Valve’s DRM was inspired by an exec’s nephew, who ‘used a $500 check I’d sent him for school expenses and bought himself a CD-ROM replicator… he sent me a lovely thank you note’

One of this year’s most interesting GDC talks was delivered by Monica Harrington, a founding member of Valve and the company’s first chief marketing officer, who went over her history with the company that brought us Half-Life and Steam.

There’s so much in Harrington’s career and memories to pick out, but a notable anecdote which PC Gamer was also able to follow-up on involves when, in the company’s earliest years, Harrington gave her nephew some money: and then found out what he’d done with it.

“At the time consumer-level piracy was just becoming a real issue,” said Harrington during her talk. “My own nephew had just used a $500 check I’d sent him for school expenses and bought himself a CD-ROM replicator, so he sent me a lovely thank you note essentially saying how happy he was to copy and share games with his friends.

“I knew he wasn’t a bad kid, but there’d been this generational shift, plus the new replicator technology. All of that put our entire business model at risk.”

Harrington was more on the business and marketing side at Valve and at the time most PC titles, including Half-Life, were distributed as CD-ROMs. Consoles like PlayStation had their own proprietary spins on the format that incorporated copy protection, but PC had no equivalent.

“Because of gamers like my nephew, we implemented an authentication scheme,” said Harrington. “Customers had to validate and register their copy with Valve directly. Soon gamers were flooding message boards, and they were saying, ‘The game doesn’t work.’

“And Mike [Harrington, Valve co-founder] stressed out and calls everyone he can find who’s complained. It turns out none of them had actually bought the game. So it turned out the authentication system was working really well.”

Speaking to PC Gamer’s Ted Litchfield after her talk, Harrington adds “it’s funny because Mike and I remember it differently. Certainly in my mind, once I realized that [about my nephew], I was like we need an authentication system.

“So that’s how I remember it: Mike thinks that we were going to do it anyway. But I was certainly talking to everybody about it and extremely worked up about it,” laughs Harrington. “Your initial reaction was, you know, saying to my nephew ‘what are you thinking?’ But what I realized is, honestly, he saw nothing wrong with it.

“He was 19 years old. He wasn’t thinking about things like companies, business models or anything like that. He wasn’t thinking about intellectual property. He later apologized profoundly, and I said, ‘Oh my God, you have no idea how valuable that was.'”

Harrington’s nephew had arguably already paid his penance and, while allowing that two people have different recollections of exactly why Valve prioritised DRM in the early days, can be seen as one of the first dominos falling in the creation of how most people now play PC games (through Steam, with Valve’s DRM).

“That is how I remember it! And that’s how I thought about it for 25 years,” ends Harrington. “And then after I told the story, Mike commented specifically about the authentication scheme, and I just realized well, certainly that’s how I thought about it. Oftentimes there are these multiple things going on… kind of in a zeitgeist.”

There’s much more to come from Harrington’s talk and interview on PC Gamer. An early highlight though is her recollection of getting the company out of a bad deal with Sierra, which involved Valve threatening to walk away from the gaming business entirely if it couldn’t regain the rights to Half-Life. “It wasn’t an idle threat,” says Harrington. “We weren’t going to take on all of the risk to make other people rich.”