That particular “B” game (a term that also refers to its quality) could have ruined Gabe Newell’s company, according to Valve co-founder and former marketing director.

Valve co-founder and former marketing director Monica Harrington participated in a roundtable discussion at the recent Game Developers Conference 2025 titled How Valve Became Valve: An Insider’s Account. According to Harrington, in the late 1990s Valve went on a headhunting spree to hire developers. One related idea was to work on another game alongside Half-Life, with the idea of releasing this unnamed project first, using the money to fund development of the studio’s flagship product…

“The original idea was to do what they called a B-title. It was just going to be a mediocre game, and the idea was that building that game would build the team. I told them, I walked them through the business analysis, and I said that’s just not going to work. If you do that, the company will fail. From the very beginning, we said you have to go all the way. It’s got to be in the top 10. I told Gabe Newell that I thought the only way Half-Life would really work was if it was named Game of the Year,” Harrington said.

Unfortunately, no further details were given as to what this other game would have been, but the reasoning seems to suggest that it would have been a first-person shooter. Half-Life was supposed to push the envelope, and that was one of Valve’s problems. After the highly impressive E3 presentation in 1997, the company was left with both hands tied behind its back, and Newell took out a loan against the company’s future profits in order to continue development. Harrington said last year that if they had released the game as it was, it would have quietly disappeared and their work would have been wasted. Everyone would have lost their jobs and the money invested would have disappeared.

Valve released Half-Life in November 1998 and it was a huge success, helped by the fact that it had a “Game of the Year” sticker on it…

Source: PCGamer