Without this one intern, we might not have Steam nowadays. This is the wildest corporate legal drama in gaming history, check it out!
It's 2003, and Valve is on the verge of bankruptcy. Half-Life 2 is in development hell, the company's been hacked, their source code leaked, and now they're locked in a brutal legal battle with Vivendi. The future of one of gaming's most beloved franchises hangs in the balance, and the company that would eventually give us Steam is about to be crushed under legal fees.
This is the story that Valve shared with us for Half-Life 2's 10-year anniversary in a documentary on YouTube. They reveal the struggle that was happening behind the scenes during the development of Half-Life 2, and how one intern eventually saved the whole company.
The Legal Nightmare Between Valve & Vivendi
Back in the early 2000s, game publishers held all the cards. Developers were essentially at their mercy, and Vivendi – who had acquired Sierra Entertainment – knew exactly how to flex that power. They had the worldwide distribution rights to Valve's games, but when they started licensing Counter-Strike to cyber cafes in Asia without permission, Valve finally stood up for themselves.
What should have been a simple contract clarification turned into corporate warfare. Vivendi was trying to cancel their agreement with Valve entirely, seize the Half-Life IP and shut down Steam before it even launched.
Vivendi's strategy was brutally simple: bleed Valve dry. As a multinational conglomerate with essentially infinite resources, they could afford to drag out the legal process indefinitely. Valve? Not so much. The company was burning through cash so fast that Gabe Newell was seriously considering putting his house on the market just to keep the lights on.
How Valve Was Saved From Bankruptcy
"The company was pretty close to going bankrupt. I was pretty close to going personally bankrupt. We went all in," Newell later admitted. "There was no money left." Meanwhile, this is all happening while Half-Life 2 is in development, the team is crunching like crazy, and everyone's wondering if they'll even have jobs next month.
When Valve requested documents about Vivendi's Korean operations, Vivendi dumped millions of pages of documents entirely in Korean, hoping Valve would either pay massive translation fees or just give up.
But here is where our hero comes in.
Valve's attorney had a Korean-speaking intern named Andrew. He spent a day grinding through thousands of boring Korean documents. Then he found gold: an email from Vivendi's Korean manager saying "I have destroyed those documents related to the Valve case, as directed."
That was Game Over for Vivendi.
This smoking gun evidence of document destruction completely flipped the case. The judge ruled that Vivendi had basically forfeited their right to contest anything.
If Andrew hadn't found that document, there might be no Half-Life 2, no Steam, no Portal, no Left 4 Dead. Valve could have been crushed or absorbed into Vivendi's corporate machine.
Instead, one summer intern's careful work literally saved one of gaming's most influential companies. Every time you fire up Steam or pick up a physics object in a game, you're experiencing the ripple effects of Andrew doing his job really, really well. So... wherever you are right now... In the name of all gamers: Thank you, Andrew!