Gabe Newell is one of the brilliant minds who developed and produced Half-Life. After thirteen years of working for Microsoft, he cashed out his stock and became a millionaire, allowing him to finance Valve Software, starting in 1996. Now that the industry, and the company, has grown into something more behemoth in nature, his direct role in game development has been marginalized. The General no longer has to be on the front lines, so to speak, and he makes executive decisions more often than he sits down to bang out baby Siddhartha in ASCii form with the other code monkeys.

Speaking truth to power.

As an unstoppable juggernaut of old school success, mostly because he has a genuine love for his fans, he can be viciously blunt about how major corporations operate without consequence. He recently critiqued Sony’s PS3 architecture, claiming that it was essentially a waste of time – he even outsourced development of a PS3 version of The Orange Box to Electronic Arts, which was delayed a month beyond the PC and 360 release. Despite working for Microsoft for most of his youth, however, he is by no means a fanboy, and also scolded Microsoft over the shoddiness of Windows Vista, and their idiotic idea to make Direct X 10 exclusive to that platform. He also hates Macs, consoles in general and non-open source operating systems. Just about the only thing he doesn’t hate is the Wii, saying that the fact that there was nothing being developed for the system was a major hole in Valve’s strategy, as it was the only console that deserved to exist due to its innovative and simple design, and gigantic install base around the world. That sort of straight talk from a man as powerful as he is – it’s just beautiful. He’s the John Wayne of the gaming industry.

Listening to the commentary tracks in The Orange Box, you get more and more a sense of how absolutely important his contribution to the industry was. With the average age of hardcore gamers now set at 35, and casual gamers approaching the average age of 40, the medium is being taken more and more seriously by the dinosaurs in old media, and with them, a larger and larger number of people in the world.

Fuck yeah.

If it wasn’t for forward thinking minds like Gabe Newell’s, video games would be seen as just another silly toy to keep the kids quiet. Now they’re quickly becoming a story telling device, not necessarily on par with books or films, but games definitely have new and interesting ways to invoke emotions in their audience. By giving us a degree of control over the action, and therefore, responsibility for it, game developers can spark flight or fight reactions far better than the goriest Eli Roth murder porn.

And now that artificial intelligence is advanced enough, not every game has to be a series of run and gun fights. Characters can react to what you do and the things you choose to say, making things like pursuing a romance subplot or a simple heated verbal confrontation a lot more satisfying to achieve, because, instead of just watching the action play out between characters as we would in a film or in a novel, we can either win, lose or have a result somewhere in between based on our actions, or at least, a level of freedom that allows for choice. This makes it easier for an audience to personally connect to and care about a fictional character.

Gabe Newell just don’t give a damn.

Now, I kinda trashed Half-Life 2 in my previous review, but that’s only because it’s an older game, and other developers have outshined it by learning from its mistakes. Again: Half-Life 2 was an excellent game for its time. That said, the beautiful brains at Valve will wow people again the next time they make a genuine new release, and with leadership like Gabe Newell, who is willing to openly say what problems exist and why they need to be fixed, there should be no doubt that Half-Life 3, or whatever they choose to pursue after Half-Life 2: Episode III is released, will be a top tier title.

Oh yeah. He also has a pretty boss folk band.