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Comment by BirAdam | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact, while Trower was the manager who got Windows moving, it was Gabe Newell who served as the lead developer of Windows versions 1, 2, and 3. Win95 was the first version he wasn’t really involved with. By that time, he was working on porting Doom to Windows.

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Sorry, are we saying Valve Gabe Newell? That's blowing my mind from both timeline and area perspective.

He notably worked at Microsoft before founding Valve.

I believe he’s confirmed that his time at Microsoft both gave him the money and the desire to make Valve and Steam.

The desire to switch to games was, reputedly, seeing Doom outsell Windows 3.x with none of the marketing budget (with Windows having huge one).

Then not getting enough support in trying to drum up better support for gaming at Microsoft, IIRC

Gabe and Carmack are probably above Amelio and below Jobs and Gates in impact on the world - but probably above them all in impact when measured on a “desired” axis - people sought out Doom in a way that even the iPhone wasn’t.

Yup, where do you think he got the money to start Valve? :-)

Yep, I still do love this little factoid

It's a fact, though, not a factoid.

Huh, valid correction, thank you, never realised that those weren't synonyms

Yeah, I don't know why this never popped on my radar. I read Abrash books long ago, MS employees blog too, its history around the creation of UIs (xerox/apple and all that), the OS/2 era .. and I never saw his name (or maybe selective vision tricked me).

Very fun fact

Half Life 3.11 confirmed.

Half Life for Workgroups

Copilot Life

Half Life/386

Clippy is the final boss

That's for Portal 3.

I think he must have sworn off any v3 after MS-DOSv3.

I love this kind of lore. Thanks for enhancing

He's an awesome guy!

If you play any Valve games with commentary he prefaces them with an invitation to email him directly with comments or questions. He's said that he doesn't have time to answer every one but he tries to read them all.

For a multi-yacht owning, industry driving billionaire, he does seem pretty cool.

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