Valve Corporation was founded on August 24, 1996 in Kirkland, Washington by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, two Microsoft veterans who had spent years shipping Windows and wanted to build games instead. Their first project, Half-Life, arrived in November 1998 on a heavily reworked Quake engine that became known as GoldSrc, and it rewrote the expectations for a first-person shooter by telling its story entirely inside the game world, with no cutscenes to pull the player out of Gordon Freeman's boots. Just as important was what the community built on top of it: Valve embraced modders from the start, and when Counter-Strike grew from a Half-Life mod by Minh Le and Jess Cliffe into the most played online shooter of its era, Valve acquired it outright in 2000 and hired its creators. Harrington left the company that same year, leaving Newell to shape a studio with a famously flat structure, no formal managers and desks on wheels, a culture the company later described openly in its handbook for new employees. Team Fortress Classic and Day of Defeat followed the same mod-to-product path, and in September 2003, the year Valve moved to Bellevue, Washington, the company launched Steam, a digital distribution platform that was initially resented as a patching system and went on to become the dominant storefront for PC gaming.
Half-Life 2 launched in November 2004 on Valve's new Source engine, requiring Steam to activate and dragging a skeptical audience onto the platform in the process, and the same engine carried Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2: Episode One and the 2007 Orange Box, which bundled Episode Two with Team Fortress 2 and the puzzle game Portal. Valve acquired Turtle Rock Studios in 2008 to finish Left 4 Dead, then built Left 4 Dead 2 in-house for a November 2009 release, refining the AI Director that sets the pace of every co-op campaign. Portal 2 arrived in 2011, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was developed with Hidden Path Entertainment for 2012, and Dota 2 grew out of a Warcraft III custom map into a free-to-play sensation by 2013. Since then the company has stretched into hardware with the Steam Controller, the HTC-built Vive and its own Valve Index headset, released the VR-only Half-Life: Alyx in 2020, shipped the Steam Deck handheld in 2022 and moved Counter-Strike onto the Source 2 engine as Counter-Strike 2 in 2023, retiring Global Offensive's client in the process. Still privately owned and still headquartered in Bellevue, Valve matters to players today on two fronts at once: it runs the platform where most PC games are bought and played, and its own catalog remains some of the most replayed multiplayer and single-player work on that platform.
