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The story of Valve founder Gabe Newell telling Erik Wolpaw, key writer on studio-defining hits like Half-Life 2 and the Portal duology, not to resign but instead to focus on recovering from serious health complications has been making the rounds online. Tens of thousands of likes, upvotes, shares, and comments have been hurled at what certainly appears to be a very successful Reddit karma farm today, in case we needed more evidence that the internet loves Newell and Valve (until it briefly doesn't). But in the process, a key part of this old story has gotten lost, not to mention citation.
Newell and Wolpaw's interaction stems from Portal 2 - The Final Hours (or The Final Hours of Portal 2), a digital book by The Game Awards host and former game journalist Geoff Keighley. No, really, after 15 years it's still on Steam for $2, and its developer and publisher are both listed as Keighley. It has also been widely archived online.
The new-again viral post puts the story this way: "In 2004, Valve writer Erik Wolpaw was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and was preparing to resign. Instead, Gabe Newell told Wolpaw that his new job description is to 'get better,' and provided him with extended leave with full pay."
In his book (pages 32 and 33), Keighley shares a 2004 account from Wolpaw, who confided in fellow Valve veteran Chet Faliszek about his declining health. Around the end of November, Wolpaw and Faliszek, both new to Valve at the time, secretly agreed to give working at the company a 30-day trial. If they didn't like what they saw, they'd leave and get back to the lives they'd uprooted to make Valve's offer work. Even at this point, Wolpaw "wasn't feeling well."
Come Christmas Eve, Wolpaw really wasn't feeling well. "He thought he might be dying," Keighley wrote. He dragged himself to the emergency room and spent Christmas in the hospital to recover from ulcerative colitis, a chronic inflammatory bowel disease that can cause intermittent, but severe and painful ulcers in the large intestine, as well as bleeding from the colon.
Keighley wrote that Wolpaw "had lost more than half his blood and would require an immediate transfusion to stabilize his body," which reads to me like some degree of exaggeration given that Wolpaw arrived at the hospital alive.
Struggling with his health, Wolpaw told Faliszek that he'd have to speak to Newell and quit his job. But Newell "wouldn't have any of it," Keighley wrote. Instead, Newell told Wolpaw that, "Your job is to get better. That is your job description at Valve. So go home to your wife and come back when you are better."
After this meeting with Newell, Wolpaw spoke to Faliszek about their 30-day trial, saying, "Well, I guess we know where we're working for the rest of our lives." Faliszek did end up leaving Valve, but seems to hold a lot of respect for the company and the people there to this day. Wolpaw still occasionally talks about the goings-on at Valve.
Later in the book (page 201), it's noted that Wolpaw "successfully completed a series of three surgeries that dramatically improved his health," allowing him to return to the writing shop at Valve. On Portal 2, during a time when the game's writing was seriously lagging behind other disciplines in production, this led to him confronting a tidal wave of feedback complaining that central Portal antagonist GLaDOS was "too mean" and even "extreme". At one point, Wolpaw made a large note on the whiteboard at his desk for everyone to see: "Act 2 - Less 'Mean' GLaDOS".
