On October 10, 2007, Valve released perhaps the biggest offering in gaming history: Orange Box, a Half-Life 2 compendium with both episodes, the long-awaited Team Fortress 2, and the unknown Portal. OK, Half-Life 2 was a few years senior (Episode 2 was modern), but every game in this bundle is a timeless game, and for the price of one retail game, you get it all.
At that time, retail sales were still vital to Valve: Steam had been around for several years, but at the time of its release, The Orange Box was focused on box sales. Which naturally made the box itself a very vital part of the overall deal and… well, that’s the one aspect where Orange Box fell flat. The final product was a strange three-sided presentation of all three games, which have different aesthetics, and a bunch of text telling you what was inside the box.
Fortunately for Valve, the content was so unique that the ugly cover didn’t matter much, but The Orange Box ended up here after an initial chatter that came from a completely different direction. In fact, it was so different that it caused a minor rebellion.
“I don’t usually discuss non-public matters at Valve” says former Valve writer Chet Faliszek”, “ but that person is no longer there and it was the funniest thing for me and a great example of how Valve is dysfunctional but works well.
“Half-Life 2: Episode 1 comes out and it doesn’t set the world on fire, everything’s fine. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 we are working on is the beginning of TF2, Portal.” Faliszek chuckles, recalling how certain corners of the Internet particularly viewed Portal: “Go back and look at the early days, before Orange Box came out, like, ‘They’re going to post this student project, it’s going to be bullshit.’ It’s crazy. We already knew then, “Oh, this is something special, you’re going to eat these words.”
I imagine it as sort of Valve’s variation on The Beatles, better known as the White Album, which came in a plain white cover with the band’s name embossed in petite font. But I guess the difference is that the Beatles in 1968 didn’t have to worry about whether their modern album would sell at retail. Either way, Valve employees’ opposition to the idea grew.
“There was also the White Box, the Black Box too, it was very confusing,” says Faliszek. “But it was so stately and so beautiful, and we were all like, ‘this is stupid, this is just stupid,’ and these old people were throwing it out and, oh my God, they were making fun of this idea, this game box… and it seems like nothing else but…
“Everyone who has been working and crunching, this is our relief valve. I’m using a few puns here, our way of blowing off steam and getting it out of our system. That box… man, I wish I had one of those, any of them with that artwork. I would love to see it again because it makes me laugh. People’s hearts were in the right place, they were trying something, you know, you tell yourself that, but then it meets reality and the first testers of anything, there are always other Valve people… and it was destroyed.”
Faliszek admits that the place Valve ultimately found itself in wasn’t ideal, but “the Orange Box is not a good box because it’s an impossible problem to solve.” This is a valid point, although he adds that the company learned from the problems that caused the company here, and shortly thereafter did a much better job of selling the Left 4 Dead concept along with box art.
Oh, and as for the name, well, that’s how Valve works. “It’s an Orange Box because Valve has always used the color orange in the Half-Life series,” says Faliszek. “I’m a big fan of the color orange, so I really liked it.” But now you know why it didn’t come in a white box.
