While everybody is waiting, poised with baited breath, for the next big Valve announcement I thought I would take this opportunity to tell some early Valve stories. I’ve told these stories in part throughout my blog but I thought I’d take the opportunity of this historic moment to compose them into a single narrative.
I first met Gabe Newell in 1994 when I had a problem on my hands. My earliest job as Games Evangelist at Microsoft had made me responsible for ensuring that the Windows 95 DOS compatibility layer could actually support the thousands of DOS games that were prevalent in the market. Since the goal of Windows 95 was, in part, to kill of DOS, I had made the case that a serious investment needed to be made in ensuring that the Windows 95 DOS emulator could actually run all popular games. It was also my hope to use this chore as an opportunity to open dialog with all of the leading game developers of the era to start discussing what it would take to persuade them to start making games specifically targeting the Windows OS. Bob Heddle, a Project Manager on Windows 95 was assigned the task of managing the compatibility testing of 1000 DOS games I was to collect. A tiny Asian engineer named Raymond Chen was responsible for the actual coding work on the virtual DOS engine to get the games working. Raymond was a fascinating character for several reasons;
1) He wore a suit and tie to work every day in stark contrast to Microsoft’s typical casual nerd attire
2) He kept a running diary of his frustrations with the task which grew over time into a litany of mad raving about the terrible assembly code most games included at the time.
Later when Origins first engineers came to visit us on Microsoft campus and met Chen they realized the heroic and herculean effort he was undertaking to support their games and he became, rightly so, somewhat of a hero in the DOS game community. Zack Simpson of Origin even persuaded Chen to share some of his diary with other developers which was hundreds of pages long and hysterical reading as each game Chen ported to DOS drove him closer to madness. Chen Later wrote a book about Windows coding called “The New Old Thing” which I would highly recommend to nerds everywhere. At some point I’ll track him down and see if he still has some of that diary. I’d love to publish it again.
Of course one of the first companies I met with on my game collection tour was id Software and the legendary John Carmack. Carmack and Zack Simpson provided me with the earliest education and foundations for the ideas that later went into crafting the DirectX API’s. Of course when I met with Carmack I attempted to persuade him to try porting Doom to Windows. Carmack was adamant that it couldn’t be done… but in classical Carmack style he made an exceedingly generous offer. He offered to give Microsoft the source to DOOM to try to port to Windows ourselves. I was of course thrilled with this offer and returned to Redmond to triumphantly find an engineer within Microsoft willing to attempt the task for me. I put it around Microsoft that I was looking for an engineer who was willing to undertake the task and that was when I first heard from Gabe Newell.
Gabe already had a long and respected career at Microsoft where he had purported worked on over 30 shipping products including being the Program Manager for Windows 3.1. As most burned-out Microsoft veterans were understandably inclined to do, he had taken what was known as a rest-and-vest job in Nathan Myhrvold’s Advanced Technology Research Group where the best and the brightest minds at Microsoft were then known to accumulate and work on highly speculative stuff that never saw the light of day. Gabe was working on set top box UI at the time and had a small team of engineers at his disposal. He offered to lend me one for the task of porting DOOM, which I eagerly accepted. Everything did not go as planned however…
After arranging with Carmack to transfer the code to Gabe’s engineer, the project disappeared into a vacuum for several weeks. Gabe’s engineer was often MIA and unresponsive to email. Finally out of frustration I made the 200 yard trek across from building 4 to building 10 to stake out his office and find out how he was doing with the port. The guy didn’t answer his door when I knocked, but I found him sweating over his keyboard in pitch darkness working on Doom. He seemed frazzled and stressed out and was not happy to have an unexpected visitor. He assured me that he was working on it and I left. A few days later it was reported that he had been found dead at his desk from a drug overdose. *For the record that was the first and only time I ever heard of such an occurrence at Microsoft. That unfortunate turn of events left me with a serious problem however. The DOOM port would have to be started from scratch again and I needed another engineer. I turned to Robert Hess a seasoned Microsoft veteran who ran the porting lab for the Developer Relations Group. Hess generously offered to undertake the port despite his many other responsibilities at the time. Robert’s effort was heroic and extremely educational about precisely the problems with the Windows OS that prevented its practical use for such games. Robert’s Windows 3.1 port of DOOM used WinG for graphics (link) and the Windows media architecture of that era for sound, networking and input. Roberts struggles with the Windows platform limitations led me to hire contractors to prototype new input, networking and sound API’s that later became the prototypes for the early DirectX API’s. WinDOOM, as we called it worked, but NOT nearly as well as its DOS counterpart. When I returned to id to show our handiwork, John was gracious but justifiably said he could never ship it as an id product.
It was the second attempt to port Doom to Windows by an engineer I hired named Fred Hommel that resulted in DirectX 1.0, whose requirements were basically, whatever we had to write for Windows 95 that was necessary to make DOOM run better as a native Windows application that it did on DOS. I’ve recounted all of those stories in previous postings, so we’ll jump forward in time to my next interaction with Gabe Newell several years later.
Early WildTangent Offices
I had left Microsoft in 1997 and founded WildTangent Inc. One of the earliest online game publishing companies of the Internet era. In our early days I had formulated the company very much like Unity 3D’s present business. We would develop and provide a browser plugin for Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers that would enable people to stream high production value 3D games over the web and play them in a browser. I bought a company called Eclipse in Austin Texas founded by a good friend named David Stafford who shared my passion for steaming 3D game engines. The WildTangent Web Driver was an extremely exotic technology for that era that achieved such incredible compression and streaming of 3D assets that it was possible for us to deliver the most advanced media rich graphics imaginable in that era… even over a modem. *by 2005 WildTangent had over 120,000,000 active WildTangent Web Drivers in active use across the Internet, more players than even Shockwave 3D.
While I was working on this technology Gabe retired from Microsoft and founded Valve. Given his relationship with John Carmack he licensed the Quake engine for his first game. Half-life and signed a publishing deal with Sierra, one of the leading game publishers of that era. As we all know, Half-Life was a mega-success. He had upgraded his offices in downtown Kirkland Washington and I was looking at moving WildTangent into his old office space which was right next door to his new offices. I paid him a visit at that time and got a tour of his budding game studio. Gabe expressed to me that he was having a great deal of frustration with his publisher Sierra over royalties for Half-Life. Like many former Microsoft founders, we had found it quite an adjustment to go from being all-powerful resource rich Microsoft employees to being struggling tech company founders on our own. Gabe was fortunate enough to have left Microsoft with sufficient wealth to fund Valve himself while I had raised some 76.6 million dollars in venture capital from dotcom era VC’s to finance WildTangent.
At the time Gabe was preparing to sue Sierra over the issue which is a famously well chronicled lawsuit as well as the subsequent one Valve filed against Sierra acquirer Activision.
http://www.lazygamer.net/general-news/valve-sues-activision-its-all-sierras-fault/
I suggested to Gabe that he consider developing his next game for the WildTangent Web Driver and publish it himself on the Internet. Since Valve didn’t make its own engine at the time and WildTangent had superior 3D character animation technology to anything Gabe could get from id Software I attempted to persuade Gabe to adopt my engine. Gabe didn’t believe that there was any way that a full production 3D game could be delivered over a modem so I arranged a demonstration for he and his engineers at WildTangent headquarters. For that demonstration we had
Travis Baldree
Brent Orford, then a junior engineer working for us duplicate a level of Valve’s famous Counter-Strike mod for the WildTangent Webdriver in Java. As I recall we were able to compress a 3.6MB level of the game into a 250K streaming level. Gabe and his engineers were suitably impressed. Unfortunately for WildTangent, Gabe is himself an extremely brilliant technologist and decided to build his own next generation game engine and streaming platform… Steam.
It turned out for the best since WildTangent turned its business focus towards capturing the rapidly growing market for downloadable casual games while Valve targeted core game publishing. For a time WildTangent and Valve competed to win distribution for our respective game clients with leading PC OEM’s but the OEM’s couldn’t ship violent core games to all of their audiences and WildTangent won a monopoly of distribution relationships across all major PC manufacturers of that era. Valve focused on winning distribution with core games via retail bundling of the Steam client with their CD games in exchange for use of Valve’s game lobbying and DRM services. I didn’t interact much with Gabe at that time because our companies had become somewhat competitive with one another for control of channel relationships. WildTangent’s platform was heavily tied to games written in Java and Gabe was of course focused on core games written natively in C++.
In 2008 WildTangent released a product for PC OEM’s called the WildTangent ORB. A software game console for delivering gamepad enabled “Mid-core” gamepad enabled games over the internet directly to PC desktops.
http://www.wildtangent.com/Corporate/wildtangent-announces-orb-the-first-game-console-for-the-pc/
WildTangent brought light online MMOG’s from companies like Runescape and Bigpoint into the Western market and distributed them early on around the same time that Valve started adding casual games like Bejeweled to their downloadable channel. By 2009 I had retired from WildTangent and left the downloable game market to focus on social game publishing. In that era Electronic Arts had made overtures to acquire WildTangent, Valve, Popcap and BigFish Games (all Seattle based) to get into the online publishing space, but it was growing so fast for everybody involved that they were summarily rejected.
In my absence WildTangent moved into mobile gaming while Valve doubled down on the dying PC retail channel and managed to dominate that space almost completely. Both WildTangent and Valve experienced constant frustrations with subsequent OS releases from Microsoft in the early 21st century as Microsoft would increasingly cripple the Windows gaming experience in favor of its XBOX console while launching failed downloadable game initiatives for the Windows PC one after another. Like Valve the temptation to abandon Windows as a gaming platform was ever present and appealing if it were not for the vast technical hurdles involved in creating a stand-alone gaming OS. Years later the prospect of a serious effort by Valve to finally ditch Windows and go it on their own is both exciting and daunting. I certainly wish them the best and hope they make a serious go of it… Microsoft certainly needs the boot in the ass for the mess they have made of the PC game market. My own, less successful attempt at the space leaves me with an abiding respect for what an accomplishment it will be for Valve to pull it off.
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