Co-founder & Managing Director · Valve Corporation · b. 1962 · 1990s
Left Microsoft because Doom convinced him his employer was missing the point of the internet — then built Half-Life, and then built the store that swallowed PC gaming.
Gabe Newell was born on 3 November 1962, attended Harvard in the early 1980s, and dropped out to join Microsoft, where he worked on early versions of Windows. He also led the Windows 95 port of Doom — an assignment that turned out to be the hinge of his career. Watching id Software distribute a game over the internet, and outperform Microsoft's entire distribution apparatus in the process, convinced Newell that his employer was missing the opportunity the internet represented. He has said he was willing to put his money where his mouth was. In 1996 he left Microsoft with Mike Harrington to found Valve, funding the development of Half-Life (1998) themselves. Harrington sold his stake and departed in 2000, leaving Newell in control of a company that would go on to produce Counter-Strike, Portal, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead and Dota. But the decisive act was Steam, launched in 2003 and initially loathed — a mandatory client that players had to install to play games they had already bought. It became the dominant force in PC games distribution, controlling over half the digital PC market by 2011, and it is where most of Valve's revenue now comes from. Newell reached that position by acting on a conclusion he had drawn from a shareware shooter more than a decade earlier.