Gabe Newell is hooked on Stalker 2 and once he’s got the fourth ending (!) will ‘figure out what I’m going to play next’

It’s been one heck of a week for serious Valve news, thanks largely to founder Monica Harrington’s new GDC talk about the company’s early days. So I thought it was perhaps time for a palate cleanser: What’s Gabe Newell up to?

Well, when he’s not fighting off sharks in South Africa, or tootling around on one of his mega superyachts, Gabe remains just one of us. Remarkably, he also still monitors his email address and, every so often, replies to someone.

Reddit user Walrus6444 recently sent one such message, politely asking: “Dear Mr Gaben, what games do you actually play?” I think brevity might be one of the keys to getting Gabe’s attention, because the Valve co-founder replied to assert his bona fides.

“Lately I’ve been playing a bunch of Stalker 2,” said Newell in response. “I should get the fourth ending tomorrow, and then I’ll have to figure out what I’m going to play next.”

I haven’t even finished Stalker 2 once, so Gabe is putting me to shame here. I’m not surprised he has the spare time to do it but I do hope that, when I’m 62, I’m still mainlining the good stuff like this.

No doubt Newell noticed a certain skeleton in Rostak’s toxic underpass location. It’s next to a shipping container, with a red crowbar propped up against it, and some familiar looking glasses.

We can return to the serious news now. Among which is the story of how Valve’s DRM was inspired by an exec’s nephew, who “used a $500 check I’d sent him for school expenses and bought himself a CD-ROM replicator… he sent me a lovely thank you note.” Then there’s Harrington’s fight to regain the rights for Half-Life, which could have seen Valve walk away from games altogether: “It wasn’t an idle threat—we weren’t going to take on all of the risk to make other people rich.”