Monica Harrington isn’t one of Valve’s official co-founders, but she played a big role in its formation and early success — she helped her partner Mike Harrington and Gabe Newell launch the Half-Life studio while working as a marketing manager for Microsoft’s games division during the day. In a lengthy piece on Medium — which Nic last covered in the Sunday Papers, but which I think deserves a piece of its own — Harrington takes us back to those heady early days.
Among other things, Harrington recounts how she and her husband invested their own money in Valve and how she used her Microsoft experience to shape Valve's approach to Half-Life, without developing any real conflicts of interest. When the line became impossible to walk, she resigned from Microsoft and became Valve's chief marketing officer from 1996 to 2000.
There are plenty of interesting moments – how Valve and Sierra fell out over marketing after the release of Half-Life, and how concerns about CD burners led to Valve implementing an authentication scheme that gave them a direct link to their first players. Harrington also gives us a marketer's view of the industry in the 1990s, and the balance of influence between developers, publishers, press, pirates and players, and draws comparisons to music and film.
There are insights into the development of Half-Life — how it shaped up internally, compared to how it looked after its triumphant E3 debut — and to a lesser extent Team Fortress. But I think the most interesting part is Harrington’s account of a proposal he made shortly after Half-Life’s release to build a digital game store and community platform in partnership with Amazon. Had that ever happened, industry history could have been very different. Here’s the full quote:
In a nine-page document, I proposed that Valve and Amazon come together to create a new online entertainment platform. I scaled the business opportunity to $500 million in four years. The gist of the idea was to create a medium-specific platform that would bring users together in a cohesive, engaging entertainment experience through digital and offline content sales. I wanted Amazon’s financial backing as a way to gain a first-mover advantage over Microsoft and Electronic Arts, and then the big PC game players. I couldn’t see a role for Sierra. If forced to, we wouldn’t create new games ourselves, and instead we would partner with outside developers to distribute content that wasn’t subject to an 85% publishing fee. At the time, I saw this as an act of rebellion against the traditional publishing dynamic, where indie developers took big risks and the big publishing houses reaped the rewards.
According to Harrington, Amazon offered to buy a minority stake in Valve a few weeks later. You can clearly see the foundation of Steam in that offer, but Harrington seems to have designed it mostly to get a valuation for Valve, to help himself and his partner when they eventually sold their share of the business to Newell.
Unfortunately, Harrington’s motivation for writing this piece is partly because, despite being heavily involved in the company’s first few years, she’s been marginalized from Valve’s history, including Valve’s own 2023 Half-Life making-of documentary. Harrington attributes this partly to her conscious decision to step back to avoid interfering with her husband’s partnership with Gabe Newell, and partly to the “bro culture” and sexist practices in the tech industry. Here’s the full piece:
When I look back at Valve’s great success, I’m proud of what the team has accomplished. I’m also proud of the work I’ve done while acknowledging that my biggest contributions to Valve’s business have gone largely unnoticed and unrecognized in the industry. Part of that was the brother culture of the software business, part of it was me stepping back to support my husband in a partnership where he was a lesser partner, and part of it was because women, especially in tech, often disappear when the story is told.
I was very disappointed when Valve released a video in 2023 of Karen Laur, a wonderfully talented texture artist who was one of the people interviewed about the creation of Half-Life, talking about the isolating experience of being a woman at Valve, essentially saying that the only other woman during her tenure there was an office manager. I understood why she felt that way, but senior Valve staff know better. Watching the video, I felt like my place in Valve's history had been completely erased.
I know Valve wouldn't have been successful without Mike. It wouldn't have been successful without Gabe. And it wouldn't have been successful without me. A friend of mine who knows the full story once told me, “You were a co-founder,” and looking back, I agree. From the beginning, I invested time, treasure, and industry expertise into making the company a huge success.
And it is.
Since leaving Valve in 2000, Harrington has done a variety of things, from getting involved in whale conservation to taking a job at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She and Mike Harrington separated and divorced in 2016. It’s worth reading the full article. It just so happens that I’ve recently been digging through Rock Paper Shotgun’s ancient records and learning about the site’s early formative interactions with Valve, while also considering the future of RPS under Ian Games of the Ian Games Network. It’s helpful to get some perspective on one of today’s weather creators on the other side of the aisle.