During the Game Developer's Conference 2025, Monica Harrington—one of Valve's founders and its first chief marketing officer, who once outright threatened Sierra over the rights to Half-Life—gave an illuminating talk on the company's infancy. Before, of course, it became the goliath-felling company it is today.
While this is interesting in itself—another fascinating snippet she shared was about how Gabe Newell, circa 1998 to the early 2000s, had his eyes set on a social network. Y'know, like Facebook, Instagram, or X. "Gabe had interesting ideas that had nothing to do with software," Harrington said. "I mean, with games—and some of those would have been really interesting."
"One of them that just struck me—because this was not in a games context at all—an interactive social hub … I'm trying to remember some of the conversations we had at that time, but he was not talking about, like the community that exists on Steam or anything like that."
Harrington says that both she and Newell had a strong nose for where gaming was going—and how massive it could potentially be. But they also knew that the internet in general had the power to be an extremely effective social hub, too. She talks about it in almost prophetic terms:
"What he was very aware of—and I was too—was that the internet could be this incredibly social place, and people weren't thinking about it that way at that time. Y'know, people were doing transactions, tech companies … they weren't thinking about the psychology and the social aspects of it."
"Where Gabe's mind was going [was] about expanding that social element, but not in a gaming context … I think it probably wouldn't have looked anything like Facebook or what happened, but yeah."
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