What would the world of video games be like without it?, Steam and everything that followed from Valve? The fact that we don't live in this reality is most likely due to an attentive intern who saved Gabe Newell and his company from extinction in the mid-2000s.
Valve versus Vivendi
On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2, Valve released a two-hour documentary about the development of the important single-player shooter.
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The documentary also sheds light on the legal dispute between Valve and publisher Vivendi from 2002 to 2004. The reason for this has long been known, but the documentary reveals the reason why Valve emerged as the winner from the process.
That's what the litigation was about
Vivendi owned the distribution rights for the physical version of Counter-Strike, but Valve found that the publisher also licensed the shooter to internet cafes in South Korea.
Since from Valve's point of view this licensing violated the distribution agreement, they filed a lawsuit. When it became apparent that Valve might win, Vivendi went on the attack.
"Vivendi decided on World War III," explains Valve's COO Scott Lynch as he addresses the issue in the documentaryFlood of counterclaimsremembered. Vivendi tried to bleed Valve financially by dragging out the process, explains Valve's lawyer at the time, Karl Quackenbush.
The tactic seemed to work, as Gabe Newell says of the situation at Valve at the time: “The company was on the verge of bankruptcy. I was on the verge of personal bankruptcy - we were fully invested, there was no money left.
According to Lynch, Newell wantedeven sell his housein order to be able to hold out a little longer. But this is where Andrew enters the scene.
The invisible hero
In the course of the process, Vivendi handed overMillions of pages of documentsabout their activities in South Korea - everything, of coursein Korean.
A summer intern who only appears in the documentaryAndrewHowever, he comes from South Korea and even studied the language in college.
In the mountains of files, Andrew found a sentence in an email in which a Korean Vivendi employee told a superiorDestruction of documentsin connection with the Valve lawsuit.
So, according to Valve attorney Quakenbush, Andrew found the one line that ultimately led to a victory for Valve because it proved that Vivendi had destroyed evidence.
Later fame
As in the following Reddit post, the unnamed intern is celebrated as a hero of the "modern PC gaming industry."
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“A bronze statue should be built in honor of this guy,” he sayslxlcecilxl.Puncaker-1456as well as many other users on the Reddit post, with over 90,000 upvotes, appropriately quote a sentence from G-Man from the first moments of Half-Life 2:
“The right man in the wrong place can make a big difference in the world.”
But from Valve's perspective, Andrew was of course in the right place and at the right time. Who knows what the world of PC gaming would be like today if it hadn't been for this one attentive intern.
