GABE NEWELL
CV
Gabe Newell’s career path is the stuff of legend. He dropped out of Harvard University in 1983 to join Microsoft: the 271st employee through the door at the company, he worked as a producer on early versions of Windows, and later admitted he’d learned more in his first three months there than in his three years at university. Inspired by Michael Abrash, a Microsoft colleague who’d quit to make games at Id Software, he and Mike Harrington left to found Valve in 1996. His numerous accolades include winning the GDC Pioneer Award in 2010, induction into the Academy Of Interactive Arts And Sciences hall of fame in 2012, and being named BAFTA Fellow in 2013; a self-made billionaire, he made his first appearance in Forbes’ list of the 100 richest Americans in 2017.
The co-founder and CEO of Valve scarcely needs an introduction. After spending 13 years at Microsoft, Gabe Newell quit to set up what would become of the most innovative, and successful, companies in not only the videogame industry, but the entire world. With Half-Life: Alyx now released, here Newell reflects on the decisions that have led to Valve being the company it is today – and offers us a tantalising glimpse of what the future might hold.
What does being president of Valve actually mean in 2020, and what do you spend your days doing?
Usually I get pulled in if there’s something that’s unusual or out of the norm. If there’s some disaster, basically. But most of the time, the way the company is designed, it’s pretty good at operating without me. But my background thread, the thing I’m always thinking about and working on, separate from being pulled by teams into something that they’d like my help on, is brain-computer interfaces. That’s kind of a longer-term thing.
That seems like a long way from Valve’s origins, but the company is built on these sorts of changes of tack. What do you consider to be the inflection points that got you here?
We started off with singleplayer, because we thought there were opportunities there that were not being exploited. That was really the design impetus behind Half-Life, and we learned a huge amount and that helped inform a bunch of the decisions we made about Half-Life 2.
But at the same time as we were high-fiving ourselves over shipping, we also started thinking about multiplayer games – and that was a point in time when there were no commercially available multiplayer games, there was no business model for them. It seemed like a radical concept, that having games that behaved more like sports and less like movies was a good way of evening out the boom-and-bust cycles for videogame development. It and and things like that.
