page_title: Gabe Newell
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Gabe Newell / Career
caption_attribution_description: Gabe Newell heading towards our Interview at the EA-Community Team Lounge. Newell is founder and public face of Valve Software. FYI: The green shirt is Doug Lombardi.
context_page_description: Gabe Logan Newell, nicknamed Gaben, is an American businessman, the co-founder and president of the video game developer and digital distribution company Valve. Educated at Davis Senior High School and attending Harvard University from 1980 until dropping out in 1983, Newell joined Microsoft, where he, over the course of thirteen years, helped create the first iterations of the Microsoft Windows operating system. Together with Mike Harrington, he left Microsoft in 1996 to found Valve.
context_section_description: Newell was born in Colorado on November 3, 1962, later attending Davis Senior High School in Davis, California. Following that, he attended Harvard University from 1980 until 1983, but dropped out before graduating to work for the American technology company Microsoft. Newell spent the next thirteen years working there, where he served as a producer of the first three releases of their Windows operating systems. Newell later stated that he learned more during his first three months at Microsoft than he ever did at Harvard, which was one of the primary reasons why he had dropped out. Inspired by Michael Abrash, who left Microsoft to work on the computer game Quake at id Software, Newell and another Microsoft employee, Mike Harrington, left the company to found Valve in 1996. Newell and Harrington used their money to fund Valve through the development of Half-Life and the GoldSrc game engine. During production on Half-Life 2, he spent several months focusing on the Steam project.
  In 2007, Newell openly expressed his displeasure over developing his software for gaming consoles, particularly the PlayStation 3. In regard to the system, Newell was once quoted as claiming that developing processes for the console in general was "a waste of everybody's time" and "a disaster on many levels ... I'd say, even at this late date, they should just cancel it and do a do-over. Just say, 'This was a horrible disaster and we're sorry and we're going to stop selling this and stop trying to convince people to develop for it'." Nevertheless, at Electronic Entertainment Expo in 2010, Newell appeared on stage at Sony's keynote; while acknowledging his past outspoken comments on console development, he discussed the open nature of Sony's PlayStation 3 platform, and announced Portal 2 for the console, remarking that with Steamworks support it would be the best version for any console. Newell has also criticized the Xbox Live service, referring to it as "a train wreck". He was also critical of Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system, calling it a "catastrophe" and "a threat" to the open nature of PC gaming.
caption: Newell in August 2007
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