A former Valve executive has recalled the time when Half-Life's original publisher almost abandoned the game and pulled marketing funds, nearly leaving the hugely influential shooter as a footnote in history.
Ex-Valve CMO Monica Harrington, in a recent panel from the Game Developer's Conference, once again remembered an era where the company wasn't a monolithic force in PC gaming - it was instead a fresh-faced studio fighting to make its debut game about escaping an alien-infested research facility, Half-Life, a success.
"Christmas was pretty low-key," Harrington says of the months after its initial launch. "The team was tired and anxious, and we still 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 news. We were expecting it to be a 'hey, great start, now let's get going with that meeting where we talk about how quickly a sticker box could retail with GOTY messaging, relaunching the game with updated packaging."
Instead, Harrington and Valve co-founder Gabe Newell "were stunned to hear" that Sierra was planning to pull "all marketing from Half-Life to focus on other Sierra titles." The publisher's strategy was to "'launch or leave,'" which was disastrous news for Valve since it "hadn't come close to making back our money" and had no other games to lean on. "Half-Life would quietly die. I felt stunned."
"When Sierra told us about their plans to abandon Half-Life, I felt like someone had slapped me across the face," Harrington continues before detailing the bold move she made to save Half-Life and the company as a whole. "Very quickly, I told Sierra that not only were they not going to pull marketing dollars from Half-Life, they were going to relaunch it in a GOTY box. And I said 'if you don't, we're going to tell the game development industry, which is starting to fall in love with Valve, exactly how screwed up Sierra is'. By the end of the meeting, I was shaking. This was make or break for the company. I left the office that day not knowing what Sierra would do. Everything was on the line[...] Soon though, Sierra relented and began making plans to launch a new GOTY edition, and when it launched, Half-Life rocketed back up the best-seller list, and the GOTY was a huge success."
The rest is history. Valve soon became one of the most renowned developers in the world, quickly pumping out all-time greats like Half-Life 2, Team Fortress, and Portal back-to-back, before eventually creating a PC storefront monopoly with Steam. But it would have all looked very different if Harrington hadn't been so ballsy.
If you'd like to read about the history-making meeting in more detail, Harrington actually went into the whole ordeal in a blog post from last summer.
Valve literally gives Half-Life away now, but 27 years ago it was carefully crushing its angry pirates: "None of them had actually bought the game"
