There's a world where a dispute with publisher Sierra might've left Half-Life as the first and last game Valve ever published, according to the developer's original chief marketing officer, Monica Harrington. In an effort to wrest the rights to the Half-Life IP away from Sierra, Harrington threatened that Valve might just abandon game development entirely.
In a talk at the Game Developers Conference this week, Harrington spoke on her role with Valve from the company's founding through much of its early success. The original Half-Life was, of course, published by Sierra, well before Valve was distributing its own games. Harrington says "there were a few things I didn't know" about the terms of that contract until she read it some time after Half-Life shipped.
