There’s a world where a dispute with publisher Sierra might’ve left Half-Life as the first and last game Valve ever published, according to the developer’s original chief marketing officer, Monica Harrington. In an effort to wrest the rights to the Half-Life IP away from Sierra, Harrington threatened that Valve might just abandon game development entirely.
In a talk at the Game Developers Conference this week, Harrington spoke on her role with Valve from the company’s founding through much of its early success. The original Half-Life was, of course, published by Sierra, well before Valve was distributing its own games. Harrington says “there were a few things I didn’t know” about the terms of that contract until she read it some time after Half-Life shipped.
“Chief among them was that Sierra had the option for two more games, essentially under the same terms, and this is despite the fact that we had produced a monster hit,” Harrington explains. “So under this scenario, Valve would fund all but a million dollars of the cost of developing a game, and Sierra would retain all the IP rights and pay about 15%. It felt insane.”
While Harrington is rarely credited as a Valve founder, she was right there with her then-husband Mike Harrington, who is typically listed alongside Gabe Newell as a co-founder. “I knew that if Mike and I were to get anything out of our ownership position in Valve, the prospects for the company needed to be much, much brighter,” she explains.
There were several issues Harrington wanted to tackle to improve those prospects, and one of them was regaining control of the Half-Life franchise from Sierra. “With Gabe’s OK, I met with Valve’s attorney to plan out a strategy for regaining the IP for Half-Life and all future games,” she explains. “And essentially, my bargaining position was that Valve and Sierra would either rework that contract, or Gabe and Mike and the team would pivot to something else entirely and Valve would never ship another game.
“It wasn’t an idle threat – we weren’t going to take on all of the risk to make other people rich,” Harrington continues. “Besides, I knew Gabe had interesting ideas that had nothing to do with games.”
If this story sounds familiar, it’s because Harrington also recounted it in a Medium post last year, which has now been expanded in her GDC talk. One of the prospects proposed for a potential non-gaming business was an “online entertainment platform” to be developed in partnership with Amazon. While that deal fell through, Valve was able to successfully wrest control of Half-Life – and its own game development future – back from Sierra. The rest, as they say, is history.
Valve was “pretty close to going bankrupt” until it was saved from a pre-Half-Life 2 lawsuit by a summer intern who happened to major in Korean language studies.
