Gabe Newell says he ditched Microsoft and made Valve and Half-Life to prove

In a more detailed unpacking of Valve‘s origins, co-founder Gabe Newell says the company and its flagship release, Half-Life, were partly a “response” to what he saw as out-of-touch practices at Microsoft, where he worked early in his career.

In a new interview with Zalkar Saliev, Newell reflects on the ideas and motivations of Valve’s earliest days, when it was more of a nascent idea than an underdog company. At the time, he pushed hard on Doom as an example of how games could go beyond the old way of insular models.

“Id was out-distributing Microsoft with Doom,” Newell recalls. “They had a completely alternate model of how to reach customers and engage with customers that I thought was super interesting, to the point that there were more people using Doom than were using Windows when there was a big survey done. It was also considered to be the most graphically advanced game. You couldn’t see anything like Doom that would run on the consoles or run in arcades.”

Newell says he reached out to id Software to offer to port Doom to Windows, but personally began to ponder the viability of Microsoft’s way of doing things at all. Newell had his eyes on the internet, but Microsoft seemed mired in old means of distribution and resellers “that was missing the opportunity represented by the advent of networking.”

These embers would eventually become the fire at Valve’s core as Newell considered “the kind of company you would design” with this new era in mind. He points to how businesses evolved throughout the 20th century along with technology, and how “you’d want to redesign your businesses to take advantage of that relative transition.”

“I enjoyed playing video games, and used that as an excuse to say, oh, I could go design a video game company and have very strong opinions about what the opportunities were to build more interesting video games, and Half-Life was certainly an expression of those concepts,” Newell continues.

“I was willing to put my money where my mouth was on the design of the game and on the design of the company, and that’s when we started Valve. And that’s where the ideas for Half-Life came from. It was really a response to looking at the opportunities to build what I thought was going to be a better approach to game design. And if I was wrong, I’d have to go back to Microsoft.”

I’ll spoil it for you now: Newell did not, in fact, have to go back to Microsoft. That Half-Life game really took off, didn’t it? And its patch tool is now the premier destination for PC gaming altogether.

Valve’s Gabe Newell predicts AI will lead to a “funny situation” where “people who don’t know how to program” could be “more effective” than people “who’ve been programming for a decade.”

Austin has been a game journalist for 12 years, having freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree. He’s been with GamesRadar+ since 2019. They’ve yet to realize his position is a cover for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he’s kept the ruse going with a lot of news and the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible.