How Valve Founder Gabe Newell Turned ‘Half-Life’ Into A Nearly $10 Billion Fortune

Last October, around 20 employees and alumni of videogaming giant Valve gathered at The Lakehouse, a trendy restaurant nestled on the second floor of a corporate office tower in Bellevue, Washington, just outside of Seattle. The artists and coders trickled into the private event to celebrate a big milestone: the 25th anniversary of Half-Life, Valve’s first bestselling videogame, which was released two years after Gabe Newell and his business partner Michael Harrington started the company in 1996.

An overnight hit, Half-Life sold 2.5 million copies within 12 months, putting Valve firmly on the map. “When you go back to how Valve started and its roots, it was that,” says Harrington of the Half-Life launch. Even today, with multiple hit games like Portal and Dota 2, a fast-growing hardware division and its digital sales platform Steam making Valve one of the most consequential gaming companies in the world, Half-Life is still core to the company’s identity.

Harrington, now 60, left Valve in 2000, a couple years after Half-Life was released. But he returned on this autumn evening, along with most of the original Half-Life team, to sip cocktails, taste farm-to-table starters, and swap war stories. The big no-show that night? Valve’s 61-year-old co-founder and president, Gabe Newell.

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