Gabe Newell

A slightly more contemporary entry to classy gents today: Gabe Newell. If you play videogames at all there’s a pretty good chance you know how much of a hero this man is to hordes of gamers across the world. For the uninitiated, here’s a quick primer. After dropping out of Harvard he became one of the first “Microsoft millionaires”, following which he left to form Valve Corporation, where he still works today. Initial efforts went on developing a game called Half-Life. You might know this game as one of the greatest videogames of all time, selling 9.3m copies as at 2008. From here the company’s record has been exemplary, releasing a hatful of stellar titles including the sequels to Half Life (up to Half Life 2, Episode 2… Liverpool 0 – shamelessly stolen from Yahtzee), the Counter Strike, Team Fortess, Left 4 Dead, and Portal franchises.

Now this record, while definitely writing him into the videogame hall of fame does not a classy gent make. His biggest contribution to worldwide decency was the program “Steam”. You hear people banging on about cloud computing all the time now as if it’s the new best thing since sliced bread. This program was released in 2003 (I know full cloud support was added later). People reading this will probably see the description of the service it provides and say “yeah, that sounds like how computer games should work”. You’d be exactly right.

A platform that lets you play your games whenever you want, on whatever computer you have access to, that will port across your save games, settings, friend lists, and so forth automatically. In stark contrast to the policies of Apple and EA Sports, two major distribution networks for digital media whose goods still come riddled with restrictions on where/when you can play them, Steam by and large is (depressingly) still an example to the industry not the rule.

Besides his legacy of incredibly successful games, and managing to revolutionise the gaming industry at the same time Gabe Newell by all accounts is an incredibly decent chap. His email address was leaked a while ago and so he was obviously bombarded by fanboys and girls (and some non-fans) with mail. Rather than changing his address he just replied to them. Even today if you’ve got a question for him and you email – there’s a decent shot he’ll answer you – I wonder how many other billionaires would do the same.

This post is certainly a little lengthy so I’ll just leave you with an anecdote about how he treats his staff:

Erik Wolpaw, a writer at Valve fell ill in 2004. He knew he couldn’t fulfil his duties at work and made the choice to leave Valve. Erik tried to quit, Gabe refused to accept his resignation and said “Your job is to get better. That is your job description at Valve. So go home to your wife and come back when you are better.” On leaving Erik turned to fellow Valver Chet and said “Well, I guess we know where we’re working for the rest of our lives.” Erick went on to write Portal, and Gabe went on being a thoroughly classy gent.