Valve
Steam was launched twenty-two years ago, in 2003. But before that, its creator, Gabe Newell, had some other pretty interesting ideas in mind, which are not related to software or games. One of them is a social hub, according to Monica Harrington, one of Valve’s founders and the company’s first Chief Marketing Officer.
In an interview with PC Gamer at GDC, she recalled those ideas from over two decades ago, around 1998 to the early 2000s.
“One of them that just struck me—because this was not in a games context at all—an interactive social hub … I’m trying to remember some of the conversations we had at that time, but he was not talking about, like the community that exists on Steam or anything like that,” she said.
During that timeframe, many of the social apps that changed the lives of our generation started to appear: Myspace launched in 2003, followed by Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2006, Tumblr in 2007, and Instagram in 2010.
Apparently, their vision that the Internet could be an “incredibly social place” was quite advanced at that time, because people “weren’t thinking about the psychology and the social aspects of it.”
“Where Gabe’s mind was going [was] about expanding that social element, but not in a gaming context … I think it probably wouldn’t have looked anything like Facebook or what happened, but yeah.”
But that idea was abandoned and never came to life. Valve’s effort has evolved into a beloved PC gaming platform with user-friendly policies and features, and over 40 million players played on the platform simultaneously. The creator co-founded Starfish in 2022, a neural interface company that is working on brain-computer solutions.
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