Page 19: Picking up the Pieces
Gabe was mad. No, he was more than mad. He was furious with whoever perpetrated this crime against Valve. It was one thing for the fans to make fun of him online. But as soon as he saw that his designers, artists, and programmers were worrying about the future, well, that's when he really went off. For years Newell had worked to make Valve a safe creative haven for the best and brightest in the business. He was the video game equivalent of the X-Men's Professor X, running his own school for the gifted. While the code theft might have meant millions in lost revenue for Valve, Newell was much more concerned about the morale and well-being of his team.
So he put on a brave face. He called everyone into the conference room and displayed remarkable sangfroid. "You know guys, every id release has leaked early and it's been no big deal,'" he told the disillusioned team in an attempt to comfort them. Then he tried to turn lemons into lemonade. "We've made it through all this," he told the team. "How much worse can it get?"
Keeping his team in high spirits was only part of the problem. Newell also had to figure out just who had compromised Valve's security and stolen the game off the network one byte at a time. He called the FBI to start an investigation. He also kicked off his own investigation by posting a message to fans online--yes, those very same fans that were furious over the missed release date. "Ever have one of those weeks?" he asked in a forum post. Newell went on to appeal to the Half-Life community for help in tracking down the hacker.
Newell also had to keep his team focused on the task at hand: finishing Half-Life 2, a game that was now costing Valve more than $1 million a month to develop. While there was no way the game could be finished in 2003, Newell wanted to make sure the project didn't lose momentum. "We lost a fair amount of time because of the theft," he says. But that lost time wasn't necessarily because the game had to be reprogrammed. It was more due to the team losing focus for a number of weeks. "It was sort of like running this race and you fall down," he says. "You eventually get back up and probably run just as fast as you did before. But for a while you are stunned and just staring around, wondering what just happened."
The 2003 holiday season was supposed to be a time of great celebration and relaxation for Valve. Half-Life 2 was supposed to be done and on store shelves. But now the employees would return in January and face 20-hour workdays with no clear sense of when the game would be finished. "By Christmas there were still a lot of empty spots in the game and really low density to the levels," Laidlaw says.
Would 2004 be Half-Life 2's year? Newell, now the eternal pessimist, couldn't see any way the game would be done before the summertime. But he didn't want to say anything to the public just yet. One thing was for sure: He didn't want a repeat of the September 30 fiasco.
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