Monica Harrington was the hidden figure of Valve in its critical early years | The DeanBeat

It’s funny how people slip out of history.

The story of Valve’s formation in its critical early years and how it made the original Half-Life is an inspiring one. I was one of the people who attempted to capture the story of the storytelling shooter game, but my relatively short story in 1998 for the Wall Street Journal left a key contact out.

So did a 25th anniversary documentary about the making of Half-Life, where one early woman employee was quoted for feeling she was alone in that environment, with no acknowledgement of Monica’s role. (Harrington later discovered that she really was a hidden figure as she did much of her early work at nights and on weekends, so other employees didn’t witness what she did). And then-game journalist Geoff Keighley mentioned this “hidden figure” three times in a very long story about the making of Half-Life.

But it’s never really been told in a full way, at least according to the hidden figure: Monica Harrington, one of the cofounders of Valve who was the company’s first marketing leader. She was married to Valve cofounder Mike Harrington, who started the company with Gabe Newell. They were all Microsoft veterans, but Monica stayed at Microsoft at the outset while the two men went to work on Valve. She wasn’t a strict cofounder in the legal sense, as Gabe and Mike’s names were on the legal documents.

Eventually, when she ran into possible conflicts of interest, Monica quit her lucrative job in marketing at Microsoft in the spring of 1998 and joined Valve full-time.

“I knew there was a window to help make Valve succeed,” she said.

She and her husband worked for a time helping to get Half-Life, a story-based shooter game that turned into a massive hit, out the door. This is the story from her point of view as told to GamesBeat and at a session at the Game Developers Conference this week.

This story is based on the script that Monica followed for her talk as well as an exclusive interview with GamesBeat. Monica really was a hidden figure as she often wasn’t physically present at Valve while doing her work, but her impact on Valve was immeasurable.

The GDC session was pitched by Kate Edwards to the GDC advisory board, after Vlad Micu suggested finding Monica after she did a post on her reaction to the Valve documentary that left her out of the story. After Micu told her about it, Edwards went to the organizers of GDC and its advisory board.

“This is a story that really needs to be told. I mean this is an amazing story about a pretty influential company,” said Edwards in an interview with GamesBeat. “This is really compelling. There’s so many younger people they just have no perspective on this. We’re talking at events that happened before they were born, and yet they were highly influential to the game industry. It’s a really important story to tell.”

Micu added, “This was the equivalent of the NASA story on “Hidden Figures,” about women mathematicians who were left out of the history of the space program. There’s a myth that leaders like Newell did everything, and in a way, Monica said she contributed to that myth. But the truth was an ensemble of people made Valve happen.

To that notion, Valve issued a statement about Monica, “The early years of Valve placed enormous trust with every single member of the team, Monica was no exception. Getting a company off the ground requires a lot of hard work, smart people having the freedom to make decisions quickly, and some amount of luck. Valve wouldn’t be the company it is today without any of the individuals that shaped it along its path.”

As for being forgotten for her contribution and a kind of hidden figure, Monica said in an interview, “I really felt strongly about it when the when the Valve [documentary] came out, and again, I thought it was beautifully done, and it was a wonderful story of how the product came together from from a product standpoint, right? And my point was I was surprised and unhappy that a video from Valve would be released. That essentially said that the only other woman besides Karen Laur was an office manager, and so I really wrote that medium article from my heart. That’s not what happened. I think it was an oversight.”

She added, “It’s just that when you look back on it years later, and you’re telling the story about the business part and what was really important, I want to get it straight. Because here I am, I’m almost 65 years old, and I think that part of the reason I know what I did, and I know that it contributed hugely to Valve’s success, and frankly, I want other women and other people in the industry to know that they too can be part of building major successes.”

In her own opening to her talk, Monica set a scene.

“It’s the mid-90s, and I’m in a new job at Microsoft overseeing PR for Microsoft’s newish Consumer Division. I’d previously worked as a product manager on Microsoft Word and later took on a new role overseeing all of applications and developer tools PR for the company,” she said. “We’d recently launched the version of Microsoft Office that would result — sorry to Microsoft’s antitrust lawyers — in total domination over our old rivals WordPerfect and Lotus.”

She added, “I’d overseen the reviews process, and we’d won every major review in all of the magazines that were then pivotal to our market share goals. Winning major product reviews for Office was the number one marketing priority for Microsoft at the time, we’d done it beautifully, and I was riding high.”

When she moved to the Microsoft Consumer Division, her new job was to help position Microsoft as much more than a successful business software company.

“We were going after the consumer market. At the time, the division’s strategy was to release dozens of consumer-targeted software titles, including games, on CD ROMs. There were a lot of marketing programs to develop and execute,” Monica said. “One of my suggestions was that we take three very different products on the road and introduce them to reviewers as the New Microsoft Consumer Division. We’d recently hired a senior executive from the games industry who would lead Microsoft’s games effort, and he brought with him a senior product manager.”

They had somehow acquired a new game that seemed very exciting and which had been demoed broadly internally. At the time, Monica knew almost nothing about the games industry. She was expecting good news from the press tour.

“My boss, who’d gone on the tour, calls me early from the road. ‘Monica, I’m here at – and then he mentioned one of the top computing publications – and they tell me this game I’m showing is actually just a Windows Port of an already released DOS game. WTF? What am I supposed to do here?’”

So she got off the phone and called the Microsoft Exec who’d hired the industry veteran who’d somehow procured the game and asked, ‘Did you know that this new game we’re launching as Microsoft’s Next Big Game is essentially just a Windows port of a DOS-based game?’

Silence.

“THAT was my introduction to the PC Games business,” Monica said.

The state of Microsoft

Microsoft wasn’t much of a player in the games world then and wouldn’t become a player until Ed Fries, who was a talented dev manager overseeing the Excel team, was put in charge. Fries was a gamer who loved games and had even created one of his own. Fries would ultimately be one of the people overseeing the games for the Xbox for Microsoft.

“Before then, Microsoft’s best-selling game wasn’t even a game at all. It was Flight Sim – which as pilots know – and I’m now an instrument-rated pilot so I get it now in a way I didn’t truly grasp then – is essentially a fun and useful tool for flight enthusiasts,” she said. “Flight Sim is great, but it’s not a game in any traditional sense.”

During her first year in the Consumer division, Monica was super busy, mostly focusing on extending the Microsoft brand into the consumer space. This involved hiring Microsoft’s first Consumer PR agency and working with various product teams on how to position their products for the consumer market. Ultimately, she ended up winning the Consumer Division’s Market Maker award for “having the biggest impact on the bottom line.”

A year or so after she won that award, Microsoft announced a new paid leave policy for long-time employees. This was late spring of 1996. Her husband Mike Harrington and she decided to take leave at the same time. Mike’s project, Microsoft Bob 2, had recently been canceled, and Mike was thinking about working on games at Microsoft. Before the leave, Mike and their friend Gabe had some conversations with the Microsoft Games Group, but nothing seemed to be moving forward. Monica stayed out of it completely.

The beginnings of Valve

Soon Mike Harrington turned his focus to starting a game company. He and Gabe Newell decided to start working on it together, and one of their first steps was visiting id to get a license to build their game on top of the Quake engine. The meeting went well, in large part because Mike Abrash was a good friend of Mike’s, and soon Mike and Gabe were catapulted into real company and game development. Since Mike had invested his time in training Abrash at Microsoft, that time paid off with good well talking to id.

“My dreams of a couple of months travel with my husband evaporated, which meant I spent most of my precious leave time in the midst of a hugely messy remodel,” Monica said. “One day, Mike came home and told me that he and Gabe had signed a five-year lease.”

How id helped Valve

Here, she digressed to talk about how Valve’s deal with id actually happened. A few years before Valve, Mike Harrington had gotten an uncharacteristically “meh” review at Microsoft.

“When I asked him what happened, he said his boss said that he was spending too much of his time helping out someone else – a new recruit at Microsoft,” Monica said. “That recruit was Mike Abrash, who was one of Mike’s programming idols and, at the time, one of the top five graphics programmers in the world. When Mike Abrash later left Microsoft, his exit interview was with Bill Gates, who was still trying to figure out how to make this brilliant developer stay and not take a job with a little game company in Texas called id.”

Now strictly from a Microsoft stockholder point of view, Mike Harrington made a brilliant decision to support Mike Abrash and the fact that he took a small personal hit for it shows some of the deficiencies of a standardized HR review system. Over time, Mike Abrash became a good friend to both Monica and Mike, and so of course when Abrash left Microsoft to join id, it was an easy leap to think that Valve might want to build their game on top of the Quake engine and that Mike Abrash might be willing to lend a hand to Mike Harrington to help make that happen.

Walking the ethical line while learning a new business

When Monica returned to Microsoft from leave, she started work on a new assignment overseeing the marketing for a portfolio of products that included Microsoft Games. She had her work cut out for her. She was excited to be working again with Ed Fries, who had just come on board after leading the Excel dev team, but the game product manager who had joined Microsoft with the senior industry hire she mentioned earlier now worked for her and it wasn’t a good fit.

“I was especially unhappy that this person thought being a strong leader meant bullying other marketing staff, several of them long-time colleagues of mine, who came to me appalled at how they were being treated. At one point, this games PM turned all of the unhappiness and fury on me and said, ‘You have no idea what you’re doing. You couldn’t market a game if your life depended on it,’” Monica said.

At that time, that product manager may have been right. But still.

“In not too much time, that PM was out the door, which meant I was doing much of the hands-on marketing for the games group,” Monica said. “Soon, because of Ed Fries, the culture in the games group started to change. I told Ed that my husband Mike was going to be working with Gabe Newell to create a new game company, and that I’d be helping them while I did my day job on behalf of his business. If he or anyone else had a problem with that, I’d need a new assignment.”

At the time, Monica was doing intensive homework to understand the PC games business. Monica discovered that more than 5,000 titles were released each year, and only about ten of them made any real money. The other 4990+ titles mostly disappeared into the ether, typically after about ten minutes on retail game shelves.

Valve’s early days

So there she was, pretty new in her job when Gabe and Mike decided to pitch their first game to Microsoft, and its new leadership, specifically Ed Fries and Stuart Moulder. Again, she stayed out of it, trying to keep some separation between her work and personal life.

“What I heard much, much later – actually just a few months ago, directly from Ed and from Stuart, was that they were being pitched almost every day by indie game developers who wanted to do a story-driven game. There was no real reason to believe Valve could make a success of it, even if they did have a license to jumpstart their project on the back of id’s game engine,” Monica said.

While Microsoft wasn’t interested in signing a deal with Gabe and Mike, Sierra’s Ken Williams leapt at the chance, and after their first meeting, he was ready to sign a deal. Sierra would front $1 million.

“I didn’t review the Valve/Sierra contract at the time – trying to keep some ethical space between my day job and my after-hours project, but I understood the essential terms which involved Sierra advancing Valve a million dollars toward the development of a game Sierra would publish,” Monica said.

She also heard once a joke where a Microsoft person laughed and said, “Oh my god. They think they can build a game because they have access to a game engine.” These moments tested hear notion of ethics and divided loyalties.

So Gabe and Mike went to work continuing to build out their team and move forward on their first project while Monica continued my work overseeing games marketing at Microsoft. Both Gabe and Mike deserve huge credit for the creativity and resolve they applied to hiring the team, Monica said.

Valve’s hiring process was pretty unique. Basically, it amounted to: “If you’ve done something we find interesting, we intend to hunt you down, and convince you to work here,” she said.

Mike worked on one key recruit – who’s still at Valve – for more than a year. Steve Bond was delivering pizza in Georgia when Gabe reached out offering to pay his way to Seattle, which he first thought was an elaborate prank. Dario Casali was an industry-famous designer from the UK. Yahn Bernier was a patent attorney who’d created developer tools in his spare time. In fact, when he and his new fiancé came to Mike’s and my newly remodeled house for dinner, she had only just found out that Yahn was a game developer in his spare time. It gave her pause.

“We were asking the two of them – both attorneys with a great future in Atlanta – to take a risk and move to Washington State where Yahn would work for a new startup in an industry where almost every small studio failed,” Monica said.

Some other key hires were closer to home. Ken Birdwell had worked with Gabe at Microsoft. Another key hire was Mike’s high school friend and best man at our wedding Kelly Bailey, who had joined the company after having been a Product Unit Manager at Microsoft. Kelly was super talented – and ultimately would do all of the sounds and music on Half-Life and win an industry-wide individual achievement award for Best Music in a Game, Monica said.

“I worked as intensively as I always worked at Microsoft, but evenings and weekends were pretty much all Valve, all the time Mike and Gabe’s original idea was to build a B-level game – something they could knock out fairly quickly while building the team,” Monica said. “I led them through the business analysis that showed that was not going to work. Valve’s first game had to be a hit. And even on that short list, there was a huge difference between being Number 1 and being Number 5. Valve needed to go all out or hang it up.”

The Game of the Year idea

Monica told Gabe that she thought the only way Valve could really break through in the retail channel, which is how PC Games were sold in those days, was if it won some of the key Game of the Year honors. She knew that a box stickered with Game of the Year could get some attention at retail, which then was the black hole for most game companies.

Gabe and Monica met to talk through what that really meant.

Valve needed to build a game that game industry influencers thought was worthy of Game of the Year honors, and the team knew that the most influential people in the game space were game developers themselves.

She said, “For it to be worthy of Game of the Year, I really thought that it was important for Valve, given the amount of spending that Valve was doing, and the ambitions that we had — we should do something really important and big. The fact is that any game takes a lot of work, but the rewards aren’t as big” for those who aren’t ambitious.

They made up a list of key requirements: Breakthrough technology, an innovative approach to gameplay, and an overall approach to product development that would earn the support of game industry insiders. In this sense, it felt comparable to the music industry where the musicians all groove on each other’s work. A first step was making sure the game had key technical elements that would set it apart – which we felt wouldn’t be too big a leap for such a talented team that was already exploring new ideas in skeletal animation, AI, and physics.

“I met with the developers working on those key areas, wrote up backgrounders on each topic, and arranged for the developers to present at GDC. I’d also put together the team bios and wrote up all of the material for Valve’s website, which was becoming an important recruitment and marketing tool,” Monica said.

Preparing for a global game launch

Meanwhile at Microsoft, Monica was working on plans for the rollout of the first major game under Fries’ management. They were planning a worldwide launch, which meant releasing it simultaneously in all of the markets where Microsoft had a presence. She had spent months overseeing marketing plans – a great new Games PM – was then working for Monica, and they were excited. By then, Monica thought she knew how to launch a hit game. She just needed a game that was worthy of being a hit.

“But over time, I started to realize I wasn’t hearing good things about Microsoft’s upcoming game. I had a pretty good relationship with the technical teams then, and I’d often stroll the halls, trying to figure out what they were really thinking that wasn’t reflected in some of the regular reports I was reading,” Monica said. “Bottom line is I wasn’t getting a good vibe about the game. Furthermore, in my previous role, I’d been the one who first warned Bill Gates about the backlash that was building just after the launch of Microsoft Bob, and I knew Microsoft’s Consumer Division couldn’t afford to lay another egg.”

(For those of you who don’t know, Microsoft Bob was a very early foray into the whole idea of helper agents and the industry press hated it and felt compelled to dig its grave and bury it within a few weeks of launch. Which they did.)

“The backlash against Bob was just horrible, and it had significant consequences. For Microsoft to do a big, splashy intro of a game the people internally weren’t excited about just didn’t make any sense,” Monica said.

Microsoft still believed in the concept and built a team to develop and ship Bob 2. At one point, Monica was asked by one of her long-time colleagues in the channel marketing division to attend a meeting in Vegas with the VP who oversaw software sales for one of the huge consumer reseller chains– think Walmart or Costco – and that VP said, “If you force us to take Bob 2, we will not sell Windows 95. Take that to your bosses.” Which she did. Soon after, Bob 2 was cancelled.

Going back to the Microsoft game, they were preparing for a worldwide launch. Monica arranged a quick private meeting with Fries, and essentially said, ‘I’m not hearing good things about our game. Are you sure?’ Within a short time, Fries made the decision to quietly pull that game, and they quietly cancelled all of the launch planning.

The Conflict Comes Home

Within a week of that decision, with no new major game on the near-term horizon, I was in a team meeting when one of the discussion items was whether to go to E3, the big show in Vegas. One of the arguments the team put forward was that Sierra, our big competitor, wouldn’t be there. Because of Valve’s deal, I knew that Sierra would be there and that Half-Life would be featured. It was a big dollar decision.

“I again spoke to Ed Fries and to the Microsoft Consumer Division’s VP about the potential conflict. I didn’t tell them Valve would be at E3…I just said I’m feeling compromised. They encouraged me to stay in my role,” she said.

“I had told [her boss] Pete, who was the VP of the consumer division, that I was going to help out Gabe and Mike,” Monica said. “And originally, my thinking was that I’m going to help [Valve] to get their game company started. And then Microsoft passed on [publishing Half-Life] and they did a deal with our biggest competitor,” said Monica. . It was clear I was going to help them. I felt like I was in a good spot to help Ed’s team do well.”

Microsoft knew that if they asked Monica not to work on the game, she would have to take a different position within Microsoft. And so it was just a struggle.

“There were things along the way that happened, like the whole discussion that we had about whether or not to go to E3. I’m in this room, and it was a seven figure decision at that point. And somebody who worked for me started making the case that we didn’t need to go because Sierra wasn’t going to be there. And I just thought. Oh, my God, I just know too much.”

Monica was grateful that Microsoft gave her freedom and flexibility and trusted her to be ethical.

Then, at E3, Valve’s Half-Life got a great reception and won Best Action Game honors – all based on small portions of the potential gameplay. Afterwards, one of the core developers came to Monica and told her that Gabe had promised some things they couldn’t possibly deliver. Ultimately, of course, that developer was wrong. Whatever magic Gabe promised was actually achievable, but the developers just didn’t know it yet.

After that show, she went back to Microsoft and insisted they move her. It was too great a conflict. She was having a hard time figuring out how to do her job in a way that was fair to Microsoft and to Valve.

” Very quickly I started in a new role completely unrelated to games. I loved working at Microsoft, and frankly, Mike and I needed my income stream and ongoing stock vesting to make it work for us personally,” Monica said.

Soon after, the Valve team was bringing gamers in to playtest some of the game elements. The feedback was good. Perfectly adequate, the kind of feedback that might make Mom proud, but which we all knew was a disaster. Valve needed a hit and the product as currently built was not on track to be a hit.

Uh-oh, trouble ahead

Soon, Gabe and Mike – with Monica’s support- made the very painful but completely necessary decision to essentially throw out the code base Valve had and start over. It was awful. Mike and Monica – who had nowhere near the resources that Gabe had as he’d started at Microsoft much earlier – realized that they couldn’t afford to front the costs for what had become a hugely expanded effort. And Sierra was out. They’d already fronted a million dollars and didn’t want to contribute more to the game’s development. So it was Gabe who decided to fund the development of Half-Life over what would become a year and a half-long process.

It was stressful, it was painful, but it was also weirdly fun and interesting, Monica said. Some days, she would go into the Valve office and find someone face down after a night of coding or design work in the playroom where the developers and designers were hanging out. The ship goal became Christmas of 1998.

“We didn’t tell anyone at the time that we essentially were starting over completely,” Monica said.

The development of Half-Life was wonderfully described in a video that Valve released about a year and a half ago. But missing was any perspective about what was happening behind-the-scenes from a business and marketing perspective. And that was starting to become REALLY interesting.

In early spring of 1998, Gabe said to Monica, “We need you full-time. When are you coming?”

Quitting Microsoft, joining Valve

So Monicawent to my bosses at Microsoft and told them she needed to leave. Her interview was with Pete Higgins, then senior VP of Microsoft’s Consumer Division. Higgins had also been in charge of Microsoft Office when she was running PR on behalf of the Apps Division. When Higgins said, “Is there anything we can say to convince you to stay?” Monica knew the answer was no.

“Valve needed me, and I needed to go. We were in deep, and the only way to dig our way out was to get all hands on board, full time. By late Spring of 1998, I officially joined Valve full-time. I’d not only given up my job, but also my stock options, including the major grant I’d gotten with the award I’d won a couple of years earlier,” Monica said.

The work to make Half-Life a hit needed to happen on a number of fronts.

“I was obsessively reading everything I could find about the early reaction to Half-Life and what was happening with other games on the horizon,” Monica said.

John Romero, who’d been a level designer at id, was the mainstream men’s press gaming god of the time.

“Every day it felt like I was reading about John’s upcoming game Daikatana. Ritual had a game called Sin that was also getting attention,” she said.

For the most part Half-Life’s development moved to stealth mode while the team tried to furiously catch up and surpass what had already been abandoned.

“Behind the scenes, Mike and I were feeling stressed, but we also knew it was important to appear stable,” Monica said.

People had house payments to make. Team members were having kids. It wasn’t a situation where communicating their own deep stress widely would be helpful.

More Marketing Strategies

One of the strategies for getting Half-Life broadly adopted was outreach to OEMs.

Monica said, “I remember being on one phone call with the marketing manager at Sierra and with a rep for one of the hardware OEMs, probably Nvidia which was making a name for itself in graphics card technology, and at the end of it, the marketing manager said ‘Who ARE you?’”

She understood that what he really meant was “How did Mike’s wife, who’s helping Valve out, know so much about marketing strategy and OEM marketing in particular?”

Of course, by then she knew a lot about OEM marketing strategy.

“A few years earlier, I’d been in a small, highly charged meeting with Intel’s legendary CEO Andy Grove where I’d seen firsthand what he valued and thought about,” she said. “Ambitious me thought it would be a great idea for Intel to highlight the advanced features of their upcoming chip with a customized version of Half-Life, optimized for their new chip.”

Of course she was also hoping for additional revenue and Intel’s marketing heft, which then was quite substantial. She had had some promising discussions, but ultimately that deal didn’t happen. Valve and Half-Life were too untested. At the time, she thought such a deal had a lot of upside for both Intel and Valve.

One of the things that happened as a consequence of all of those OEM discussions was that Sierra put together a “first chapter” look of the game for OEMs, which got leaked early – in the fall of 1998. At first, Mike and Monica were furious, mostly because they felt blind-sided and vulnerable about the timing. The great news was that the leaked first chapter quickly went viral and soon the internet messaging boards were blowing up about Day One, the first chapter in the Half-Life saga.

At some point, in the early fall of 1998, Monica knew the project was running perilously close to the Christmas 1998 deadlines, and she decided it needed an additional push at retail.

“So I reached out to Dean Takahashi, who was covering games for the WSJ, and who still covers the game industry today, and tried to sell him on the idea that he should take this small startup called Valve seriously,” she said. “Over a series of weeks, I updated Dean on all of the positive happenings about Half-Life. The goal was to get one high-profile story in the WSJ so the retailer honchos would lean on their staff to say, “What’s with this new game Half-Life….I keep reading about it. What are we doing to keep it in stock?” Because quite honestly, that’s a huge part of how things worked at that time. Real-time data was simply not available, Monica said.

The Human Side of Startup Life

In the final weeks before Half-Life shipped in 1998, it became clear that we needed one of our developers, Robin Walker, who’d been part of a brilliant acquisition/hiring deal that Gabe had concocted, to work furiously over a several week period.

The problem was that Robin’s fiancé Maggie needed to be married to Robin by the end of the year or she’d need to move back to Australia. Robin and Maggie were a lovely couple and they really wanted to get married. But Valve needed Robin to keep writing code to make our make-or-break holiday deadline– so Mike and Monica offered to throw a “first” wedding at our house so they didn’t need to make their Vegas trip.

Monica assumed that Robin and Maggie would have a separate wedding for family afterwards, so she told them to just show up. She would handle everything. One of the best Valve parties they had was that wedding – complete with Elvis impersonator, beautiful catering, a minister ordained by the Internet, and the entire Valve team and their families.

“When I talked to Robin about the wedding years later, he said he and Maggie, who have two daughters, never did have another wedding since they’d had so much fun at the first one,” Monica said.

“One tough part of that lovely party day was when a relatively new IT employee who’d been let go weeks earlier for doing nothing but playing games showed up at the party with his wife several weeks after being told he needed to go,” Monica said. “She clearly had no idea that her husband was no longer working at Valve. Her presence was a poignant reminder of how much the families depended on Valve and the decisions we made.”

In the final weeks of Half-Life’s development, Mike was working furiously on some of the game’s final code. For Mike and Monica, it was stressful and tense because they knew exactly what was at stake. The rest of the team had mostly finished their work. Finally, in November, the game went to duplication and they had a ship party where Mike broke open a pinata filled with candy to everyone’s cheers. After that day, it was eerily quiet, almost like purgatory. In those days, it still took a while to get boxes out to retail and start getting feedback on how the game was actually selling.

At the time, consumer-level piracy was just becoming a real issue. Monica’s nephew had just used a $500 check she had sent him for school expenses to buy a CD replicator, and being the nice guy he was, he sent a her a lovely thank you note saying how happy he was to be able to copy and share games with his friends.

“I knew he wasn’t a bad kid – he just saw the world differently – a generational change, combined with new technology put our entire business model at risk,” Monica said.

Because of gamers like Monica’s nephew, Valve implemented an authentication scheme where customers had to validate and register their copy with Valve directly. Soon, gamers were flooding the message boards saying that the game didn’t work. It was enormously stressful. For a few days, Mike called everyone he could find who complained about the authentication – and NONE of them had actually bought the game. Which meant the authentication system was working extremely well. It felt like a near-death experience.

Then, in early December, as game industry reviews started coming in, the Wall St. Journal article appeared with the title “Valve’s Storytelling Game is a Hit.”

The Wall St. Journal Weighs In

Monica sent that story to her contacts in the retail channel, suggesting they hit the reorder button repeatedly. Within short order, Valve started to rack up all of the major Game of the Year awards. Over time, Valve’s Half-Life would win more than 50 total. It had never happened before.

Monica had purchased the website www.gameoftheyear.com more than a year earlier, and Valve quickly launched it with the best of what the industry was saying about the game.

“I have to say that some of the gamer press we got in those days was simply outstanding. Geoff Keighley worked for PC Gamer, and he really Got It,” Monica said. “His stories about the behind-the-scenes-workings of Valve and the building of Half-Life really stand up over time. And of course, the PC Gamer review of Half-Life helped make Half-Life’s meteoric rise possible.”

My story in the Wall Street Journal ran during the critical time period, and Monica was able to show it to others who may have been on the fence about stocking the game. Sales data would not be available for months, and by that time it was too late to get it on shelves. This was how journalists were a critical part of the game ecosystem, back in the day.

Monica said, “So much of the work that we did was about winning the respect of journalists and of the people who evaluated these products on an ongoing basis within games. It was the game developers who really had the most important input and insight, and they were the people we knew that journalists were going to be talking to.”

The PC Gamer Verdict

Christmas was pretty lowkey. The team was tired and anxious. They still really didn’t have a great sense of how the game was performing at retail, but all of the online feedback was great.

Then, sometime in mid-January, Sierra’s business team reached out with some news.

The Valve team was expecting it to be a “Great start, now let’s get going” meeting where we talked about how to quickly sticker boxes at retail with the Game-of-the-Year messaging, relaunch the game with updated packaging, and gear up on sustaining marketing and momentum programs.

“Instead Gabe and I were stunned to hear Sierra tell us that they were pulling marketing from Half-Life to focus on other Sierra titles,” Monica said.

In our interview, Monica said, “They said they were going to now start marketing other games, and essentially, Half-Live was going on the back burner. That was the essence of what they told us. And so it was my language where I said, ‘Oh, my God, they have a launch and leave’ strategy.”

She said in the talk, “The problem was we hadn’t come close to making our money back, and with that move we never would. Half-Life would quietly die. I felt stunned. In the Microsoft world where I’d earned my chops, reviews were always the start of a much longer marketing process.”

And she said, “We were at their mercy because Valve didn’t have the direct channel relationships as a company. I mean, there’s only so much we could do. We still had potential to be really big and the word of mouth was still building,” she said. “Half-Life was in the game stores, but it hadn’t broken through to that uber level where it’s going to be carried way more broadly.”

The Office Wars remembered

Monica overseen the PR and reviews process for products ranging from Microsoft Word, Excel and Office to Developer Tools. At the time, winning reviews for Office was the number one marketing priority for the company.

“We spent an enormous amount of time and energy on figuring out how best to win reviews because for so many of the businesses Microsoft was in, reviews were crucial to gaining corporate acceptance and IT support. In order for Microsoft to unseat the industry leaders, IT managers needed convincing review wins before they’d even consider convincing their bosses to change corporate standards,” she said.

Typically, this involved bringing press in very early in the development cycle so that they could hear first-hand from the developers what problems they were trying to solve and why. The central idea was to share the development journey with them so they understood the tradeoffs the team made and so they could ask their most difficult questions when those decisions weren’t etched in steel or shipped code.

With Microsoft Office, the journey to win reviews was a three-year process. Victory was not a foregone conclusion. Microsoft faced tough competition in Lotus, Borland, and WordPerfect. Ultimately, Microsoft Office won all of the key office suite reviews.

In the consumer business, the reviews environment was a bit different.

“We knew that great reviews could do for games what great movie or music reviews could do for movies or albums. Great reviews couldn’t ensure a hit, but they could make enough people notice to give your product a real shot. And they were key to a broader strategy of amplifying word of mouth and getting shelf space in retail to support Half-Life sales,” Monica said. “We’d brought press inside over months to share what was happening behind the scenes as Half-Life was built, they’d talked to developers and designers and seen firsthand some of the tradeoffs the team made. And we did all of this knowing that they’d be talking with their own insiders – which included avid gamers and especially, other game developers.”

She added, “We’d done all of this work to position Half-Life to be worthy of winning reviews, and now that it had all gone so well, Sierra was, less than two months later, saying ‘Thanks, but we’re good.’”

A showdown with Sierra

In those few seconds, when Sierra told us about their plans to abandon Half-Life, Monica said she felt like someone had slapped her across the face.

“Very quickly, I told the Sierra team that not only were they not going to pull marketing dollars from Half-Life, but that they were going to relaunch it in a Game of the Year Box,” she said. “With steel in my voice, I said “And if you don’t, we are going to tell the game development industry that is starting to fall in love with Valve exactly how screwed up Sierra is.”

By the end of the meeting, she was shaking, and she was scared.

“I left the office that day not knowing what Sierra would do. Everything was on the line. Mike wasn’t in that meeting and I had to tell him that Sierra was poised to abandon our game,” Monica said.

Soon though, Sierra relented, and began making plans to launch a new Game of the Year edition. When it launched, Half-Life rocketed back up the best-seller lists. The Game of the Year edition was a huge success.

Actual Game of the Year

It wasn’t just a box, it was a marketing juggernaut, supported with ads, PR, and a major retail push.

“At some point, my mom, who never used a computer in her life, proudly pointed to the Game of the Year box in Costco and said, ‘That’s my kids’ game.’ – which I’m sure left the Costco associate profoundly befuddled,” Monica said.

While the Game of the Year marketing was ongoing, Monica was working with Gabe on developer marketing plans – which felt like a natural to a Microsoft team that had worked closely with developers over many years.

The idea of course, was to encourage the mod industry for Half-Life, where developers and hobbyists could build modifications on top of our game. One of the most important mods of that era was Team Fortress, which was created by the Australian team Robin Walker and John Cook to run on top of Quake. Now that Robin and John were part of the Valve team, the next iteration, called Team Fortress Classic, would run on top of Half-Life. Team Fortress Classic would be named Best Action Game and Best Online Game at E3 in 1999.

In the online world, Valve had a huge advantage. Because of the authentication scheme, users were registering with Valve directly, which meant Valve had a direct channel to all of our own customers.

At the time, Monica’s two main jobs were to continue building momentum for Half-Life and to continue separating Valve’s brand identity from Sierra.

“We didn’t want anyone to think of Half-Life as a Sierra game, or Valve as a Sierra studio,” Monica said. “After Sierra’s Launch and Leave strategy for Half-Life was unveiled, I didn’t trust them to be Valve’s long-term partner. I was also starting to think through the broader implications of the big advantage we were building.”

Because of the authentication scheme – users were registering with Valve directly, which meant Valve was building a direct pipeline to all of its own customers.

Mike makes a decision

Monica was in this frame of mind when Mike told her that he wanted to leave Valve. Mike really needed a break, and he decided that he wanted to put all of his focus for his next life chapter on boating. By late spring of 1999, he was rarely in the office.

“While I understood Mike’s decision, I was also panicked. I’d given up my highly paid job, we still hadn’t seen any money from Half-Life’s sales, and I didn’t know how the future would unfold, especially given the tense relationship between the partners and the growing inequality of their partner relationship,” Monica said. “I hadn’t read the agreement between Sierra and Valve until after Half-Life shipped, and while I thought I knew many of the essential terms, there were a few things I didn’t know. Chief among them was that Sierra had the rights to two more games with no better terms for Valve even though we’d produced a huge hit.”

Valve would fund all but $1 million of the costs of developing a game, and Sierra would retain all of the IP rights and pay Valve a 15% royalty. It felt insane.

“I could see red ink flowing for years,” Monica said. “I knew that if Mike and I were to get anything out of our ownership position in Valve, the prospects for the company needed to be much much brighter. Plus, I felt a keen sense of responsibility for all of the people Valve had hired and recruited, which included one brilliant female texture artist (Karen Laur) and by then dozens of young men.”

Valve held and attended several parties, and it had celebrated Half-Life’s launch down in Mexico with the entire team, and many of the team members and their partners had become friends as well as colleagues.

A three-pronged approach

The first and easiest issue to tackle were the ongoing royalties we were paying to id. The Quake engine gave us an important head start and foundation, but moving forward it simply didn’t make sense to keep paying that royalty, especially since Valve had already modified so much of the code base.

Valve could build an engine on its own. That would take some time or Valve could essentially come to agreement with id on a capped royalty. With Gabe’s OK, Monica approached id to suggest a deal that might work for both and they quickly agreed.

“Next, I knew we needed to tackle the IP issue. Again, with Gabe’s OK, I met with Valve’s attorney to plan out a strategy for regaining the IP for Half-Life and all future games,” Monica said. “Essentially, my bargaining position was that Valve and Sierra would either rework that contract or Gabe and Mike and the team would pivot to something else entirely and Valve would never ship another game.”

It wasn’t an idle threat. Valve wasn’t going to take on all of the risk to make other people rich.

“Besides, I knew Gabe had interesting ideas about software that had nothing to do with games,” she said.

Monica said the third thing she felt she needed to do was work on a new direction for the company that built on the reputation and talent for games, but that wasn’t dependent on the Half-Life IP.

“I was still unhappy about the lopsidedness of the Valve/Sierra deal,” she said. “In one of my chapters at Microsoft, I’d overseen the prelaunch marketing for Expedia, which involved scoping the business opportunity for a brand new category – the online travel market. I knew what it was like to stand in front of a white board and make outrageous assumptions and predictions about how fast an industry might move online and what the potential rewards might be.”

A bold new direction

Gabe and I both knew that the online games market had the potential to be much, much bigger than movies or television. With Gabe’s buy-in and approval, Monica moved forward to pitch a new online games opportunity to Amazon, which at the time was still known as an online book reseller.

“I’d been tracking Amazon for many years since a dear friend of mine had become its very first marketing director. She wasn’t there any longer, but I knew a lot about the company and thought it might have expansive business aspirations too,” Monica said.

She wanted the new business to be good for Valve and good for developers, with a much bigger share going to developers than the traditional 15%.

“So I wrote up a nine-page business and marketing plan, reviewed it with Gabe, and sent it over,” Monica said.

Soon, she had a response: “Let’s meet.”

At that time, Amazon had just moved into an imposing building that used to be a hospital just south of the I-90 exchange in Seattle.

Partner or go it alone?

When I arrived solo, I was soon ushered into a meeting with a very friendly, smiling young man who said, “You don’t recognize me, do you? You interviewed me years ago.”

I was racking my brain, but it didn’t sound good. If I interviewed him and he wasn’t working at Microsoft, it must mean I said No Hire.

Before my body could deflate entirely, he said, “Remember, you interviewed me for a spot in Consumer, and told me about this online book business…” and soon it clicked.

At one point, the Consumer Division was essentially in a no to low-hire mode when a small education-focused company implemented a company-wide layoff.

“I’d interviewed this guy shortly after that, and when I saw his resume, which was heavy on channel experience, I knew he wasn’t a fit for our division. But I saw something and so I suggested he check out this online bookstore where my friend worked,” Monica said. “Now, he sat before me as a VP at Amazon, and we had a great talk.”

Shortly after the meeting, a bottle of champagne arrived at Valve. Essentially Amazon was very interested in teaming up with Valve to create an entirely new business category that would upend the traditional games business. While working on Expedia, Monica had learned the potential of the online commerce market. That led her to think more broadly about the opportunity. She started thinking about the things that became Steam.

“I had scoped the opportunity within a few years at $500 million dollars annually, and predicted it very soon would be larger than the movie and TV industry combined,” Monica said.

Key to the plan was attracting other game developers and building an online community that was deeply engaged. The stickiness Valve be building toward was all about having fun with your friends on a new digital platform.

“Once they had the source code to the game engine, it’s like they were full steam ahead,” Monica said.

“When Valve moved into the whole Steam part of things, I think people think of that as happening way after Half-Life. But the fact is, the birth of all of that happened when Half-Life shipped. That means that the authentication scheme, which we did for a different reason, gave us the direct channel to our customers. That was really just unheard of, and that was all part of the broader changes that were going on in the industry,” Monica said.

“I absolutely talked with Gabe about this, and told him that I wanted to pitch Amazon. And what I was thinking about was, if we’re going to do something really ambitious, I knew that Mike and I didn’t have the personal funding to really move forward with a ambitious online initiative,” Monica said. “I thought that we could really do something if we partnered with Amazon, which at that time was really known as a book reseller. I wrote up those ideas and I sent them over to Amazon.”

It was Gabe who made the decision to move forward without outside funding. This was the business idea that would turn into Steam. It took a while, but Steam finally launched in 2003, a few years after the Harringtons left. At the time, the standard cut for a game developer was 15%, and the vast majority went to the publisher, who also shared it with the game platform owner. Under Steam, 70% went to the developer. Now Epic Games is pressuring the industry to go lower, setting royalties at 12% and 88% going to game developers.

“Shortly after Gabe made that decision, I knew that I too, needed to leave Valve. Mike had essentially already left the company, and the life he was envisioning for his next chapter had nothing to do with software or games. We were going boating,” Monica said.

Life after Valve

Mike and Monica sold their interest in Valve over time to move onto the next chapter of their lives, which involved skiing and snowboarding at Whistler, moving to the San Juan islands, and boating to Alaska. It was up to the Valve team to continue the legal negotiations and build out Valve’s online platform. In was around the end of 1999 when they left. The reason: Mike wanted to go boating.

For several years, Monica stayed engaged with Valve, and when Valve officially regained the Half-Life IP, they sent Mike and me a small little statuette that said “Welcome home Gordon.” In 2012, she worked with the Valve team on a story about Valve’s company culture that appeared in the New York Times.

In our interview, Monica said Valve did have a very competitive culture, and in hindsight she saw it as a “bro culture” where there wasn’t much diversity of people at the company, with very few women. Microsoft also had a very competitive culture, but that was viewed as a good thing, like they were part of a sports team. It was not about beating up the other guy, Monica said, but more about being the best you could be.

After a five-year boating and island hiatus, Monica went on to other adventures. In 2005, Patty Stonesifer, former SVP of Microsoft’s Consumer Division, reached out to suggest she take on a new job at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, managing the central communications team and any media that involved Bill and Melinda. During Monica’s two years there, Bill and Melinda were named TIME Persons of the Year and Warren Buffett pledged the bulk of his enormous fortune to the foundation’s work.

She left the foundation to help launch Picnik, a startup also cofounded by Mike Harrington that went on to become the world’s most popular photo editor before its sale to Google in 2010. And after that, she ran for and won nonpartisan public office on San Juan Island.

Several years ago, Mike and Monica separated and then divorced, and she moved to Bend, Oregon, to begin a whole new set of adventures, which are still underway.

Reflections

When Valve released a video just over a year ago about the Making of Half-Life, which overall was beautifully done, Monica was taken aback when the lone woman in the video said that the only other woman working at Valve during her tenure there was an office manager.

She and Monica had a brief exchange via Facebook, where she clarified she was talking about her first year at the company, because she didn’t know how deep my involvement with the company was during her first year.

Monica thought about it. During her first year and a half of Valve, she had a full-time job at Microsoft and her involvement with Valve was handled over email and nights and weekends, but it was SUPER intense and as her old boss Bill Gates might say, Super High Bandwidth.

“And when Valve needed me, I quit my own high-powered job to make it succeed,” Monica said.

Today Valve is a super successful company, and Valve and many of the people we hired are doing fabulously well.

“I’m doing fine. A few years ago, I joined Gabe and some of the other Valve folks for a tour of Japan on Gabe’s yacht. I talked to developer Ken Birdwell recently about his awesome philanthropy. I’ve cheered Valve folks on when they’re giving back or pursuing their life’s passions,” Monica said.

After Valve, Monica became a fierce advocate on behalf of women, including serving on the board of the Center for Reproductive Rights.

“What I know today is that Valve, as you know it, wouldn’t have happened without me. It wouldn’t have happened without Gabe. And it wouldn’t have happened without Mike. I’m proud of everything the founding team did,” she said.

During and after her time at Valve, she thought a lot of people who weren’t on the inside thought of her as “Mike Harrington’s wife, who sometimes helped out like a good wife should.”

For many years, only her closest Microsoft girlfriends, most of them powerhouses in their own right, had any idea of all that she had done for Valve. She receded into the background because it was easier. The common narrative at the time was all about brilliant male founders, and not only didn’t she challenge the prevailing narrative but she contributed to it.

“I played the role of company cheerleader well,” she said. “The reason any of this matters is not about me. I’m almost 65 years old. I’m not looking for another big job in the industry. But to me, story and truth telling matters. Throughout my career in tech, I’ve known many brilliant women who played key roles in making some key businesses succeed. And in many cases, their contributions largely disappeared as the mythmaking played out. In reality, Valve’s story is one of an ensemble effort that included smart men AND women.”

It wasn’t until Valve released the video where she felt erased from the company’s history that she decided to write up her experiences about Valve on Medium, which is how she came to the attention of Vlad Micu, Kate Edwards, and the GDC advisory council, which invited her to speak.

“I am proud of what the Valve team did and I know that companies do better when they welcome the contributions of people from many different perspectives. As a woman, and especially as a journalism graduate who wandered into high tech more than 40 years ago, I have always had a different perspective,” Monica said.

As for as getting credit for the work, Monica said she was happy to hear the thunderous applause at the end of her talk. It was a reminder that when it comes to making games, it’s not the work of one person. It takes a village.