48 Fun Facts About Valve

Valve's two founders both quit which tech giant in 1996 to start the company?

Microsoft had made both founders millionaires, and they spent that money bankrolling Valve themselves while it built its first game.

To which nearby city did Valve move its headquarters from Kirkland, Washington?

Bellevue became home when the company moved about five miles south, at around the time it dropped the name Valve L.L.C. and became Valve Corporation.

Valve's debut game, Half-Life, casts the player as which crowbar-wielding physicist?

Gordon Freeman never speaks: the story plays out through his eyes while the player keeps control, an approach that broke new ground for shooters.

Valve was founded on which personal occasion for Newell?

His wedding day: Newell signed the papers setting up the company on the day he got married, and Rhino Scar was among the names he and Mike Harrington considered for it.

Valve's handbook for new hires, written for a company with no bosses, says every desk comes with what?

Wheels: the handbook calls them a reminder to keep asking where you would be more valuable, and staff really do unplug their desks and roll them to whichever project they join.

Valve's GoldSrc engine was a modified version of which id Software engine?

Quake's engine came through a friend: Michael Abrash, a former colleague of Valve's founders who had joined id Software, helped them license it, and Valve reworked it into GoldSrc.

Which publisher did Valve eventually sign with for its debut game?

Sierra On-Line took a chance on the unproven studio after Valve had struggled to find any publisher willing to back its ambitious first shooter.

Which studio made the expansions Opposing Force, Blue Shift and Decay?

Gearbox Software, the future maker of Borderlands, took on the add-ons while Valve's own team spent the following years building a new engine and a sequel.

Which sardonic AI guides and taunts the player through the test chambers of Valve's Portal games?

GLaDOS dangles the promise of cake to keep the player testing and then tries to kill them; Valve's own blurb for the sequel calls her an 'occasionally murderous computer companion'.

Which cryptocurrency did Steam accept from 2016 until 2017?

Bitcoin lasted about 20 months as a way to pay: Valve dropped it when its value swung wildly and the network's fee on a single purchase neared $20.

Installing which 2004 game made Steam mandatory for players?

Half-Life 2 needed the Steam client even when bought on disc, to the dismay of fans who met overloaded servers and found the early service buggy.

What is the name of the in-house game engine Valve introduced in 2004?

Source, the successor to GoldSrc, was built to be upgraded piece by piece instead of replaced outright, which is how it powered Valve's games until its own successor arrived in 2015.

Portal grew out of which student project?

Narbacular Drop caught Valve's eye at a DigiPen career fair; after the students demonstrated it at Valve's offices, Gabe Newell offered the whole team jobs to rebuild it as Portal.

What was Valve's 2007 five-game bundle, which introduced Portal and Team Fortress 2, called?

The Orange Box sold five games for the price of one, three of them brand new, and carried Valve's catalogue beyond the PC to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Which studio did Valve acquire in 2008 and rename Valve South?

Turtle Rock Studios finished Left 4 Dead as Valve South, but its co-founder called co-developing with a team 800 miles away 'a nightmare', and the studio went independent again in 2010.

Which Warcraft III mod developer did Valve hire in 2009 to lead Dota 2?

IceFrog, a designer known only by that pseudonym, broke the news himself on his blog in October 2009, saying Valve had hired him to lead a team.

What is the name of Valve's annual Dota 2 esports tournament, begun in 2011?

The International began at Gamescom in 2011 as the first public showing of Dota 2, with a $1 million top prize put up by Valve; from 2013 the pool was crowdfunded through players' in-game purchases.

Which economist did Valve hire in 2012 to study its in-game economies?

Yanis Varoufakis was approached by Gabe Newell himself, who had read his blog on the euro crisis and saw the same problem in linking two game economies with a shared currency.

Which film director did Newell announce a movie collaboration with in 2013?

J. J. Abrams shared a D.I.C.E. Summit keynote on storytelling with Newell, where the pair said they were discussing a Half-Life or Portal film and a game to make together.

Which Taiwanese company partnered with Valve on the Vive VR headset?

HTC, a smartphone maker, unveiled the Vive at its own Mobile World Congress keynote in March 2015, while Valve supplied the SteamVR software and the base stations that track a player walking around a room.

Which 2016 Valve collection of VR minigames is set inside Portal's Aperture Science?

The Lab was given away free: Valve built its room-scale experiments, from defending a castle to fixing a robot, to learn what worked in VR before attempting a full-scale game.

Which indie studio did Valve acquire in April 2018?

Campo Santo, the maker of Firewatch, moved its whole team to Valve's offices, where its announced follow-up, In the Valley of Gods, was put on hold as its staff were drawn onto other Valve projects.

Which game designer did Valve bring in to design its card game Artifact?

Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering, saw his contract ended less than four months after launch as players drifted away, and in 2021 Valve gave up on a rebuilt version and made both editions free.

What was the company's second-generation VR headset, released in June 2019, called?

Valve Index was built by Valve itself, and its controllers strap to the hand, so a player can let go completely while sensors track every finger.

Which 2020 VR game was hailed as virtual reality's first killer app?

Half-Life: Alyx began as an experiment: Valve dropped pieces of an earlier game in the series into VR for quick prototypes and found its mechanics a surprisingly natural fit.

Which streaming service aired the animated Dota: Dragon's Blood from March 2021?

Netflix and Valve kept the series under wraps until about five weeks before its March 25, 2021 premiere, announcing it with a trailer in mid-February.

Which Valve-built compatibility layer lets Windows games run on the Linux-based Steam Deck?

Proton is Valve's own build of the Wine project, developed with CodeWeavers; it gets Windows games running on the Deck, though some online titles stay off it because their kernel-level anti-cheat cannot run through it.

Which chipmaker supplies the custom processor in the Steam Deck?

AMD's custom chip pairs Zen 2 processor cores with RDNA 2 graphics; inside Valve it was nicknamed Aerith, after a Final Fantasy VII heroine, and its 2023 revision took the name of that game's villain, Sephiroth.

What is the name of the hero-shooter/MOBA hybrid Valve began beta-testing in 2024?

Deadlock leaked to the public in May 2024 while Valve was still testing it in secret, and the invite-only test was drawing big crowds before the game even had a store page.

Valve's standalone VR headset announced in November 2025 is called what?

Steam Frame can also stream games wirelessly from a PC, and it tracks the wearer's eyes so that only the spot being looked at is sent in full detail.

Which shortage delayed Valve's new Steam Machine in 2026?

Memory chips, and storage with them, soared in price during the AI boom; the Steam Machine finally went on sale in June 2026 from $1,049, through a randomised reservation queue.

What do gamers jokingly call the gap between Valve's promised release dates and the real ones?

Valve Time is a joke the company is in on: it keeps a page on its own developer wiki tracking promised dates against actual ones, and it used the phrase itself when it delayed Portal 2.

Which wearable items did Team Fortress 2 players become famous for collecting and trading?

Hats became the game's running joke and its economy: the rarest, called Unusuals, come only from opened crates, and the hat-loving crowd kept growing after the game went free-to-play in 2011.

Valve writer Chet Faliszek said that when playtesters keep getting stuck, the fault lies with whom?

The developers: at first he blamed the testers, he said, but once a third or fourth group hit the same wall he saw that 'it's not their fault, it's our fault'.

In 2024 Forbes said Newell owned about half of Valve; who held the rest?

Employees held the rest, by Forbes's estimate, beside Newell's 50.1%; the company is privately held, so it has no outside shareholders to answer to.

In 2011 Newell said Valve out-earned which two giants per employee?

Google and Apple were his yardstick, and filings in a later lawsuit pointed the same way: with only about 350 staff, Valve was often more profitable per employee than some of the world's most valuable companies.

Which unusual input let Valve's 2015 Steam Controller play mouse-driven PC games from the sofa?

Twin trackpads with haptic feedback let a thumb stand in for a mouse; Valve stopped making the controller in 2019 and cleared the last stock for $5 apiece.

Valve sued Vivendi in 2002 for licensing its games to which businesses?

Cyber cafés were the issue; the case swung Valve's way when an intern who spoke Korean translated documents suggesting Vivendi had ordered evidence destroyed.

After a 2012 settlement with Valve, Blizzard DOTA was renamed and eventually released as what?

Heroes of the Storm began life as Blizzard DOTA; the settlement left Valve the commercial rights to the name, so Blizzard retitled its game Blizzard All-Stars before choosing the final title in 2013.

An Australian court fined Valve in 2016 for telling Steam customers they had no right to what?

Refunds were the issue: the Federal Court fined Valve A$3 million for telling Australian players they were not entitled to them, even though Steam had brought in a refund policy while the case was running.

A Paris court ruled in 2019 that Steam users may do what with their games?

Resell them, the court said, rejecting Valve's argument that Steam is a subscription; the win for consumer group UFC-Que Choisir was overturned on appeal in 2022, and France's top court agreed in 2024.

Wolfire Games's 2021 antitrust suit took aim at which Steam practice?

Its 30% cut was the target: the studio, which started the Humble Indie Bundle, called the fee 'extraordinarily high'; a first complaint was thrown out, but a reworked one went ahead in 2022.

Which networking company joined Valve on the PowerPlay low-latency initiative in 2000?

Cisco Systems and Valve pitched PowerPlay as a standard that would bring internet providers, router makers and game studios together to make online games run faster, with a first service promised within months.

Valve's 2013 intern project for ten high school students was called what?

Pipeline put ten high-school students to work making game content, partly to test whether teenagers with almost no experience could be trained for a studio that normally hires only veterans.

Which shelved Valve project of the late 1990s was planned as a moody science-fantasy game?

Prospero was one of two projects the new studio started with; the other became Half-Life, which gathered so much momentum that the Prospero team was absorbed into it.

Why did Valve scrap its 'Vader' VR headset?

Too costly: the team reckoned the no-compromise design would have sold for around $5,000 a unit, so the project was shelved.

Which distributor replaced Vivendi for Valve's retail games under a 2005 deal?

Electronic Arts won a multi-year deal for the shop shelves only: Valve went on selling the same games itself over Steam, the outlet its previous distributor had gone to court to stop.

Valve's September 2023 sequel in its tactical shooter series was titled what?

Counter-Strike 2 did not go on sale beside its predecessor: it arrived as a free update that replaced Global Offensive in players' libraries, leaving the old game reachable only as a legacy version on community servers.