Due to a legal dispute, Valve was on the verge of bankruptcy. The rescue came in the form of an intern and a single line of text.

What would the world of video games be like without Half-Life 2, Steam and everything that followed from Valve? The fact that we don’t live in this reality is most likely due to an attentive intern who saved Gabe Newell and his company from ruin in the mid-2000s.

Valve vs. Vivendi

To mark the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2, Valve released a two-hour documentary about the development of the famous single-player shooter.

The documentary also sheds light on the legal battle between Valve and publisher Vivendi from 2002 to 2004. While the reason for the dispute has been known for a long time, the documentary reveals why Valve emerged from the trial as the victor.

The subject of the lawsuit

Vivendi owned the distribution rights for the physical version of Counter-Strike, but Valve discovered that the publisher had also licensed the shooter to Internet cafes in South Korea.

Since Valve felt that this licensing violated the distribution agreement, they filed a lawsuit. When it became clear that Valve could win, Vivendi went on the offensive.

“Vivendi decided to start World War III,” explains Valve COO Scott Lynch, recalling the flood of counterclaims in the documentary. Valve’s then-attorney Karl Quackenbush explains that Vivendi tried to bleed Valve dry financially by dragging out the process.

The tactic seemed to work, because Gabe Newell says about the situation at Valve at the time: “The company was on the verge of bankruptcy. I was on the verge of personal bankruptcy – we were fully invested, there was no more money.”

According to Lynch, Newell even wanted to sell his house in order to hold out a little longer. But at this point, Andrew comes on the scene.

The invisible hero

During the lawsuit, Vivendi handed over millions of pages of documents about its activities in South Korea – all of which, of course, were in Korean

One summer intern, who is only referred to in the documentary as Andrew, comes from South Korea and even studied the language at college.

In the mountains of files, Andrew found a sentence in an email in which a Korean employee of Vivendi informed a superior about the destruction of documents related to the Valve lawsuit.

According to Valve attorney Quakenbush, Andrew’s discovery of the one line that ultimately led to Valve’s victory proved that Vivendi had destroyed evidence.

Late glory

As in the following Reddit post, the unnamed intern is celebrated as a hero of the “modern PC gaming industry”.

“This guy should be honored with a bronze statue,” lxlcecillxl. Puncaker-1456 and many other users under the Reddit post, with over 90,000 upvotes, appropriately quote a sentence from the G-Man from the first moments of Half-Life 2:

“The right man in the wrong place can make a big difference in the world.”

Of course, from Valve’s point of view, Andrew was in the right place at the right time. Who knows what the world of PC gaming would be like today if it hadn’t been for that one observant intern.