In a current documentary on the making of Half-Life 2, Gabe Newell has mainly confirmed that he’s the IRL Saxton Hale, and the form of man that simply is not all that fussed when confronted with a shark assault. Aren’t all of us?
One of many themes of the documentary is that, as Half-Life 2 was being developed, Valve was embroiled in what would change into an enormous and doubtlessly existential authorized battle with writer Vivendi. Valve COO Scott Lynch explains that they’d filed a “slender” go well with over a dispute of their current licensing phrases, and gained a number of minor victories, earlier than Vivendi determined to “go World Conflict 3” in response.
Sure, we’ll get to the shark quickly, however the essential context for this story is that Vivendi was allegedly out for blood, quickly concentrating on Lynch and Newell (and their wives!) personally along with suing Valve.
“It isn’t a authorized technique,” says Newell. “It is mainly making an attempt to intimidate you, they’re saying ‘not solely are we going to take all this cash from the corporate however we’ll bankrupt you as nicely.’
“Publishers within the business at the moment had been used to with the ability to bully builders, proper? And so this was as a lot about an assertion of energy as a lot because it was optimizing for a monetary end result.”
Lynch says there got here a degree the place “if we need to maintain going” Newell needed to put his home available on the market, and Newell himself says “I used to be fairly near going personally bankrupt: We went all in, there was no cash left.”
Now, it strikes me that making an attempt to bully somebody like Gabe Newell is likely to be a foul concept. The person himself, telling the story from what appears like his $500 million superyacht, has one other means of placing it.
Requested whether or not this was an anxious time for him, Newell demurs. “I do not know, uh, there are particular issues that I simply… I am form of a bizarre individual in a lot of dimensions. I do not actually suppose ‘oh that is tremendous scary’, like I haven’t got an emotional response to it. I simply say ‘nicely that is what we’re doing and we’ll see the way it performs out.’
“So I do not suppose it was tremendous annoying to me, proper, I imply it did not actually trouble me. I used to be diving in South Africa lately and a shark tried to chunk me a few occasions, and the folks round me had been far more freaked out than I used to be. I used to be like ‘oh, a shark’s making an attempt to chunk me, I ought to get away from the shark’ whereas different folks had been having like [high-pitched voice] ‘oh, a shark! It is making an attempt to chunk any person!'”
Newell is at pains to level out that he would not take into account this to be something to do with bravery, or certainly foolhardiness.
“I simply suppose that is how I am wired,” says Newell. “I do not suppose it is something that speaks to my character or something, it is like I simply appear to not get significantly agitated round threat, which most likely means I tackle extra threat at occasions than most sane folks would. Which generally is a constructive or you may wreck a bunch of different peoples’ lives being within the neighborhood of your threat indifference.”
In different phrases: Vivendi may go swivel. And I am undecided there’s a greater comparability for standing as much as bullyboy lawyer ways than being unbothered by an precise honest-to-god shark making an attempt to chunk you.
One closing contact is that Newell tells this story on a yacht, with an enormous mannequin of a shark behind him. Was the shark in query zapped for its impertinence and stuffed as a trophy for the massive man? Properly if this was Saxton Hale, there could be little question.
Valve would finally emerge triumphant from the Sierra lawsuit, a lot as I think about Newell emerged triumphant from the ocean, ending the ordeal in 2005 with a settlement that noticed the writer cease distributing Valve’s video games, and all of the licenses return. It is a wild story although and, subsequent to the shark, maybe probably the most gorgeous cameo comes from an intern who may communicate Korean and, arguably, modified the course of videogame historical past with what they discovered.
