Monica Harrington, Valve's marketing strategist who was there at the beginning of the company's early problems, says she helped steer it out.

It's easy to think that Valve's history of success and the fact that we all play our PC games in Steam's shadow is the only possible way for the future. Monica Harrington was the chief marketing strategist at Valve during its early years, and later, the wife of studio co-founder Mike Harrington. She says that we barely avoided a future where Half-Life would have left Valve in ruin, and her work is to thank.

I emailed Harrington after reading her memoir "The Early Days of Valve From a Woman Inside" published on Medium in august. It details how she transitioned to working with her ex-husband, Gabe Newell, from Valve's foundation through Half-Life release. (We have asked Newell to give his perspective on the early Valve days and will update this article if we receive a response.) Harrington's memories detail Valve’s early struggles with Sierra On-Line, from the perspective of an overlooked figure in its history. They reveal how its mythologized success was anything but guaranteed.

Harrington says that Valve was in a very precarious position in 1998. Half-Life was Valve's debut release, but it was also a matter for the studio's survival. Half-Life's E3 1997 reveal demos were a huge success, but internal demos the following summer only received lukewarm reactions from playtesters. The money that Harringtons and Newell invested in their fledgling company was swallowed up by the ever-rising cost of game development. Half-Life production was kept afloat through a loan Newell took against Valve's profits.

Harrington wrote in Medium that "if Valve shipped the games we had, they would launch and quietly disappear and all of our work would be for nothing." "All the people we hired would lose their job, and we'd lose money we invested." It was a catastrophe."

Valve knew it was a bet that could mean the difference between life and death. They decided to scrap their work and build a better version of Half-Life. Sierra, on the other hand, did not give its blessing. Valve began the year-long gamble to overhaul Half-Life without any additional publisher funds.

In retrospect, it's easy to say that the decision was right. Half-Life was released in November 1998. By the end of the year, it had already won over 50 Game of the Years. Harrington's marketing campaign ensured that the credit went to Valve, not Sierra. Harrington says that from the beginning of Half-Life, she worked to make sure that, if it was a success, Half-Life developers would be celebrated, and not its publisher.

Harrington's marketing plan in the lead-up to Half-Life was to establish Valve as a respected company among industry peers and the press. She wrote and distributed background pieces about Valve's developers while they attended conferences and discussed the technology they were advancing. Harrington wrote in Medium that the work paid off. "Shortly after Christmas, an article appeared in the Wall St. Journal with the headline 'Valve Storytelling Game Is a Hit.'" "In the article Sierra as our publisher wasn't mentioned."

There's still a world where Half-Life wouldn't have been the huge success it is today. Harrington said that this timeline was more probable than we thought. Sierra broke the bad news to Harrington as he began planning Half-Life’s ongoing retail strategy. They were dumping Half-Life. Harrington said that the message they sent us was "thank you, we're moving forward, and the game has done great." "Their marketing at that time was Launch and Leave. We were trying to market an franchise-worthy game on which we could build for years to come."

In the late 1990s, games sales were quite different. A game could have easily died in the water without traditional advertising and retail presence. Harrington told that Valve would have been doomed if Sierra had pulled out of Half Life marketing. "There is an alternate universe in which Half-Life disappeared from the retail channel because it was not being stocked and supported." She said that if Half-Life had failed in the market, the company wouldn't have survived. "And that almost occurred because Sierra had no clue how to handle a game of Half-Life’s potential magnitude."

Harrington, on the other hand, had no intention to waste Half-Life's momentum. She had the expertise necessary to capitalize on it. "Because I had worked at Microsoft before, I knew how to maximize Half-Life’s potential on the market. I was ready to go. I also wanted to use our leverage to ensure Sierra delivered its responsibilities," said Harrington. "It was what we owed the Valve team, and also the gamers who had already fallen in love with the title."

Harrington claims that in the same meeting where Sierra announced its withdrawal, she told the publisher, if it did not double down on Half Life marketing, Valve "would walk away from our agreement and inform the industry who had fallen in love Valve, how screwed-up Sierra really was." Half-Life's Game of the Year Box was the result. It is one of the first examples of a retail strategy so powerful that triple-A releases still emulate it today.

Valve's outlook was still grim, despite the fact that Half-Life sales began to rise. Sierra had signed a publishing agreement that gave them exclusive rights to publish Valve’s next games. Valve's publishing agreement stipulated that, despite the fact that game development costs were steadily rising into the millions, Valve would receive an advance of $1,000,000 for each game and only 15% of sales royalties.

Harrington wrote on Medium: "All I could imagine was Valve swimming around in red ink in years to come."

Harrington says that to get out of the Sierra agreement, she helped devise a strategy which allowed Valve to issue an ultimatum. If Sierra did not renegotiate its terms, Valve would stop developing games and switch to other software development.

Harrington explained that "Gabe and Mike were both very experienced in other aspects of software development and the threat was not inactive." She also noted that from her experience with marketing campaigns for Microsoft products such as Expedia, she knew a lot about the scope and size of the online opportunity for an entirely new category.

She just needed to give their words some weight, which she found by securing a partnership offer for building an online entertainment platform with a little company called Amazon--a proposal for a "made-for-the-medium" digital games storefront that sounds a lot like what Steam would eventually become. Valve, armed with the Amazon offer that Harrington's gambit had earned, returned to the negotiation table with proof that it could pursue alternate software development, which Sierra would not see a penny from, bolstered in part by a reputation for development that Harrington helped cement.

Valve amended its publishing contract with Sierra in 2001 and gained control of the Half-Life IP as well as online distribution rights for their own games. Half-Life 2 may not have existed without that renegotiation. No Steam, no Portal, and no TF2! Harrington's work is what has made PC gaming what it is today.

Valve's legacy hasn't been all rosy. After all, Yanis Varoufakis, Valve's former economist-in-residence, says it's responsible for ushering in our current "technofeudalist" hellscape. Harrington, however, stated via email that she was motivated to secure Valve’s future by "an extraordinarily strong sense of responsibility towards the people we hired."

Harrington stated that when the studio was founded "the ethos of Valve was to only hire the people you wanted to work with, and then let them do what they were best at." Valve wanted to live up to its ethos by securing the rights to all of the work they did.

Harrington said, "I knew that Sierra could claim the IP rights but it couldn't claim to have made Half-Life." "Yes, I felt this pressure in a very intense way. It's what motivated me to start the legal fight to protect the Half-Life IP, and to do everything I could to set Valve up for success on the long-term."