Page 16: Gabe Comes Clean

Game release dates slip all the time. In fact, it's hard to think of a cutting-edge, genre-defining game that didn't have its release date moved back at least once. Even the original Half-Life shipped a year later than first projected. So why did the fan community whip itself into such a frenzy over the Half-Life 2 delay? It boiled down to this: The fans weren't upset that the game was delayed, they were upset over the way the delay was handled by Valve. In the weeks following the delay announcement, Valve wouldn't say anything to explain the delay. Indeed, until now, Gabe Newell has never publicly commented on the release-date fiasco.

Gabe Newell finally comes out of hiding to discuss the missed release dates on the project.

But he wants to set the record straight--to explain to the fans why Valve did what it did. It's not, however, an easy thing for him to do. Ask him about the debacle and his first explanation is utterly unsatisfying. "I was just dumb," he says bluntly. So you ask him again. This time he delivers a highly technical and emotionally distant answer: "I made the decisions I had to make based on the problems that were apparent and the questions that needed to be answered."

But finally, after much prodding, Newell begins to explain why Valve seemingly misled the public for months. First, he wants everyone to know that those initial September 30 promises haunt him to this day. "Listen, I feel absolutely terrible about the date fiasco," he explains. Then he lists every possible adjective of regret he can conjure: "I feel totally guilty and embarrassed and ashamed and humiliated about what happened."

So what did happen? As Newell and the team have explained, by July it was obvious that Half-Life 2 would not be finished in time for a September 30 release. So why was Valve still telling the public in late August that the game was on schedule? "We were paralyzed," Newell says. "We knew we weren't going to make the date we promised, and that was going to be a huge fiasco and really embarrassing. But we didn't have a new date to give people either." In other words, Newell didn't want to announce the delay until he had a new official date to announce. It's that simple. "So I decided we should just stay quiet," he says.

Still, there's a difference between staying quiet and confirming a ship date that you know to be incorrect. Newell says that, in retrospect, he may have made the wrong decision on this front. At the time, however, he didn't want to announce the delay until he had something better to tell the fans. "I didn't want to go to 'when it's done' or announce 17 different dates over the next few months," he says.

So by mid-summer he was in an awkward situation: He had dug himself into a hole by loudly proclaiming the September 30 ship date. Now he knew he was going to miss that date. So what did he do? Like people sometimes do in an embarrassing situation, he stalled. He thought that by saying, "The game's still on schedule," he could quickly move on to other questions in interviews and not have to confront the slippage. But as September 30 approached, Valve didn't have a new date, and Newell finally had to fess up about the delay.

Looking back on those months, would Newell change anything about how he handled the situation? He says yes. "If I learned anything, it's just that we should be more open with the community--to tell them what we know and don't know," he admits. Indeed, no one asked Valve to promise the game on a specific date. That was Newell's choice. And it's a choice he now regrets. "Yeah," he says with a chuckle. "In retrospect I probably should have just said, 'When it's done.'"