interesting that you’ve taken aim at valve. as i’m sure you know, there isn’t a whole lot of material to draw on for that particular cause. i do recall one particularly biting piece of criticism, however; failmath’s detailed rundown of their history pre-half life 2 and associated often-shady practices, pulling information, statements and contradictions from various interviews and press releases. considering the timeline starts before 2000, the events are naturally far too old for the gaming internet’s collective memory to retain.
failmath itself seems to have been all but totally forgotten and the site has been dead for many years now, but the archive sees all and knows all.
http://web.archive.org/web/20060706015933/http://failmath.com/reviews/valve98.htm
There’s no ’cause’. I just get suspicious when there is lack of criticism for a high profile game company. And I’m getting tired of the only answer being “But there are wheels on the desks at the Valve Corporation! They roll around. They roll down the halls, Master Malstrom, yes, the desks roll down the halls.” What does any of that mean? Why not just take a laptop or something more mobile? In this era of portable computing and networking, who the heck moves their desktop computer around all the time? And what does the desks having wheels have anything to do with the lack of games coming out of the Valve Corporation? None of it makes sense to me.
The timeline in the link you provided is AMAZING. Hilarious and amazing. I remember things like the Half-Life 2 code being stolen or the tons of different retail versions of Half-Life and PC-Gamer repeatedly telling us that Half-Life is the ‘best game ever’. The further I got in the timeline, the funnier it became.
By the time Half-Life 2 came out, the Valve Corporation had made only 1 single player game and co-opted three community mods to create 18 different retail versions of the same game. Incredible.
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