Don't let the fat fool you, GabeN is strong as an ox...
A few years ago, a Valve hire who had worked in special effects in Hollywood balked at wheeling his desk. The news reached Mr. Newell, who promptly picked up the desk himself and carried it to the new location, to the new employee’s embarrassment.
Gabe Newell video. In bed. Naked. Like John Lennon did. Make it happen people.In an interview in a conference room at Valve’s headquarters, Mr. Newell says that relatively few people have left Valve over the years. When they do, it’s often because a sick parent needs help. In one case, Valve moved an employee’s parents to the Seattle area, where one of them was also able to receive better cancer treatment.
“I get freaked out any time one person leaves,” says Mr. Newell, a bearded bear of a man with John Lennon-style glasses. “It seems like a bug in the system.”
Vintage pinball machines are arrayed around its corridors, and doors throughout its offices are etched with tributes to Team Fortress, a Valve game that features an evil virtual corporation that hates its customers and sells them inferior products.
“Mann Co. We sell products and get in fights,” reads the sign on the door in Valve’s lobby.
Valve has an eclectic work force. The company became interested in hiring one artist only after learning that his pastime was spray-painting graffiti art in Britain. It recently hired Leslie Redd, a school administrator, to lead an effort to use “Portal” to teach physics and other subjects in schools by offering a more engaging way to present ideas like escape velocity. Ms. Redd said that more than 2,000 teachers worldwide had registered to use the game in classes.
GabeN being filthy rich can hire a Greek economist just for the lulz.
That Greek better not mess with the hat economy like what his country did to their own economy...Mr. Newell hired Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist, after being impressed with Mr. Varoufakis’s personal blog, which he fills with commentary on the European financial crisis. Mr. Varoufakis, who had never heard of Valve and is not a gamer, is studying the workings of the virtual economies of Valve games, in which players can barter and sell items like hats and armor. He said he was drawn to the job partly by Valve’s “completely anti-authoritarian” culture that, to his surprise, seemed to be working.
GabeN telling females that money ain't no thang...
Valve also recruited Jeri Ellsworth, an inventor and self-taught chip designer, whose pinball machines decorate Valve’s offices. Ms. Ellsworth recently gave a tour of Valve’s hardware laboratory, proudly showing off 3-D printers, a laser cutter and other industrial tools used to cobble together hardware prototypes. While interviewing for the job, she said, she was dubious about Valve’s interest in hardware.
“At one point, I said a hardware lab could be very expensive, it could be like a million dollars,” she recalled. “Gabe said, ‘That’s it?’ ”
Valve's hardware project...
Now Valve executives think they may be onto the next big thing in games: wearable computing. The goggles I’m wearing — reminiscent of the ones Google recently unveiled to much hoopla — could unlock new game-playing opportunities. This technology could let players lose themselves inside a virtual reality and, eventually, blend games with their views of the physical world.
While Google’s glasses will display texts and video conferences, Valve has greater technical challenges to overcome with augmented-reality games. It has to figure out how to keep stable an image of a virtual object (say, a billboard) that is meant to be attached to a real-world object (the side of a building) while a player moves around. Otherwise, the illusion would be shattered.
He said Valve hadn’t decided whether it would make glasses itself. But its ultimate goal is to share its designs freely so other hardware companies can make glasses, too.
EA COO Peter Moore, hating...
Mr. Moore of Electronic Arts doubts that wearable-computing projects championed by the likes of Mr. Newell and Sergey Brin of Google will connect with the mainstream. “It’s appealing to them because they live in that outer fringe of I.Q. and money,” he says.
GabeN giving the finger to EA...SNAP!
Valve has been pursued over the years by Electronic Arts, which would very likely have valued Valve at well over $1 billion had the talks progressed that far, said two people with knowledge of the discussion who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were private.
Mr. Newell said that there was a better chance that Valve would “disintegrate,” its independent-minded workers scattering, than that it would ever be sold.
“It’s way more likely we would head in that direction than say, ‘Let’s find some giant company that wants to cash us out and wait two or three years to have our employment agreements terminate,’ ” he says.
