Valve Nearly Went Bankrupt Before Launching Half-Life 2 and Steam; Company Saved by a Summer Intern In a recent documentary about the creation of Half-Life 2, an interesting story emerged about how Valve nearly went bankrupt before they could launch the game and digital storefront Steam, due to a legal battle with Vivendi. The company was saved by an employee hired for a summer internship (basically an intern), who is also largely responsible for the world of PC gaming as we know it today.The problems began when Sierra, the original publisher of Half-Life, was acquired by the French conglomerate Vivendi. Vivendi began distributing Counter-Strike in South Korean internet cafes, which Valve did not like because it was not part of the original contract with Sierra. For Valve, however, this was a minor issue.According to Scott Lynch, Valves COO, the company simply wanted recognition that the original agreement had been violated. Vivendi, however, did not budge, and Valve filed a lawsuit, asking only for recognition of its rights and reimbursement of legal fees. In response, Lynch said, Vivendi decided to start World War 3. What happened was a huge pile of counter-complaints that came in, explained Valve counsel Karl Quackenbush. Everything from canceling the 2001 deal, to getting ownership of the Half-Life IP, to preventing us from doing Steam.Valve was a successful development studio at the time, but not one with unlimited funds. Vivendi had terrifying firepower in comparison and was bloodthirsty, so much so that it explicitly wanted to bankrupt Valve and destroy Lynch and Newell.Failure was indeed a near-miss, according to Newell, because there was no more money, a fact confirmed by Lynch, who explained: Gabe had basically run out of cash and was like, Should I put the house up for sale? I said, Yeah, I think its time to put the house up for sale if were going to continue.'But then came the lucky break, with the hiring of Andrew for a summer internship. Vivendi had submitted millions of pages of Korean-language documents to the cybercafe lawsuit, hoping to be saved by the volume and the language barrier. Andrew was a native Korean speaker and had a degree in the language. He was the one who found the classic needle in the haystack: in an email, a Korean Vivendi executive mentioned destroying documents related to the Valve case.He had essentially been ordered by his superiors to make them disappear. With such evidence in hand, Valve turned the tables in court, extracting a very favorable settlement and keeping all its intellectual property.In short, without Andrews intervention, Valves fate would have been uncertain and, after the launch of Half-Life 2, the company would have risked disappearing. Andrew saved a good part of the video game world, then, and allowed us to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2.(Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and readability.)More MP1st Reading:Thanks, newSillssa! Tags:Half-Life 2SteamValve Sam Shahbaz