"I just seem to not get particularly agitated around risk."
In a recent documentary on the making of Half-Life 2, Gabe Newell has basically confirmed that he is the IRL Saxton Hale, and the kind of man that just isn’t all that fussed when faced with a shark attack. Aren’t we all?
One of the themes of the documentary is that, as Half-Life 2 was being developed, Valve was embroiled in what would become a huge and potentially existential legal fight with publisher Vivendi. Valve COO Scott Lynch explains that they’d filed a “narrow” suit over a dispute in their existing licensing terms, and won a few minor victories, before Vivendi decided to “go World War 3” in response.
Yes, we’ll get to the shark soon, but the necessary context for this tale is that Vivendi was allegedly out for blood, soon targeting Lynch and Newell (and their wives!) personally in addition to suing Valve.
“It’s not a legal strategy,” says Newell. “It’s basically trying to intimidate you, they’re saying ‘not only are we going to take all this money from the company but we’re going to bankrupt you as well.’
“Publishers in the industry at that time were used to being able to bully developers, right? And so this was as much about an assertion of power as much as it was optimizing for a financial outcome.”
Lynch says there came a point where “if we want to keep going” Newell had to put his house on the market, and Newell himself says “I was pretty close to going personally bankrupt: We went all in, there was no money left.”
Now, it strikes me that trying to bully someone like Gabe Newell might be a bad idea. The man himself, telling the story from what looks like his $500 million superyacht, has another way of putting it.
Asked whether this was an anxious time for him, Newell demurs. “I don’t know, uh, there are certain things that I just… I’m kind of a weird person in a number of dimensions. I don’t really think ‘oh this is super scary’, like I don’t have an emotional response to it. I just say ‘well this is what we’re doing and we’ll see how it plays out.’
“So I don’t think it was super stressful to me, right, I mean it didn’t really bother me. I was diving in South Africa recently and a shark tried to bite me a couple of times, and the people around me were way more freaked out than I was. I was like ‘oh, a shark’s trying to bite me, I should get away from the shark’ whereas other people were having like [high-pitched voice] ‘oh, a shark! It’s trying to bite somebody!'”
Newell is at pains to point out that he doesn’t consider this to be anything to do with bravery, or indeed foolhardiness.
“I just think that’s how I’m wired,” says Newell. “I don’t think it’s anything that speaks to my character or anything, it’s like I just seem to not get particularly agitated around risk, which probably means I take on more risk at times than most sane people would. Which can be a positive or you can wreck a bunch of other peoples’ lives being in the neighborhood of your risk indifference.”
In other words: Vivendi could go swivel. And I’m not sure there’s a better comparison for standing up to bullyboy lawyer tactics than being unbothered by an actual honest-to-god shark trying to bite you.
One final touch is that Newell tells this story on a yacht, with a big model of a shark behind him. Was the shark in question zapped for its impertinence and stuffed as a trophy for the big man? Well if this was Saxton Hale, there would be no doubt.
Valve would eventually emerge triumphant from the Sierra lawsuit, much as I imagine Newell emerged triumphant from the sea, ending the ordeal in 2005 with a settlement that saw the publisher stop distributing Valve’s games, and all the licenses return. It’s a wild story though and, next to the shark, perhaps the most stunning cameo comes from an intern who could speak Korean and, arguably, changed the course of videogame history with what they found.
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