'There's an alternate universe where Half-Life disappeared after release': Valve's first marketing strategist Monica Harrington says she helped navigate its way out of early disaster

Looking back on Valve's record of repeated hits and the fact that most of us are playing our PC games under Steam's monolithic shadow, it's tempting to think that this was the only way history could've gone. But according to Monica Harrington, Valve's chief marketing strategist in its early years and then wife of studio co-founder Mike Harrington, we only barely avoided a world where Half-Life left Valve in ruins, and we've got her work to thank for it.

I spoke to Harrington over email after reading «The Early Days of Valve from a Woman Inside,» a memoir she published on Medium in August detailing how she transitioned from managing a Microsoft marketing portfolio to working alongside her ex-husband and Gabe Newell from Valve's founding through Half-Life's release. (We've asked Newell for his perspective on these early Valve days, and will update this story if we hear back.) Harrington's recollections detail Valve's early struggles with publisher Sierra On-Line from the viewpoint of an overlooked figure in the studio's history, revealing how its mythologized successes were anything but guaranteed.

As Harrington tells it, Valve was in a precarious place in 1998. Half-Life's launch wasn't just Valve's first release—it was a matter of studio survival. While Half-Life's reveal demos were a hit at E3 1997, internal demos over the following summer were only producing lukewarm responses from playtesters. Meanwhile, the money that the Harringtons and Newell had invested in their fledgling studio had been swallowed by the ever-rising costs of game development, with Half-Life's production kept afloat by a loan Newell had taken against Valve's future profits.

«If Valve shipped the game we had, it would launch and quietly disappear, and all of the work we'd all done would account for nothing,» Harrington wrote on Medium. «All of the people we'd hired would lose their jobs, we'd lose the money we'd invested. It was a disaster.»

Knowing it was a life or death bet, Valve had made