This week marks the twentieth anniversary of Half-Life 2, Valve’s seminal first-person shooter and arguably one of many style’s biggest video games. To rejoice the event, Valve launched an almost two-hour documentary on the making of the sport, which included the story of how Valve’s future was threatened by a lawsuit from its former writer, Vivendi.
As associated by PC Gamer and 80 Level, the story behind the lawsuit begins about one hour into the documentary, and that story flows out and in of the background of Half-Life 2’s growth over the subsequent 43 minutes of the film. On the coronary heart of the lawsuit was Valve’s assertion that Vivendi was distributing Counter-Strike to South Korean cyber cafes with out permission from Valve itself.
In response to Valve’s lawsuit asserting its rights, Vivendi responded with a number of counter-claims in opposition to the previous, in addition to Valve COO Scott Lynch and co-founder Gabe Newell. The authorized battle was such a drain on Valve’s assets that the corporate practically went bankrupt. Newell additionally revealed that he was practically personally bankrupted as properly, and he needed to put up his home on the market so as to hold combating.
A take care of one other writer gave Valve some much-needed respiratory room. However the turning level within the case got here when Vivendi handed over hundreds of thousands of pages of emails in the course of the discovery section, which had been all in Korean. Because it occurred, Valve had a summer time intern–a native Korean speaker who is just talked about by his first title, Andrew–who discovered the proverbial smoking gun in all of these messages. In an trade between two of Vivendi’s vice presidents, considered one of them talked about that he had “destroyed these Valve paperwork such as you requested.”
“I did numerous lawsuits for a very long time,” recalled Valve basic counsel Karl Quackenbush. “I by no means noticed something like that. By no means. Perhaps there was doc destruction that could not be proved, however that was like, ‘We’re speaking about it in writing.’ I would by no means seen that earlier than. At that time, Choose Zilly stated, ‘All issues of reality are actually in accordance with Valve. You do not get to contest any of these. Now we’re simply discussing the [settlement], how a lot you are gonna need to pay and what the damages are.'”
Valve emerged from that lawsuit with a settlement that returned its IP from Vivendi and secured its future as a writer and as a distributer for different publishers via Steam. That brilliant future would possibly by no means have occurred with out Andrew. However the documentary by no means mentions whether or not Andrew was supplied a job with Valve, which might have been a becoming reward for saving the corporate.