Why it matters: A week ago, we highlighted the surprising interview Valve co-founder Gabe Newell gave to a little-known YouTube channel, where he revealed his unconventional daily routine and passion for scuba diving. But beyond the lifestyle quirks lies a deeper, more instructive story – how a chance encounter with Steve Ballmer at Microsoft pulled Newell away from Harvard and into a 13-year tenure at the software giant. That decision not only shaped Newell's personal trajectory but also helped lay the groundwork for Valve, Steam, and the transformation of PC gaming as we know it.
Valve co-founder Gabe Newell, one of the most influential figures in the video game industry, recently provided a rare and candid interview to independent YouTuber Zalkar Saliev. This unexpected conversation covered Newell's journey from teenage hobbyist programmer to the head of a company that changed the PC gaming landscape.
Throughout the discussion, Newell reflected on pivotal moments in his career, offering glimpses into his daily life and ongoing interests. Recounting his teenage years, Newell framed programming as an unlikely career path in the 1970s. "I started programming in high school," he said. "At the time programming wasn't really a career path.
There were probably only a couple of thousand programmers in the United States, working on mainframe accounting software primarily… It wasn't like people said, 'Oh, you know, there's this huge industry where software gets developed.'"
For Newell, even video games were virtually nonexistent at the time: "I was 10 before the first video game came out, it was called Pong, so when I was a kid I thought I was going to be a doctor, and programming was what I did when I should have been doing something else."
Newell's perspective began to shift after he enrolled at Harvard and visited his brother Dan, who had just started at Microsoft. What was meant to be a short visit led to an extended stay thanks to a suggestion from Steve Ballmer.
"Steve Ballmer got mad because I was distracting Dan from doing his job and said, 'If you're going to be hanging out here, why don't you do something useful?' So I said 'fine, I'll do a little work.' And decided I'd take the quarter off and just work at Microsoft."
That quarter evolved into a 13-year stint. Newell said that his skills developed much more rapidly at Microsoft, describing it as the premier environment for programmers at the time. He noted that, at the time, Microsoft fostered a spirit of innovation and valued producing high-quality solutions at speed – a philosophy that would strongly influence the culture he later established at Valve.
Newell went on to say that learning alongside so many skilled professionals at Microsoft offered a far more valuable experience than what he would have gained by returning to university. "Hundreds or thousands of people doing it at Microsoft was way better than going back and continuing my education at university," he said.
Newell cited the distribution model of id Software's Doom as a transformative moment. The success of Doom, which reached audiences through methods outside the conventional retail and reseller channels, opened his eyes to the strategic potential of direct digital distribution – a model Microsoft, at the time, was slow to adopt.
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