During the Game Developer's Conference 2025, Monica Harrington—one of Valve's founders and its first chief marketing officer, who once outright threatened Sierra over the rights to Half-Life—gave an illuminating talk on the company's infancy. Before, of course, it became the goliath-felling company it is today.
While this is interesting in itself—another fascinating snippet she shared was about how Gabe Newell, circa 1998 to the early 2000s, had his eyes set on a social network. Y'know, like Facebook, Instagram, or X. "Gabe had interesting ideas that had nothing to do with software," Harrington said. "I mean, with games—and some of those would have been really interesting."
