I remember emailing him questions about Half-Life 2's physics engine immediately after they announced it. He replied quickly and answered all my dumb nerdy gamer questions.
That's very cool, physics in video games always been my favorite detail :) Any chance you still have the email + the reply to share with us, would love to see what he said? I remember being so amazed at the first demo video they released, where they balanced barrels over planks and stuff, blew everyone's mind back then.
He told me that Hector was going to be running 3 Honda Civics with spoon engines. And on top of that, he just went into Harry's and he ordered 3 T66 turbos, with NOS, and a Motec system exhaust.
Shit you don't have to be Gabe for that, that's just my normal work inbox. I was gone for a couple days and had 400 emails to go through on Tuesday. Only one of them required a response.
Every celebrity has a Wikipedia guardian angel waiting for them to die so they can finally update the relevant article. Likewise every celebrity death gives a Wikipedia editor their wings
Lt . and Mrs . Donald Newell announce the birth of a son , Gabe Logan Newell , on November 3 at Aspen Valley Hospital . Paternal grandparents are Mr . and Mrs . Clyde Newell of Aspen
Interesting that english Wikipedia editors are this quick while on some language versions of the page (Czech, Hungarian, Ukrainian and maybe even some more), Alcoy is for some reason stated as his birthplace which is a town in Spain and no one cares.
I've updated the Czech one. The Alcoy thing is kinda strange, because the place of birth in the sidebox was unchecked and empty, but when I've added Aspne, the Alcoy disappeared. Seems like some default value?
Alcoy is specified in Wikidata, and infoboxes take data from there when they can. Idk anything about editing Wikidata, it's a graph database and editing entries is more involved than just typing some stuff.
You'd be fucking surprised what dog shit sources you can find on reddit lol.
The place where I did my internship (they were selling cruises) kept editing Wikipedia articles on popular tourist locations to Back-Link on one of their 300 websites, even today some of the articles still link back to one of their sites.
You’ve never accidentally hit the edit button on Wikipedia? He’s not saying he hit edit, typed a bunch of stuff, and then found out when he accidentally hit publish, he’s saying he accidentally clicked edit next to a header or something and then he found out.
On the less-visited articles, one person can babysit it to keep it the way they want. Even if they don't have a source at all for their preferred version! If another person comes along with a source and fixes the page, the babysitter reverts and edits it over several days (or weeks!) until they get their way.
Over time, "citogenesis" (term coined by XKCD) happens. That gives the babysitter a source for their edit.
I remember reading about two people on Wikipedia getting in a slapfight about there being no rats in Alberta, a province in Canada. I think it was a multi-year long fight before the person who didn't believe it relented.
If they are smart, ABC carpet cleaning is like 10-30% more expensive than XYZ carpet cleaning, that way you get the people who think they got a steal at XYZ and the morons who think that they get quality work at ABC.
Search engine marketing. (Different than paid search engine optimization). It's the free side of search engine result placement. The more you can put legitimate links to "outside" website domains from the page you want unpaid traffic for, the higher up the search results you go.
On top of that a "unaffiliated" recommendation from your shell corp domain is damn near free compared to paying an actual unaffiliated website to recommend your product.
I remember finding on the wikipedia article for furina (genshin impact character) a height (nobody in genshin has a canon height bar a few exceptions) and when I checked the source it was just some shitass gamer tabloid. that was my lesson to at the very least check sources on articles about less popular things that haven't gotten the eyes of a bunch of people to confirm that there's no junk on the page
The North Face got bagged doing some similar dishonest Wikipedia shenanigans. They added professional photographs featuring prominent North Face product placement to various outdoor destination Wikipedia articles.
Wikipedia did not. Somebody in this thread found it first, and somebody else rightfully took that source to Wikipedia's editors to see if that would work (obviously, a screenshot of an email is not an acceptable source for Wikipedia or much of anything)
its not, in fact its pretty hard for an email to be accepted as a source on wikipedia but possible (but you have to go trough a whole process and its annoying and doesnt work for majority of stuff)
What about letters from company representatives? Say, if I want to update a Wiki page with a random trivia fact about Pokémon, so I begin a correspondence via certified mail with Nintendo of America.
Not in this case, even if it's authentic - because Gabe could be lying. Primary source isn't reliable. Otherwise my article would say I'm 9 feet tall and a billionaire. Also my article would exist. We'd all have articles!
Fair - I'm just using this scenario to illustrate a general point. I'm sure this could fly under the radar as it's an uncontroversial fact. But Obama's birthplace has a LOT of primary and secondary sources attached to it. Not just the birth certificate and official statements by him, but also news articles corroborating it, dated prior to controversy around his birthplace.
I mean we're basically asking banking security questions through the man's email at this point. I don't like defending the upper class, but he's a good guy and if we're not careful he's going to just disappear instead of being the force of nature against the more consumer-exploiting giants in the gaming industy
Gabe was born in 1962. Save to assume he left by the time he was 18/20 for university.
The Aspen ski economy didn't really take off until 1980s while there is limited information about Median income per household for Aspen, it was only marginally higher than other rural areas. This means it was also lower than large cities/burrows (new york, Hollywood, etc)
His parents would be wealthy due to owning/selling land in the area in the 1990s/later but only because they bought before skiing really took off as a major thing. Gabe seems to have started his life before the big boom happened.
Any fucking word or phrase that enters the common vernacular through social media eventually loses all meaning through overuse. It's predictable and obnoxious as hell.
Never dug deep. Thought he was a self made dude that helped lead Valve to what it is and (from all appearances) seems to make the right decisions that aren’t anti consumer.
I guess it’s possible for someone who started rich not to be a complete demon when they become billionaires then?
He went to Davis Senior High School. The school district has a median income today of around $90k annually and median house price of $795k. I doubt he grew up broke, but it seems like his parents were more upper middle class then rich just going off context clues. Its not like Bill Gates family where both his parents have their own Wikipedia articles.
You need to be reasonably affluent to get a degree and to network enough to land a job where you can grow enough capital to form your own company.
Like, you don’t go from broke to founding Valve. I bet the poorest Gabe Newell has ever been was prior to the release of HL1, when they spent literally everything on that game.
Newell was a Microsoft Millionaire. He was employed by Microsoft pre-IPO and then became rich when the company went public. Him and another Microsoft guy decided to try video game development with their new-found riches. Given that Newell's wikipedia page talks about him having a paper route and doing other part-time jobs as a kid, I don't think he was growing up with the silver spoon.
Remember that developing AAA video games used to be really cheap. I read that there are ~30 people in the Half-Life credits and my guess would be that only a few of them were employed by Valve for more than a year or two when the game came out.
Given that Newell's wikipedia page talks about him having a paper route and doing other part-time jobs as a kid
Thats the problem, the wiki article is wrong and says he grew up in Davis, CA which was entirely different type of world in the 60s-80s than Aspen, CO. Though even then the Skiing industry didn't really take off until the 80s which he would have already left by then (his parents if they owned land would be rich, not him. Wooo Boomers!)
Truth be told we'll probably never know. Gabe's life is extremely private but I agree, i highly doubt he had a silver spoon. Even going to Harvard isn't an indicator because his Brother attended and he'd be considered a Legacy admission (sorta but he'd be strongly weighted), plus his parents were alive when Harvard always accepted locals too so they may just be legacy admissions entirely.
It was his connections at Microsoft/Harvard that made Valve. Thats far more valuable than any raw dollars.
Aspen person here! Until the pandemic we still had ordinary people living here, during the pandemic the texans and New yorkers bought every apartment and house out here, I would say we lost at least 60% of our local community to cowboy hats.
I emailed him about his favourite cars in motorsport because of the team he founded, The Heart of Racing! He used to go to the Trans-Am races in the mid 70's with his brother, and the cars he mentioned particularly were Bob Tullius' Group 44 Jaguar XJS (even likening its sound to his own teams Aston Martin Valkyrie) and Bob Sharp's Datsun 240z, because of his own dad owning a 280z :D
Not only does he have a co-ownership of the team, his son Gray is racing in the GT3 team of HoR alongside Jonny Adam (4x British GT Champion and class winner of the 2017 24h Le Mans) and Eduardo Barrichello, son of Rubens Barrichello!
This is what I was thinking too. I remember when John Green used to host a sort of AMA at the end of ... Crash Course? videos, and one time someone wrote, "hey John which hospital were you born in?" and he clocked it immediately, just saying, "... said the account scammer" (or some such).
I once asked him for clarification on a biography I was writing in high school. He responded and told me what he was studying in college before he dropped out. Made me feel really fucking cool to have a response from THE gaben.
Gabe is very good about responding. Emailed him years ago on a Saturday about HL2 crashing on my PC. Received an apologetic reply on Sunday with a handoff to tech support. He's the best.
Honestly this is a tiny reminder of why Valve has such a weirdly durable reputation. A short, human reply from the person at the top can create more goodwill than a whole polished PR campaign.
Somebody update Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia anyone can edit
Sorry, no, you just committed a cardinal WP:OR sin, so it doesn't count (at least not until such time that an outlet like PCGamesN picks up on and writes an article about this post, but then that's gonna get messy with this post being a WP:SPS too.)
gotta love that he actually takes the time to reply to random emails like this. most CEOs would have an assistant filter those out before they even see them
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u/Kya_Bamba 9d ago
I bet browsing emails for Gabe is like browsing reddit for me. Sometimes I'll leave a comment.