Life. They had shown off Half Life twice at E three, once and once, but that was limited and no one was really sure

what to expect. But this leak demo suddenly impressed everybody. It impressed the people who pirated copies of it online and then impressed people within the industry itself. In fact, peers in the gaming industry started to heap praise on Half Life, including people who had previously dismissed Valve, saying that it was an upstart company that was never going to have anything to show for its efforts. It was just gonna fizzle out before they ever had a chance

to create an actual game. They came back and said, you know what we were wrong. Half Life is amazing. It was the closest thing to playing an interactive movie that had been developed up to that point, at least within the first person shooter genre, and this was stuff that people who were working on developing competing first person shooters were saying about Half Life. Meanwhile, work behind the

scenes was still going on. The last bits of coding fell to Harrington himself and his small team of programmers. They were seeking out bugs that were duction stopping bugs, stuff that could not ship with the game. This was back in the day where you needed to make sure you solved all those bug problems, or as many as you possibly could, before you shipped the game, because there wasn't really an easy way to develop updates and send

them out. This was pre patch days. These days, when you buy a game, frequently there's a day zero patch where you buy the game, you install it on your machine, and then you spend the next forty five minutes downloading an update so that the game is actually playable. Well, in those days, you couldn't really do that, so they had to make sure that any bugs that were show stoppers were worked out. And there was a bug that was sort of preventing multiplayer matches from launching reliably, so

Harrington and his team had to figure this out. They eventually were able to track down the problem to a single line of code and fixed it, and it was a good thing too, was an enormous relief. They were already four days behind when they were supposed to have launched the game, and Harrington and his team were under tremendous amounts of stress to locate and fix that bug, so they had definitely been feeling a lot of pressure.

On November seven, Half Life shipped. It had most of the features the team wanted to include, but not all of them. For example, originally they hoped to allow players to map their own faces onto multiplayer characters for the purposes of online competitive multiplayer, but that just didn't happen

at launch. They also wanted to implement what they called pain models, which will reflect damage done to specific body parts as opposed to just general damage to the entire body, but that also did not make the final product either. The day the game went gold, the Valve team got together for a party. The center piece of the party was a pinata in the form of a head Crab,

which is one of the monsters in Half Life. The team members would take turns smashing open the head Crab using a crowbar, which is an iconic weapon in the Half Life universe. They ended up breaking it open and getting Monopoly money and wind up figures of South Park characters. That's what was inside the head Crab. Newell also talked about the next project that Valve would work on, and that project was Team Fortress Too. And wait, I hear

you say Team Fortress Too. What about the original Team Fortress? Why go straight to two? What what happened to the first game? Well, Team Fortress was not originally developed by Valve. That was instead a game created by the Quake mod community. And while Team Fortress was a Quake mod, Team Fortress Too would be based off the Half Life software developer hit and it would also be one of several mods of Half Life that would make a life of its own and take off in ways that Valve could not

have anticipated. And it would also uh turn out that developing Team Fortress Too would become a much more difficult task than Newell had anticipated. Much like Half Life ended up being more difficult than they thought, Team Fortress Too also took way more time than they expected. It actually

took years longer than they anticipated. While they were working on Team Fortress Too, they were also creating a remake of Team Fortress itself, the Quake mod, this time called Team Fortress Classic, and this was based off the gold source engine that they had used for Half Life. As for the game sales of Half Life, those did really well.

It became the fifth best selling computer game in the United States in n That's pretty impressive for a game cup that had never put out a game before, and it was a brand new first person shooter intellectual property and had never there was no sequel. It was brand new. It was a brand new experiment in storytelling, so there's a lot of new stuff going on here. So for it to become a bestseller right out of the gate was pretty phenomenal. That year, it sold four twenty three copies.

By today's standards, that's tiny, but keep in mind this isn't an era where PC gaming was a much smaller niche market, and it ended up bringing in about sixteen million dollars in revenues, so for the first time the company was making real money and not just being funded out of pocket by Newell and Harrington. The game received critical acclaim as well, amassing dozens of Game of the

Year awards in the process. Over the years, sales have increased with various ports and re releases, so these days we're talking more than nine million copies of the game have been sold in one format or another, which is a pretty impressive number by any stretch of the imagination. Now I have more to say about these early days at Valve Software, but before I get into that, let's

take another quick break and thank our sponsor. So Newell said, and and ask me anything or a m a on Reddit that he viewed Half Life as a series of regrets, insomuch as he was heavily involved in the game's development and in multiple stages they had to trade off on things they wanted to include in the game for the

sake of expediency and stability. Specifically, he said, quote, the issue with Half Life for me is that I was involved in a much higher percentage of the decisions about the games, so it's hard for me to look at them as anything other than a series of things I regret.

He went on to say that everything you see in the game is the res alt of something else being sacrificed so that that could be in the game, and that sometimes it was really hard to make those sacrifices, and that Newell felt that those sacrifices were more personally impactful because of his level of decision making in the development of that game. Specifically, now half Life secured valves place in the gaming world. They were clearly a dominant

player as soon as Half Life shipped. But obviously this is not the end of their contributions. It was really just the beginning. So let's talk about a couple of other elements before I conclude part one of this series. As I mentioned, moments ago, Newell had announced that the next project would be Team Fortress, to a team based first person shooter game in which players compete in teams

against other teams. A red team and a Blue team, and various game types like territorial control or Capture the Flag. Each player can choose one of nine classes, with each class having different abilities within the game, and strong teams would rely on classes that complement each other. Some of them would be more effective against enemy classes than others, which adds a bit of strategy on top of the twitch based skills necessary to perform well at first person

shooters in general. Shortly after the release of Half Life, Valve acquired Team Fortress Software Limited, and they brought the Team Fortress creator team over to join Valve Software. These guys got on board at just the right time, because the company ended up holding its first of many company vacations. Gabe Newell had promised his employees that if Half Life was a success, there would be a full company vacation

to someplace nice. That's someplace nice ended up being Cabos Son Lucas in Mexico, so thirty employees went on that vacation with zero children. This is actually from the official Valve Software Employee Handbook, which by the way, is a fascinating read, and that again was the first of many company vacations at Valve. Sounds like a pretty nice perk to me. Although you would be worked to death leading up to that vacation, it was a well earned vacation.

People who stuck with Valve they deserved it, trust me. While the developers that Valve were hard at work on the next titles, the company was also paying attention to the mod community. Valve had decided that they were going to support mod communities, very much like other developers had,

such as in Software and three D Realms. These were companies that knew that people who were modifying games were passionate about the gaming industry, and that supporting those players would end up creating loyal customers, and they kept an eye out for the best examples of mods that were on the community, because if they were really good, they

would actually reach out and acquire those mods. They would pay money to the creators and say you did great work, and we appreciate it, and we would like to market this under our company name, and so we will purchase those rights from you, which is pretty cool, assuming, of course, that the deals were all on the up and up. I have no reason to assume otherwise. By the way, in Valve released an expansion pack for Half Life called

Half Life Opposing Force. Now, I'm not gonna cover every single release that Valve created or all the different expansion packs, but this one I felt was particularly interesting. This game took a different approach to expanding that original material of Half Life. Rather than playing Gordon Freeman for an expansion pack, the player would take control of an invading soldier attempting to breach Black Mace Up and deal with the Zen problem.

So this gave players even more story to explore and examine the events of Half Life from a completely new perspective. I think that's really cool that you can play a character who technically would be an antagonist in the realm of the original Half Life and learn what was going on from that side of the story and open up a whole new element to the mythology of Half Life. Again, very innovative compared to what a lot of the other

first person shooters were doing at the time. Having learned from their experiences with Half Life and with the help of the original Team Fortress creators, Valve was able to release Team Fortress Classic near the end of n Now, as I make these notes, I have the Steam charts up on my computer. So the Steam charts is kind of an ongoing analysis of the games that players are

playing using the Steam platform. So today, eighteen years after Team Fortress Classic debuted, there are on average about fifty seven people playing Team Fortress Classic online. Now, I know that fifty seven is a very small number, but it's also kind of incredible to think that a game that's nearly two decades old still has people playing it online to this very day. Also incredible is that Team Fortress

two would be delayed until two thousand seven. So I remember I was talking about here Team Fortress, to which game Newell said was gonna be the next big project out of Valve, would not come out until two thousand and seven. But more on that in the next episode of this series. I think a really good place to kind of conclude this episode is in the beginning of two thousand, because that's when Mike Harrington, the co founder of the company, decided to step down from Valve Software.

He dissolved his partnership with Gabe Newell, and this was not due to some sort of feud or problem between the co founders. According to everybody, this was an amicable partning. A major reason contributing to Harrington's decision to leave Valve was that the company was clearly going to move ahead

and start to develop a sequel to Half Life. And the first game was a major success, and Harrington was really proud of it, but he wasn't sure if he wanted to devote so much of his time and effort and energy into developing a sequel, particularly when developing a sequel comes with added pressure you need to outperform your original title. Nobody wants a sequel that is less impressive than the original title, and unfortunately that happens more often

than not. Harrington knew this, and he knew that it was possible to make a better game, to make a game worthy of being a sequel, but he wasn't sure that he was up to all of that effort after dedicating so many hours, sleepless hours, to getting Half Life out the door. So his first challenge really was to create a new type of first person shooter with an

emphasis on story. His new challenge would be to do that again, but more betterer, so to speak, and he just wasn't sure that he was capable of that or if he really wanted to try, So he decided he would leave Valve and spend some time with his family. On January two thousand, Harrington left Valve Software. True to form. Earlier that day, he clocked out after checking his final line of code. He didn't just come in and resign. He actually finished up his full days of work day

of work before he left the company. Harrington said later that this decision, while it was the right one for him at the time, still was not an easy one. It was emotionally difficult to let go of the company, but he felt that he had a amblished his goal and that was better to leave on a high note. For his co founder, A. Game Newell, it was also difficult. Valve would continue on after Harrington's departure, but Newell couldn't even dream of retiring. He said that he felt he

needed to work in order to stay sane. He couldn't just stop and do nothing. Mike and Monica Harrington, on the other hand, commissioned a seventy seven ft boat they named the m V Meander, and they set forth to sail the world, which they did for the next few years. Harrington's story with Valve would end in two thousand, but Harrington himself would go on to do much more. So. Let's talk a little bit about what he then did after Valve and wrap up his part of this story.

In two thousand five, he co founded the company bit Nick, which had a product called pic Nick, P I C and I K, an online photo editing tool. Harrington spent nearly five years there. He would move on to work for Google for a year as an engineering manager because Google would acquire the company Picnic, and in two thousand twelve he would leave to co found a new software company called cat Nip Labs, where he works as the

chief Technology Officer. He's also the CTO for a Committee for Children in Seattle, which is I think pretty darn awesome to dedicate his talents to uh a an organization like Committee for Children. Now, in our next episode, we'll look at valves evolution in the post half life era, which will also include a discussion of the incredibly disruptive

platform called Steam. In the meantime, if you guys have suggestions for things that you would like me to cover on future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a technology, a company, a personality. Maybe there's someone you want me to interview or a person you would love to have on as a guest on Tech Stuff, Let me know.

Get in touch with me. My email address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on the social media platforms as long as they are Facebook or Twitter because of the two I use, and I use the same handle at both of those for this show, it's called text Stuff h s W. Also, you can join me at twitch dot tv slash tech stuff and watch me record these shows live. I record on Wednesdays and Fridays. The schedule is at twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff. Tune in.

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