Monica Harrington, Valve’s former chief marketing officer, is a business strategist known for her wise decisions, which helped Valve as a company and its major beloved video game franchises, such as Half-Life, survive and thrive.
Recently, at this year’s Game Developers Conference, she recalled during a panel “How Valve Became Valve: An Insider’s Account” (via GamesRadar+) that the idea of another “mediocre” game before releasing Half-Life appeared, but in the end, didn’t come to realize.
“The original idea was to do what they called the B title. 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,” she said. However, it didn’t seem to be a good choice at that time, so she tried to persuade the team to give up the idea by walking them “through the business analysis.” Her insistence was deeply rooted in a belief, “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 that I thought the only way that Half-Life was really going to work was if it was named Game of the Year.” In 1998, when the original game was released, it was nominated as Game of The Year, although it didn’t secure the reward in the end.
During GDC, Monica Harrington also shared that Valve’s creator, Gabe Newell, had some interesting ideas before launching Steam, like a social hub that is nothing like Facebook. As for Half-Life, rumor has it that Half-Life 3 is close to completion and we will see the game soon.
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