Last year saw the 25th anniversary of Half-Life, one of the most important games in PC history and a spectacular debut for Valve. But in another timeline, it could've been the studio's second game.
Valve co-founder and former chief marketing officer Monica Harrington was on a panel at the recent 2025 Game Developers Conference called "How Valve Became Valve: An Insider's Account." This expanded on Harrington's memories of the crucial early years at the company, and one tidbit concerns how Valve was looking to build up its development strength and team size.
Harrington says Valve was headhunting developers in the late 90s, and one of the ideas linked to this was to work on another game as well as Half-Life, with the idea being to release this unnamed title first and make a bit of money to help with the development of the studio's premier product.
"The original idea was to do what they called the B title," says Harrington. "This was going to be just kind of a mediocre game, and the idea was that the building of that game would build out the team."
Despite coming at it from more of a business and marketing perspective, however, Harrington saw that this would be a disaster for the fledgling studio.
"I told them, I led them through the business analysis, and I said that's just not gonna work," recalls Harrington. "If you do that, the company will fail. From the very beginning, we said you need to go all out. It's got to be in that top 10. I told Gabe [Newell] that I thought the only way that Half-Life was really going to work was if it was named Game of the Year."
No further details were offered on what this "B title" would have been, though given the rationale for making it Valve must have been considering another first-person shooter. Half-Life was after all intended to push boundaries, and that was one of Valve's problems: after a spectacular E3 showing in 1997 Valve was burning through cash, with Gabe Newell taking out a loan against the company's future profits to continue development.
"If Valve shipped the game we had, it would launch and quietly disappear, and all of the work we'd all done would account for nothing," recalled Harrington last year. "All of the people we'd hired would lose their jobs, we'd lose the money we'd invested. It was a disaster."
As Valve scrapped what wasn't working and development went through a reset, it was self-funding the game. We all know that things eventually worked out when the game released in November 1998, but Harrington's throwaway line to Newell about it needing to be "Game of the Year" proved oddly prophetic. Valve would struggle to sell Half-Life until Harrington came up with a marketing manoeuvre that persists to this day: putting all those accolades to good use, and slapping a "Game of the Year" sticker on the box.
