In an interesting little nugget of computing and gaming history, it turns out that none other than Gabe Newell — then a bigwig member of Microsoft’s Windows team — was one of the reasons that Windows became a viable gaming platform, and probably why Windows went on to completely monopolize the consumer computing market for almost two decades. We raise this point now, of course, as Valve will soon be faced with making its own SteamOS and Steam Box viable for gaming.

For 13 years through to the mid-’90s, Gabe Newell was “producer on the first three releases of Windows” at Microsoft. At the time, according to Newell, “it was common wisdom that it wasn’t possible to write a good game in Windows because of, well, unnamed technical reasons.” In 1993 Doom was released, and according to Newell it became the number one most-used program in the entire US, ahead of Windows. When you consider that Id Software was a company of just 12 people, and Microsoft already had hundreds of developers working on Windows, this was quite an achievement.

Newell was disappointed that this game ran in MS-DOS, rather than Windows, and thus tasked some of his engineers to create a Windows port. According to an interview back in 2007, he then apparently called John Carmack at Id Software to say that Microsoft would do the port for free, and thus the port was eventually released as Doom 95. It is possible that the success of Doom, and Doom 95, showed developers that it was indeed possible to write top-notch games on Windows. It’s also worth noting that WinG, the precursor to DirectX, was maturing at the same time — perhaps it was a combination of factors that finally made Windows the de facto gaming platform.

Either way, the parallels between Newell’s Doom 95 efforts and his work to make Linux a viable gaming platform are startling. There was a misconception that Windows couldn’t run good games, much in the same way that popular consensus doesn’t believe that Linux is capable of running serioug ames. He used an existing, massively successful game to prove what Windows could do — and now he plans to do the same, saying that AAA developers are porting their games to SteamOS (and thus Linux). He worked on the Doom port for free, believing that proving Windows’ viability was more important than money — likewise, SteamOS will be free and open.

“People don’t realize how critical games are in driving consumer purchasing behavior,” Newell said in a 2012 interview with All Things D. Newell probably believed that porting Doom to Windows would have a disproportionately positive effect on the Windows ecosystem, and now he’s trying to do the same thing to Linux with SteamOS and the Steam Box.

At this point, with with a rock-solid kernel, mature graphics drivers from Nvidia and Intel, and excellent performance from OpenGL, there are no technological roadblocks that prevent Linux from becoming a viable gaming platform. Now we just need someone to prove it with the release of an AAA Linux game — something like Grand Theft Auto 5 or Bioshock: Infinite. Maybe Newell will repeat the same trick, with Valve doing the porting work for free. Maybe it’s enough to have the seemingly invulnerable, unbeatable, and indefatigable heft of Valve backstopping SteamOS — if Valve believes it can work, then there are surely other games developers out there that will follow suit. Or maybe Valve will release Half-Life 3 for Linux and SteamOS — that’d probably do the trick as well.

Now read: Could this be the year of the Linux desktop?