The GDC 2025 highlight for me was a talk by Monica Harrington, Valve co-founder and the company's first chief marketing officer, about her long and storied career in tech. And like many of Valve's earliest employees, Harrington came there from Microsoft, where one of her major responsibilities was marketing Microsoft Word and later the Office suite.
"It's the mid-90s, and I'm in a new job at Microsoft overseeing PR for Microsoft's newish Consumer Division," says Harrington in her talk. "I'd previously worked as a product manager on Microsoft Word and later took on a new role overseeing all of the applications and developer tools PR for the company. We'd recently launched the version of Microsoft Office that would result—sorry to Microsoft's antitrust lawyers—in total domination over our old rivals WordPerfect and Lotus."
"The people who had asked for it, they actually wanted essentially a type-off," said Harrington. "They wanted you to produce a document. And they told you what the document was, and you had to produce it. And so here I am, and WordPerfect owned the market. And the Microsoft guy who asked me to come out… I can see him over there, and I can see the look on his face when they ask for that."
The look on his face will have to be left to your imagination, but this is clearly the kind of scenario that would make certain Microsoft product managers wake up screaming in the night.
"And I said 'it's okay, it's okay,' you know," recalls Harrington, who was able to sit down and produce exactly what the client was demanding in Word. "And that was hugely important, and yeah I was lucky to be able to do that. You know, it was down to [the fact] I'm pretty sure I was the only one on the Word product marketing team who'd actually been a secretary."
Most of the rest of Harrington's talk focuses on her time at Valve, but the common thread among all her recollections is just how brilliant she is at both selling a product and understanding what people want from it. "You can't use up your credibility," Harrington says of truth in marketing, "and you can't lose it."
There's also the story of how her nephew buying a CD-ROM copier got Harrington very interested in DRM, as well as the intriguing alt-history where Valve got out of the games business entirely. Gabe Newell had his eyes on a social network in the '90s that "was not in a games context at all"—meaning Valve-owned social media could've been a very real thing.
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