Here are 55 new photos of Gabe Newell’s $500 million superyacht for your peasant eyes

Earlier this week Gabe Newell made a surprise appearance in an ad for Oceanco, the company he liked so much that last year he just straight-up bought them. Oceanco is, of course, behind the construction of the Valve co-founder’s $500 million custom superyacht, Leviathan, and it looks like this is PR week for the company: it’s just dropped a whole bunch of new photographs of the boat for our peasant eyes to gaze longingly upon.

As PCG’s Andy Chalk adroitly noted of the video ad, “it sure looks like being a super-rich guy is a pretty good time”, and these photos do little to dispel that. They also arrive with a load of the cod-philosophical verbiage Oceanco seems to specialise in, because apparently these first images of the Leviathan in operation “reveal her human-centered philosophy in practice.”

The photographs were taken by Guillaume Plisson in the Bahamas, and the full gallery certainly shows that this thing puts the ‘yacht’ in superyacht. “The imagery places a strong emphasis on people and how the yacht is used, reinforcing the community-driven environment at the heart of the design,” says the Oceanco bumpf.

“Leviathan represents a new philosophy of yachting—one that places greater purpose at the heart of design, ownership and operations,” says Deniz de Koningh, project director at Oceanco. “The owner’s vision sets a forward-thinking example of how yachts can be built and used with intent. We are excited to see the influence she may have in shaping the future of the industry.”

Gabe Newell: not just a videogame legend, but apparently a yacht revolutionary to boot. The interior of the ship is, ahem, “conceived to dissolve traditional hierarchies between guest and crew spaces.” I doubt that means that Gabe’s in the kitchen whipping up dinner, and that just seems a very weird thing to say about a vessel that, with all the good intentions in all the world, is designed as a billionaire’s floating palace and looks like it must have a staff count in the very high dozens.

What Oceanco means by this is that “recreational areas such as the gaming lounge, basketball court and sun deck are designed for shared use”, which is very nice and all. More practically, the “crew-centric approach” means that the majority of the material choices are “low-maintenance solutions” that are easy to upkeep: “custom Bolidt decking, bead-blasted stainless steel railings, synthetic handrails and an off-white exterior finish.”

“The goal was to consider where the most valuable experiences occur for the community of people onboard,” says Gabe Newell. “By increasing crew productivity, we can enable them to focus more on engaging with guests and creating meaningful experiences for everyone.”

The photos also show Leviathan’s dive center, helipad, the biggest big screen you’ll ever see on the top deck, the pool, a bunch of young folks playing Counter-Strike 2 in the gaming room, various lovely interiors, people doing yoga on the deck, people scuba-diving, the support vessels, the on-deck basketball court, the control room, various exterior shots contrasting night/day, a chap hosing off some of those low-maintenance banisters, and oddly enough there’s a photograph of some stairs.

We can also see that the ship flies the Red Ensign, so I’m declaring Gabe an honorary Brit. One of the photos also shows that beneath one of the Leviathan logos on the ship, it says “Bloody Bay,” which Google tells me is a port of registry in the Cayman Islands for luxury superyachts. I will never understand rich people.

The one absence is Gabe Newell himself, who doesn’t seem to be present in any of the group shots (unless I’m mistaken, which is possible because I’ve just looked at 55 super high-res photos of a yacht and need a lie-down). Newell does however appear briefly in the promotional video, where he can be seen chatting with a diver and laughing at someone’s joke. There’s also a sketch of Newell with a leviathan curling around him, featuring the words “Thank you Gabe.” Hey, if he’d just paid me $500 million, I’d say thanks too.