Nearly 30 years ago, Monica Harrington guided business development and marketing efforts for Valve , which became the biggest player in the PC gaming industry. This is her story.
Nearly 30 years ago, a small company was founded near Seattle WA. Gabe Newell and my ex-boyfriend, Mike Harrington, were the official co-founders.
I had taken a two-month leave from Microsoft, where I was the Group Marketing Director in the Consumer Division, overseeing a product portfolio that included Microsoft Games.
I had worked for Microsoft for nine years. My career was in high tech. A year prior, I had been honored with the Maker Market Award as the marketer who contributed the most to the bottom line of the consumer division (1600+-person). I loved my job but was also tired, so when Microsoft announced a leave program in the spring of 1996, I was all in. The renovation project left our new home a mess.
My husband Mike had other plans.
He had worked in the gaming industry before joining Microsoft the same year I did, and he had a dream of starting a gaming company. Mike decided to use his leave to figure out whether he wanted to stay at Microsoft or embark on a new adventure working elsewhere. During his leave, he began solidifying plans with Gabe Newell to actually make it happen. Our travel plans quickly disappeared.
Gabe and Mike met when Mike was working on printer drivers for the OS/2 operating system, and the three of us had hung out together a few years earlier, including a weekend in Eastern WA with Gabe's then-girlfriend. Mike was also friends with Mike Abrash, an industry luminary who was then working at ID Software, the independent studio behind the extremely popular Doom franchise.
Because of his relationship with Abrash, Mike was able to quickly secure a deal to build Valve's first product using ID's game engine. It was a big deal and essentially made Valve, Gabe, and Mike a serious company and game developers.
When I returned to Microsoft, Mike and Gabe and their small team were quickly gathering to plan their first product.
The original idea Mike had was that Valve would create a product that Microsoft would launch. It turned out Microsoft had very little appetite for doing deals with its own former employees, which meant Valve would need to sign a publishing deal with one of Microsoft's competitors.
Because of my role overseeing game marketing for Microsoft, interacting with Valve was very complicated. The investment Mike and I were making in Valve was significant, so I knew I couldn't get involved, but I also needed boundaries. When I returned to Microsoft, I went directly to the head of games and to the VP of our division to say that my husband and Gabe Newell were starting a gaming business, and I would help them, and I would open up to any changes Microsoft might want to make regarding my role. Both ED Fries and my managers were friendly and reassuring. At that time, there were hundreds of games published each year that disappeared into the ether. Valve was a small player, and I was sure from ED's perspective and everyone else's, likely still would be.
I was traveling for Microsoft on a cold winter day in Seattle when Mike called to tell me that he and the team had just finished a meeting with the head of Sierra Online, a major force in PC gaming and one of our biggest competitors. Their office was in Bellevue WA, just twenty-five minutes from our home. Because of the icy conditions, Ken Williams, their CEO, was the only one from Sierra who made it into the office. By the end of the meeting, Ken basically told the team, I want to work with you, make it happen.
Because of my role at Microsoft, I decided not to get involved in the contract negotiations. It was up to Mike and Gabe to figure that out with Sierra. At that time, the standard industry practice for an unproven game company was to move forward against an advance on royalties, with additional royalties only from successful games.
Sierra's advance was about a million dollars, along with the hundreds of thousands Mike and I and Gabe had invested, which meant Valve had enough to fund the company through the launch of its first product.
The first product would be a first-person shooter, in the same genre as ID's category-defining game .
Gabe, Mike, and I met regularly, and one of the things I told them was that the gaming business is a hit-driven business, where only the top 10 games make any real money. At a time when thousands of games were introduced each year, that meant Valve's first game would either be a hit or it wouldn't, and with the dynamics of the gaming industry, if the first game wasn't a hit, there likely wouldn't be a second Valve game. Gabe and Mike talked about trying to launch a B product, something that wasn't a hit, but would be successful enough to support the company as it established itself, and I knew and made it clear that simply wouldn't work.
In the next ten months, activity at Valve was all about recruiting and onboarding, building proper office space, and developing the game concept that had attracted Ken Williams of Sierra.
While I continued to consult with Valve, my day-to-day work at Microsoft was invigorating. One of the projects we were working on was the global launch of a new game, which meant a simultaneous launch in all markets where Microsoft had a consumer presence. My team and I had been working for months to ensure we had marketing and launch strategies ready to support Microsoft's next big hit game in markets around the world. At that time, the biggest hits from the game team to date were the Strategy Game Age of Empires and Flight Simulator, a product primarily appealing to pilots and aviation enthusiasts.
In the background, I was still working with Valve, which I reminded everyone at Microsoft about regularly. No one seemed worried. My general principle was that I wouldn't tell Microsoft anything about Valve, and I wouldn't tell Valve anything about what was happening at Microsoft. However, all the lessons I was learning about the gaming industry in my work and personal time were certainly being brought to bear for both Microsoft and Valve. Mike and I each worked 10 to 12 hours or more.
There was one time I was in a meeting with some well-known game developers who had signed a long-term development deal, multiple games with Microsoft, and the subject of Valve's new deal, using the ID engine, came up. The lead from that company, with no idea of my relationship with Valve, said something like, It's a joke - a few Microsoft developers licensed the ID engine and think they can build a game.
Inside, I thought, man, this is going to be tough.
One of the roles I played with Mike and Gabe in those days was helping them understand what it would take to succeed from a marketing and business perspective. At that time, key marketing strategies for games involved reaching out to influencers, advertising in gaming-specific publications, and working with retail channels on strategies to get prominent display space so consumers walking in would feel compelled to choose and buy your game. Once a game shipped, you had to nurture and support early adopters so they could tell their friends about your game. The broad strategy I had learned and refined over many years was essentially to arm and activate (early adopters).
From a PR perspective, Microsoft was a phenomenon in the industry. At the time I was working in the gaming business, I had spent many years working directly with consumers and tech press for products from Microsoft Word and Office to Expedia and Encarta. I had also managed large product marketing and communications teams and had participated in press tours for critics across the country, from New York to New Hampshire to Austin, Texas, and Eugene, Oregon. The gaming business shared a lot in common with some other businesses I had worked in, but there was also a key difference. In a business like Word or Office, you essentially ran your marketing with a winner's mindset, and that was because in those businesses, there was likely to be a market-leading company, and as that leader gained more market share, its advantage continued to grow and became self-reinforcing as companies and the broader industry coalesced around a product. At that time, my experience in market battles fighting against Lotus and WordPerfect was that a certain software category would only support a market-leading company.
The PC gaming business in the late 90s was like the music business, where there were many independent labels, and where developers treated each other like musicians. There was mutual respect, there was competition in a certain genre, but also an understanding that gamers would buy many games. If they loved your game, they also had room to love your competitor's game, and in fact, someone who liked action games could be a connoisseur of the genre, with many favorites. The most influential people in the gaming market were not the press, but the game developers themselves.
For publishers and major players, it was a different story. Microsoft was competing with Sierra and Electronic Arts to attract game developers, just as music labels at that time were competing to sign top musical talent. The signing of higher profit margins of over 15 percent for new game developers mirrored other content deals in music and book publishing.
Of course, the big difference between the gaming business and the book or music industry is that the cost of producing a game is much higher and starting to rise exponentially.
At Valve, costs were rising quickly as the team was being built. It soon became clear that the initial investment Gabe and Mike and I had made plus the advance Sierra had made would not cover the actual costs to produce Valve's first game.
One evening, Mike and I hosted a potential new Valve hire, Yahn Bernier, and his fiancée at our newly renovated home. I remember thinking, if we hire you, Mike and I and Gabe will be paying your salary out of our pockets.
We threw Yahn and his fiancée Beth Hard a party. I remember that just a few days earlier, Beth had learned that Yahn even developed software, as his day job was a patent attorney in Atlanta. Valve's strength in those days was finding talent from around the world who had done amazing things - the kind of thing that might not show up on a typical resume but could be discovered on the internet, which in many ways was still in its infancy. At one point, Gabe had tracked down and recruited two guys who were creating game-related software that was becoming popular on the internet only to find out they were delivering pizzas to make a living and thought Gabe's phone call was part of an elaborate prank.
Fortunately, while the Valve development team was working to build the time-bomb game, my Microsoft options were continuing to vest, which meant Mike and my net worth continued to climb. It was stressful, but in the grand scheme of things, the stress was manageable.
Somewhere in the first year of development of Half-Life, I officially wrote the marketing plan for the launch of Half-Life. The key to our strategy was positioning Half-Life as a game worthy of the Game of the Year title. We wanted to earn the respect of industry influencers, including gaming press and other game developers. As part of the strategy, Valve's developers went to industry conferences to talk about some of the work they were doing in key technical areas including AI, skeletal animation, and physics. To support this effort, I wrote up backgrounders on each of these topics for the press based on interviews with developers Ken Birdwell, Jay Stelly, Yahn Bernier, and others.
In the spring of 1997, I attended a meeting at Microsoft about the upcoming E3 program, which is the largest and most important industry brand for electronic entertainment companies. One of my team members recommended that Microsoft not attend the show, and during her time with me and others, part of her recommendation was clearly based on the idea that our competitors were unlikely to have a large presence there. I knew Sierra would be there and Valve would have a large presence.
Meanwhile, the game I had been focused on at Microsoft, which would be at the show, had faced a major setback. A month or two earlier, I had started a meeting with Ed Fries, where I told him Point Blank, I wasn't hearing great things about our game and was losing confidence. Are you sure?
My conversation was based on hallway talks with various gamers in the department, who had been exposed to the game and were not excited. Basically, I couldn't find anyone who really believed in the game. I also knew from the work I was doing for Valve what it felt like when developers who were also gamers were very excited about a new project.
At that time, Microsoft's consumer division had laid a huge egg with Microsoft Bob and I knew that if we launched another consumer product that didn't live up to the expectations we had set, then the consumer effort would be severely damaged. After soul-searching, Ed decided to cancel the launch and the huge plans we had made were quietly set aside.
At that point, I knew Sierra would tease the time-bomb and that would be the star of their booth at E3. I remember thinking, damn, I know too much. Something has to change.
I had another conversation with Microsoft executives about my role and the conflict with Valve, and once again I basically said, it's all good, we're fine, we like where you're at, don't worry.
A few months later, Valve's time-bomb was publicly unveiled at Sierra's booth at E3 in Las Vegas. Valve's demos were received so well that Valve won the award for best action game at the show.
When the Valve team returned from Las Vegas, and I got the full update, I requested a meeting with the senior executives of the division, and said, This may not be a conflict for you, but it is for me. I need a new assignment.
Shortly thereafter, I started a new role in the company, completely unrelated to the gaming business.
As the months went by and Valve's costs continued to rise, it became clear that Mike and I had maximized our financial commitment. Instead of renegotiating the contract with Sierra, Gabe, who had started at Microsoft earlier than Mike and me, began funding ongoing development costs, set up as a loan against the company's future profits.
That summer and in the following months, the online game that Valve had showcased, which was really not a game, but rather a series of elaborate demos, went into early game, involving bringing gamers into Valve, to play with the game elements and give us their feedback. The feedback was okay. Just okay. Which for a company that needed a hit was devastating.
Gabe, Mike, and I all knew we couldn't stay the course. If Valve shipped the game we had, it would launch and quietly disappear, and all the work we had done would be for nothing. All the people we had hired would lose their jobs, we would lose the money we had invested. It would be a disaster.
There was no choice. Ultimately, the decision was made to take what we had and use everything the team had learned up to that point to start anew. Unfortunately, Sierra was not on board with the plan. They would not invest any further to make Valve's first game a success. We were on our own. Gabe's deep pockets became crucial.
It would take more than a year for Valve to rebuild the time-bomb in a way that would bring us back to a position that everyone thought was the case with a game that could be released in just a few months. The new goal would be to launch for the Christmas season of 1998.
In the spring of 1998, Gabe basically said, when can you be here full-time? We need you right now.
I had written the marketing and launch plan for Half-Life, I had written all the press materials and copy for the website, I had written the backgrounders we shared with the Key Press, but I wasn't focused on some of the bigger business principles. One big example, I still hadn't read the publishing agreement Gabe and Mike had signed with Sierra.
I went to meet with my boss at Microsoft and basically said, I'm ready to leave.
In my exit interview with Pete Higgins, then the vice president of Microsoft's consumer division, he started by asking, is there anything that would make you stay? And I knew the answer was no.
I needed to move on. Valve needed me. We had too much investment. It was time.
In the months that followed, I worked tirelessly laying the groundwork for the launch of Half-Life. Among the projects I was working on was seeding a story with the Wall St. Journal. Basically, my idea was to build retail buzz so that retailers would order more and feature it prominently for the Christmas season. Over the weeks, I emailed reporters with updates on all the great Half-Life news, from developer comments to industry buzz that was appearing in the gaming press.
At that time, most of my work was with Gabe or other developers or with Sierra's marketing team. Mike was finishing up the final work needed to complete the time-bomb so we could send it off for duplication. One of the key issues we were concerned about was copyright infringement. One of my nephews had recently bought a CD copy set with a monetary gift I had sent him, and I was horrified to realize that he was copying games and giving them to his friends. For him, it wasn't stealing; it was sharing. A generational shift in culture and technology meant that the games we had poured our blood and treasure into would likely be infringed upon from day one not just by professional thieves but also by everyday end users. At that time, no publisher was doing effective checks to ensure PC game ownership was legitimate. Valve would need to implement a validation scheme.
Around this time, we caught a lucky break. For about a year, we had been pushing Sierra to plan to seed with OEMs, computer manufacturers that produced hardware that the time-bomb could be played on. For a time, we even had serious talks with Intel about a version of the game that would highlight features in a new chip they were developing. All of this came from Microsoft's collective experience of working with OEMs and seed products in large quantities to drive user adoption. Ultimately, the Intel play didn't happen but one of the programs Sierra led involved providing a small portion of the game they had shipped as a demo disc called Day One.
When we first realized what had happened, that Sierra had shipped some half-life code as Day One, Mike and I were furious. We quickly realized we were at the mercy of whatever happened next. Fortunately, Day One became a phenomenon. Game developers loved it and started buzzing. Half-Life was spreading. The product was still a month or two from completion and no one had played the final game, but the early buzz for the first part of the game was very promising.
I continued to provide reporters from the Wall St. Journal with updates on the time-bomb, on its early reception, on what we were hearing from Day One users. All extremely positive.
Mike was still coding and he was exhausted. I was exhausted, and the team was because we really didn't know how Half-Life would do in the market. Finally, at the end of 1998, a few weeks before Christmas, we were ready to ship. Valve had a party where Mike broke open a piñata filled with candy and small toys.
While the game was in production, the final discs were sent to the gaming press. We waited. At one point, when Mike was in the shower, I felt overwhelmed with anxiety and asked in a worried tone, is it really a good game? And his honest reaction was, I don't know.
Gabe, Mike, and I had all been through the shipping process at Microsoft, but as part of a large team where the company supported everything was completely different from being the sponsor of a company where we knew it was a one-shot deal. The game would be a hit or it wouldn't, and in a short time, as the discs were duplicated and packaging was printed and shipped, we simply didn't know. The first discs went straight to the major gaming press.
About a year earlier, I had worked with Gabe to set the bold goal of Half-Life winning at least three of the top industry awards of the year. We were very conscious of thinking through what it would take, including breakthrough technology, an appealing new angle, and broad industry support. It would be particularly difficult for a game that some insiders had dismissed when Microsoft developers were building ID's technology.
In a few weeks, Half-Life won its first award among over 50 Game of the Year awards. It had never happened before. Just before Christmas, the Wall St. Journal article appeared with the headline, Valve's storytelling game is a hit. In the article, Sierra, our publisher, was never mentioned. That was a clear strategy of ours - since we were funding the development, we wanted Half-Life to be known as a Valve game, not a Sierra Studios game.
A few weeks before Christmas, we were all exhausted. Some team members had gone on vacation, but most continued to show up, almost in a daze, as we transitioned from the intensity of pre-production to the purgatory of waiting and watching. We hadn't seen any sales figures. At one point, just after the game had shipped and we started to see online feedback about how terrible the validation system was, Mike yelled. It turned out when someone complained about validation, Mike called that person directly, challenged them, and asked for sales verification. None of the people Mike contacted who complained early had paid for the product. Mike was furious and exhausted but also vindicated.
Game of the Year titles continued to roll in, and we were very optimistic that the great reception we were getting from industry influencers would ultimately translate into financial success for the company. I began working feverishly on post-launch marketing strategies, primarily involving amplifying the success of Half-Life and ensuring retailers were equipped with sales data and point-of-sale materials so customers could find it. I bought the domain Gameoftheyear.com and we launched it with all the materials about the Game of the Year that Half-Life had won, including from PC Gamer and Computer Gaming World, then heavyweights in our industry.
Meanwhile, Gabe and Mike's relationship had soured. A large part of this was the stress and financial imbalance. Gabe had become the major funder, and essentially, Mike had burned himself out doing the critical final coding work before Half-Life shipped. The case before we tried to shield the team from our collective anxiety, Mike yelling at customers had made some people anxious. I found myself in a situation where the two founders were basically not talking to each other and people were tiptoeing around wondering what was going on.
Then, in January as I was preparing to focus on next steps, Sierra requested a meeting. Basically, their message to us was thank you, the game has done very well, we are moving on. They had pulled all marketing from Valve to focus on one of their next titles. Essentially, their marketing at that point was launch and leave, while we were trying to market a game worthy of a franchise that we could build on for years to come.
Gabe and I were stunned; I was also very angry. I knew that the marketing of Half-Life was just beginning. We had done all this hard work to earn the Game of the Year title with the idea that it would help us break out of the pack and it was time to leverage that effort with sustainable marketing. At Microsoft, winning awards was always the beginning of a much larger process, where we leveraged positive reviews to win customers over time.
With a steely voice, I told the Sierra team that they would not pull marketing from the time-bomb. They would re-release it in a Game of the Year box, and they would support it with significant marketing spend or we would walk away from our deal and tell the industry how much we loved Valve and how awful Sierra really was. By the end of the meeting, I was shaking. We were very vulnerable, the partners hardly spoke, and life at home and in the office was very tense.
Sierra relented and began working on packaging for a new Game of the Year box. The logo on the front looked like an Academy Award. The basic idea was that for anyone walking into a game retailer, they would quickly see that Half-Life was the Game of the Year they couldn't miss.
By early March, things at Valve were still very tense. In addition to ongoing media and marketing work for Half-Life, I was working closely with developer strategies with Gabe and some other developers and Mike was spending less time in the office. At some point in early spring, Mike told me he wanted to leave Valve.
I was in a panic. We hadn't recouped the money we had invested. The buzz was continuing to build, but we had a long way to go. I told Mike that we needed time to figure out a way forward, as at that point, the value of our ownership stakes was very questionable. At the same time, I was also panicking because for the first time I read the contract agreement between Sierra and Valve, and while I thought I understood the key terms that Gabe and Mike had agreed to, there were some points I was not aware of. Chief among them was that Sierra owned all intellectual property for Half-Life and held the exclusive option to publish Valve's next two games, all at a 15% royalty rate for Valve. We would do all the development work with a reasonable advance royalty of $1 million for each of those games, and Sierra would take 85% of the revenue and all intellectual property. At that time, I knew that development costs were nearing $5 million or more per game.
Given the licensing deal we had with ID for the game engine license, the lack of ownership of our own IP and the commitment to exclusivity for the publishing rights for future games, all I could see was Valve swimming in red ink for many years to come.
We needed a different path forward.
Fortunately, one of the consequences of Valve's work on a validation system was that our customers had registered directly with Valve,
Right from the start, we began to understand the benefits of what we were inadvertently doing. Instead of a situation where we didn't know who our customers were, we actually knew exactly who our customers were. That was unprecedented. Every Half-Life registration meant direct contact with customers in Valve's database.
On top of that, the year before, Gabe had the brilliant idea of recruiting a development team that had written one of the top mods for ID's Doom and now they were part of Valve's team. John Cook and Robin Walker were exciting Aussie additions to Valve. The game mod they had written to run on ID's DOOM was quickly adapted to run on Half-Life. Essentially, the Game Mod allowed a player to play a completely different game on top of the Half-Life technology. In the case of Team Fortress, it was a multiplayer game where you could team up with friends over the internet in a team-based game where each of you played a unique and interesting character.
While the Half-Life buzz was continuing to build through word of mouth and new marketing pushes, the buzz and additional enthusiasm was a result of Team Fortress layering on top of everything else. Soon, there were hundreds of thousands of Team Fortress players on Half-Life and Valve knew who each of them was. We had a direct pipeline, bypassing Sierra, to our customers.
By late spring, Team Fortress, the Cook/Walker mod for the Half-Life engine was showcased at E3, where it won Best Action Game and Best Online Game on behalf of Valve.
Through all of this, I continued to noodle on the best ways I could position Valve for long-term success. With the bad publishing deal in hand, I knew I had to work on multiple fronts.
If Mike and I left, we needed to prove value to Valve that was not directly tied to the Half-Life IP. We needed to renegotiate our deal with Sierra. And we needed to figure out how to limit our royalties with ID, so that Valve wouldn't pay them every time someone bought one of our future games.
Valve had done a lot of work customizing the ID engine code for our purposes and we had reached the point that for any future game, we would either continue to use and modify that code base or we would spend time writing our own engine code from scratch.
With Gabe's okay, I reached out to the team at ID and we quickly negotiated a limited deal.
The second step was to initiate steps to renegotiate our deal with Sierra. I met with Valve's lawyer, and the basic approach we took was to clarify that if Sierra insisted on holding the original deal, then the Valve team would pivot to a completely different genre and would never publish a second game. Since Gabe and Mike had a lot of experience in other software development aspects, this threat was not idle. The bottom line was we would not create games and take on all the risk just to make others wealthy.
One of my responsibilities in the mid-90s at Microsoft was overseeing the initial marketing for Expedia. I spent a lot of time with Josh, who was on my team, who was tasked with making the market case. From that and other experiences over the years, I knew a lot about the scope and size of the online opportunity for a completely new genre. I was working to try to find an online business opportunity that did not depend on the Half-Life IP.
Internally, we had rich experience to draw from. Gabe and Mike had a lot of experience with developers and with the developer market, and at one point, I had overseen Microsoft's PR outreach related to software tools for the developer community. Additionally, I knew the gaming business inside and out and I was part of teams at Microsoft that were completely focused on emerging online opportunities that could exist on the internet.
In the summer of 1999, while Mike was researching fishing charters, I was immersed in figuring out potential business opportunities for Valve, and Gabe was deep in thought, leading the team and communicating with customers. Meanwhile, because of the way Gabe and Mike structured ownership, where employees could earn equity over time, Mike's ownership stake and my ownership had effectively been diluted.
Eventually, at some point, I realized that the only way to prove the value of some ideas I was focused on was to write them up and get a proposal. Without that, I could make the case that Valve was worth a lot of money or nothing. And I knew Gabe could make the same case.
With Gabe's buy-in, I decided to bring Amazon a new business opportunity. I had known about Amazon for a long time because one of my dear friends from Microsoft had been hired as the initial marketing lead. She had left, but I had kept an eye on the company. At that time, it was based in South Seattle in a magnificent building south of the I-90 Highway Exchange.
In a lengthy 9-page document, I proposed that Valve and Amazon collaborate to create a new online entertainment platform. I expanded the business opportunity over four years to $500 million. The main idea of the proposal was to create a platform built for the average user, that would bring users together in an engaging, compelling entertainment experience, with sales of both digital and offline content. I wanted Amazon's financial backing as a way to gain a first-mover advantage over Microsoft and Electronic Arts, then the big PC gaming players. I did not see Sierra's role. If pushed, we would not create any new games ourselves and instead would partner with outside developers so they could distribute content without incurring the 85% publishing fee. At that time, I saw it as a rebellious act against the traditional publishing dynamic, where independent developers took on significant risk, and large publishers reaped the rewards.
With Gabe's okay, I sent the document to Amazon. In a short time, I had a response. "Let's meet."
When I arrived, the Amazon vice president I met was super friendly. He seemed familiar but I couldn't place him. Then he said, you don't remember me, but you interviewed me at Microsoft.
I realized I hadn't hired him, and for the first time, I began to feel uncomfortable about how things would play out. He gently reminded me that when Amazon was pretty much in its infancy and a company I knew mainly because of my friend, I had interviewed him for a position at Microsoft. He was interviewing at Microsoft because the company he worked for had just laid him off. Our department was pretty much in a hiring freeze and he had a retail background, so I suggested he check out a small company called Amazon. When we met again, he had been there for a few years.
We had a great discussion, and a few weeks later, a bottle of champagne showed up at Valve's door.
It was exciting and scary at the same time. We had an offer from Amazon for a minority stake, but the dynamics in the company were tough. Amazon could help propel Valve to the next level, but the partnership would not come without costs. Valve's culture was still evolving. A partnership with a big outside player could help but it could also hurt what we had built.
It was after the Amazon offer that Mike revealed to Gabe that he wanted to leave. With an offer in hand, we didn't take long to outline a deal.
Ultimately, Mike and I relinquished ownership to start the next chapter of our lives. The structure of the deal meant we would be rewarded for Valve's success over the next five years. I knew opportunities lay ahead. I also saw significant risks. The Sierra deal could publicly collapse, employees could be unsettled, we might not actually regain the IP and with any online efforts, there would be new significant risks.
In the months that followed, Mike and I left Seattle for a new adventure on San Juan Island and Whistler BC, I continued to make myself available to Valve. But for the most part, I shed my work identity and started new projects, including a passion for protecting the resident Orca whales of Washington.
It was up to Gabe and the Valve team to move the business forward.
A few years after Valve, I went to work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and from there, took on another CMO role when Mike started a new partnership and business focused on photo editing. That company, Picnik, was sold to Google in 2010.
I continued to see the Valve team intermittently over the years, and even worked with the team on a story that appeared in the New York Times in 2012 about Valve's very unusual flat culture. When the Half-Life IP was secured and owned by Valve, the team sent us a small trophy with the engraving welcome back Gordon. Gordon is the main character in the Half-Life adventure.
In 2016, Mike and I separated and then divorced. In 2018, I joined Gabe and some friends from Valve on a cruise journey around the Japanese islands.
About ten years after the release of Half-Life, PC Gamer named it the best PC game of all time. In a separate story, PC Gamer also named Half-Life the best marketed game of all time, with special credit to anyone who came up with the game box and pushed retail. Valve's online platform Steam is now an industry phenomenon, with annual sales in the billions of dollars.
As I look back, Valve's great success has become, I am proud of what the team has achieved. I am also proud of the work I did while realizing that my greatest contributions to Valve's business were largely unnoticed and unrecognized in the industry. Part of that is due to the bro culture of the software business, part of it is that I stepped back to support my husband in a partnership where he was the lesser partner, and part of it is that women, especially in tech, often disappear when the story is told.
I was incredibly disappointed when Valve released a video in 2023 about the making of Half-Life, where one of the interviewees, Karen Laur, a talented texture artist, spoke about the isolating experience of being a woman at Valve and basically being the only other woman in her tenure, there was an office manager. I understand why she felt the way she did, but the senior Valve team knew better. Watching the video, I felt like my place in Valve's history had been completely erased.
I know that Valve would not have succeeded without Mike. It would not have succeeded without Gabe. And it would not have succeeded without me. A friend of mine, who knows the whole story once told me, You are a founding partner and in hindsight, I agree. From the very beginning, I invested time, treasure, and industry expertise to make the company a great success.
And it is.
Monica Harrington lives in Bend, Oregon, with Scott Walker and their Spaniel Johnnie Walker Black and White.
Editor’s note 8/21: The author has updated details related to the validation scheme and the name of the mod created by Robin Walker and John Cook, which was ultimately shipped as Team Fortress Classic.