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Monica Harrington isn’t one of Valve’s official co-founders, but she was heavily involved in its formation and initial success – working by day as a marketing manager at Microsoft with responsibility for the games division, while helping her partner, Mike Harrington, and Gabe Newell get the Half-Life studio off the ground. In a lengthy post on Medium – which Nic has already covered in the most recent Sunday Papers, but which I think deserves a piece of its own – Harrington takes us through those heady early days.
Amongst many other things, Harrington discusses how she and her husband poured their own money into Valve, and how she walked the complicated line of drawing upon her Microsoft experience to shape Valve’s approach with Half-Life, without developing an actual conflict of interest. When the line became impossible to walk, she resigned from Microsoft, becoming chief marketing officer at Valve from 1996 to 2000.
There are intriguing memories aplenty – how Valve and Sierra fell out over the marketing of Half-Life after release, and how concerns about CD burners led to the implementation of an authentication scheme which accidentally gave Valve a direct line to their first players. Harrington also treats us to a marketing-eye picture of the industry during the 1990s and the balance of clout between developers, publishers, press, pirates and players, drawing comparisons with music and film.
There are insights upon the development of Half-Life – how it looked after its first triumphant E3 showing versus how it was shaping up internally – and to a lesser extent, Team Fortress. But I think the most interesting part is Harrington’s account of a pitch she made, shortly after Half-Life’s release, to set up a digital games store and community platform in partnership with… Amazon. Had that gone all the way, industry history might have been very different. Here’s the excerpt in full:
In a nine-page document, I proposed that Valve and Amazon team up to create a new online entertainment platform. I scaled the business opportunity within four years at $500 million dollars. The gist of the idea was to create a made-for-the-medium platform that would bring users together in a sticky, compelling entertainment experience, with digital and offline content sales. I wanted Amazon’s financial backing as a way to gain first mover advantage against Microsoft and Electronic Arts, then the major PC games players. I didn’t see a role for Sierra. If pushed, we wouldn’t create any new games ourselves, and instead would team with outside developers so that they could distribute content not subject to an 85% publishing fee. At the time, I considered it an act of rebellion against the traditional publishing dynamic where independent developers took on huge risk, 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 obviously see the bones of Steam in that proposal, though Harrington appears to have conceived of it mostly to get a valuation for Valve, to help her and her partner when they eventually sold their share of the business to Newell.
Sadly, Harrington’s motivation for writing the post is partly that she has been left out of Valve’s history – including Valve’s own 2023 Half-Life making-of documentary – despite being so heavily involved with the company during its first few years. Harrington attributes this partly to her consciously stepping back to avoid interfering in her husband’s partnership with Gabe Newell, and partly to “bro culture” and sexist practices in the tech biz at large. Here’s that part in full:
As I look back on the huge success Valve has become, I’m proud of what the team accomplished. I’m also proud of the work I did while recognizing that my biggest contributions to Valve’s business went largely unnoticed and unrecognized within the industry. Part of that was due to the bro culture of the software business, part of it was that I receded to support my husband in a partnership where he was effectively the lesser partner, and part of it was that women, especially in tech, often seem to disappear when the story gets told.
I was hugely disappointed when Valve released a video in 2023 about the creation of Half-Life where one of the people interviewed, Karen Laur, a wonderfully talented texture artist, talked about the isolating experience of being a woman at Valve and essentially said that the only other woman during her tenure there was an office manager. I understood why she felt as she did, but the senior Valve team knows better. Watching the video, I felt like my place in Valve’s history had been completely erased.
I know that 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 said to me, “you were a founding partner” and in hindsight, I agree. From the beginning, I invested time, treasure and industry expertise to make the company a huge success.
And it is.
Harrington has done a variety of things since leaving Valve in 2000, from getting into whale conservation to a job at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She and Mike Harrington broke up and divorced in 2016. The full post is worth a read. As it happens, I’ve recently been trawling back through the ancient annals of Rock Paper Shotgun and learning about the site’s formative early interactions with Valve, while thinking about RPS’s future under Ian Games of the Ian Games Network. It’s useful to get some perspective on one of today’s weather-makers from the other side of the aisle.
Belated update: I should have mentioned that while Nic first covered Harrington’s blog in the Sunday Papers, it was Graham who suggested writing this piece. Thanks Graham!