Valve Trivia
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48 free Valve trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Valve was founded on Gabe Newell's wedding day in 1996 by two ex-Microsoft engineers who rejected names like Rhino Scar and Fruitfly Ensemble. Two years later Half-Life split the history of first-person shooters into before and after, and in 2003 Steam turned the studio into the gatekeeper of PC gaming. Along the way came Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Dota 2, Half-Life: Alyx and a run of hardware from the ill-fated Steam Machine to the Steam Deck. This quiz covers the games, the engines, the acquisitions, the cancelled projects, the lawsuits with Vivendi, Blizzard and the Australian regulator, the flat structure with no bosses, and the term Valve Time that the company itself now uses. It also reaches into the hardware era: the HTC Vive, the Index, the Deck and the 2026 Steam Machine. Fifty questions, in sets of ten, from facts any Steam user knows to details only a Valve historian would recall.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Valve's two founders both quit which tech giant in 1996 to start the company?
Microsoft
Microsoft had made both founders millionaires, and they spent that money bankrolling Valve themselves while it built its first game.
Q 02To which nearby city did Valve move its headquarters from Kirkland, Washington?
Bellevue
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.
Q 03Valve's debut game, Half-Life, casts the player as which crowbar-wielding physicist?
Gordon Freeman
Gordon Freeman never speaks: the story plays out through his eyes while the player keeps control, an approach that broke new ground for shooters.
Q 04Valve was founded on which personal occasion for Newell?
His wedding day
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.
Q 05Valve's handbook for new hires, written for a company with no bosses, says every desk comes with what?
Wheels
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.
Q 06Valve's GoldSrc engine was a modified version of which id Software engine?
Quake
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.
Q 07Which publisher did Valve eventually sign with for its debut game?
Sierra On-Line
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.
Q 08Which studio made the expansions Opposing Force, Blue Shift and Decay?
Gearbox Software
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.
Q 09Which sardonic AI guides and taunts the player through the test chambers of Valve's Portal games?
GLaDOS
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'.
Q 10Which cryptocurrency did Steam accept from 2016 until 2017?
Bitcoin
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.
Q 11Installing which 2004 game made Steam mandatory for players?
Half-Life 2
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.
Q 12What is the name of the in-house game engine Valve introduced in 2004?
Source
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.
Q 13Portal grew out of which student project?
Narbacular Drop
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.
Q 21Which 2016 Valve collection of VR minigames is set inside Portal's Aperture Science?
The Lab
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.
Q 22Which indie studio did Valve acquire in April 2018?
Campo Santo
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.
Q 23Which game designer did Valve bring in to design its card game Artifact?
Richard Garfield
Q 14What was Valve's 2007 five-game bundle, which introduced Portal and Team Fortress 2, called?
The Orange Box
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.
Q 15Which studio did Valve acquire in 2008 and rename Valve South?
Turtle Rock Studios
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.
Q 16Which Warcraft III mod developer did Valve hire in 2009 to lead Dota 2?
IceFrog
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.
Q 17What is the name of Valve's annual Dota 2 esports tournament, begun in 2011?
The International
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.
Q 18Which economist did Valve hire in 2012 to study its in-game economies?
Yanis Varoufakis
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.
Q 19Which film director did Newell announce a movie collaboration with in 2013?
J. J. Abrams
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.
Q 20Which Taiwanese company partnered with Valve on the Vive VR headset?
HTC
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.
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.
Q 24What was the company's second-generation VR headset, released in June 2019, called?
Valve Index
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.
Q 25Which 2020 VR game was hailed as virtual reality's first killer app?
Half-Life: Alyx
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.
Q 26Which streaming service aired the animated Dota: Dragon's Blood from March 2021?
Netflix
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.
Q 27Which Valve-built compatibility layer lets Windows games run on the Linux-based Steam Deck?
Proton
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.
Q 28Which chipmaker supplies the custom processor in the Steam Deck?
AMD
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.
Q 29What is the name of the hero-shooter/MOBA hybrid Valve began beta-testing in 2024?
Deadlock
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.
Q 30Valve's standalone VR headset announced in November 2025 is called what?
Steam Frame
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.