Final 12 months noticed the twenty fifth anniversary of Half-Life, one of the necessary video games in PC historical past and a spectacular debut for Valve. However in one other timeline, it may’ve been the studio’s second sport.
Valve co-founder and former chief advertising officer Monica Harrington was on a panel on the latest 2025 Recreation Builders Convention known as “How Valve Grew to become Valve: An Insider’s Account.” This expanded on Harrington’s reminiscences of the essential early years on the firm, and one tidbit considerations how Valve was trying to construct up its improvement power and group measurement.
Harrington says Valve was headhunting builders within the late 90s, and one of many concepts linked to this was to work on one other sport in addition to Half-Life, with the concept being to launch this unnamed title first and make a bit of cash to assist with the event of the studio’s premier product.
“The unique concept was to do what they known as the B title,” says Harrington. “This was going to be simply type of a mediocre sport, and the concept was that the constructing of that sport would construct out the group.”
Regardless of coming at it from extra of a enterprise and advertising perspective, nonetheless, Harrington noticed that this might be a catastrophe for the fledgling studio.
“I instructed them, I led them by the enterprise evaluation, and I stated that is simply not gonna work,” recollects Harrington. “For those who try this, the corporate will fail. From the very starting, we stated it’s essential go all out. It is acquired to be in that prime 10. I instructed Gabe [Newell] that I believed the one manner that Half-Life was actually going to work was if it was named Recreation of the 12 months.”
No additional particulars had been supplied on what this “B title” would have been, although given the rationale for making it Valve will need to have been contemplating one other first-person shooter. Half-Life was in any case supposed to push boundaries, and that was considered one of Valve’s issues: after a spectacular E3 exhibiting in 1997 Valve was burning by money, with Gabe Newell taking out a mortgage in opposition to the corporate’s future income to proceed improvement.
“If Valve shipped the sport we had, it could launch and quietly disappear, and the entire work we would all performed would account for nothing,” recalled Harrington final 12 months. “All the folks we would employed would lose their jobs, we would lose the cash we would invested. It was a catastrophe.”
As Valve scrapped what wasn’t working and improvement went by a reset, it was self-funding the sport. Everyone knows that issues finally labored out when the sport launched in November 1998, however Harrington’s throwaway line to Newell about it needing to be “Recreation of the 12 months” proved oddly prophetic. Valve would wrestle to promote Half-Life till Harrington got here up with a advertising manoeuvre that persists to this present day: placing all these accolades to good use, and slapping a “Recreation of the 12 months” sticker on the field.
