Monica Harrington isn’t one of Valve’s official co-founders, but she was heavily involved in its founding and early success—she worked as a marketing manager at Microsoft during the day, in charge of its games division, while helping her partner, Mike Harrington, and Gabe Newell launch the Half-Life studio. In a lengthy post on Mediocre – which Nic has already touched on in recent Sunday papers, but I think deserves a separate article – Harrington takes us on a journey through those first, stimulating days.
Among other things, Harrington discusses how she and her husband put their own money into Valve, and how she walked the tough line between using her Microsoft experience to shape Valve’s approach to Half-Life without developing an actual conflict of interest. When the line became insurmountable, she left Microsoft, becoming Valve’s chief marketing officer from 1996 to 2000.
There are plenty of intriguing recollections—how Valve and Sierra fell out over Half-Life’s post-launch marketing, and how concerns about CD burners led to an authentication scheme that inadvertently gave Valve a direct line to its first players. Harrington also regales us with the marketing landscape of the industry in the ’90s, and the balance of power between developers, publishers, press, pirates, and gamers, comparing it to music and film.
There are insights into the development of Half-Life—what it looked like after its triumphant first showing at E3 compared to how it was shaping up internally—and, to a lesser extent, Team Fortress. But I think the most compelling part is Harrington’s account of the proposal she made shortly after Half-Life’s launch to create a digital games store and social platform in partnership with… Amazon. If that had gone all the way, the history of the industry might have been very different. Here’s the full excerpt:
In a nine-page document, I proposed that Valve and Amazon join forces to create a modern online entertainment platform. Over the course of four years, I scaled the business opportunity to $500 million. The idea was to create a platform built for the medium that would connect users in a sticky, immersive entertainment experience, with digital and offline content sales. I wanted Amazon’s financial backing as a way to gain first-mover advantage over Microsoft and Electronic Arts, then the major players in PC gaming. I didn’t see a role for Sierra. If we were forced to, we wouldn’t make any modern games ourselves, and instead we would team up with third-party developers to distribute content that wasn’t subject to the 85% publishing fee. At the time, I saw this as an act of rebellion against the time-honored publishing vigorous, where independent developers took huge risks and gigantic publishing houses reaped the rewards.
According to Harrington, Amazon offered to buy a minority stake in Valve a few weeks later. There’s clearly a Steam skeleton to this proposal, though Harrington clearly came up with it primarily to get a valuation of Valve to assist herself and her partner when they eventually sell their stake in the company to Newell.
Sadly, Harrington’s motivation for writing this post is partly that she’s been omitted from Valve’s history—including Valve’s 2023 documentary on the making of Half-Life —despite being so heavily involved in the company in its first few years. Harrington attributes this partly to a conscious withdrawal to avoid interfering with her husband’s partnership with Gabe Newell, and partly to “crony culture” and sexist practices in the broader tech business. Here’s the piece in its entirety:
When I look back on Valve’s incredible success, I’m proud of what the team has accomplished. I’m also proud of the work I’ve done, while also realizing that my greatest contributions to Valve have largely gone unnoticed and unrecognized in the industry. Part of that was the camaraderie of the software business, part of it was stepping back to support my husband in a partnership where he was essentially a junior partner, and part of it was the fact that women, especially in tech, often seem to disappear when the story is told.
I was incredibly disappointed when Valve released a Half-Life origins video in 2023 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 basically stated that the only other woman during her tenure was the office manager. I understood why she felt that way, but Valve’s senior team knows better. Watching the video, I felt like my place in Valve history had been completely erased.
I know Valve wouldn’t have succeeded without Mike. It wouldn’t have succeeded without Gabe. And it wouldn’t have succeeded without me. A friend of mine who knows the whole story once told me, “you were a founding partner,” and in retrospect I agree. From the beginning, I invested time, money, and industry knowledge to make the company a huge success.
And so it is.
Harrington has done a lot of things since leaving Valve in 2000, from whale conservation to working at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She and Mike Harrington separated and divorced in 2016. It’s worth reading the entire post. As it happens, I’ve recently been going through the venerable annals of Rock Paper Shotgun and learning about the site’s formative early interactions with Valve, while also thinking about the future of the RPS under Ian Games’ Ian Games Network. It’s helpful to look at one of today’s weather creators from the other side of the aisle.
Late update: I should mention that while Nic first covered Harrington’s blog in the Sunday Papers, it was Graham who suggested writing this piece. Thanks Graham!
