Trivia / Valve Corporation

• Adored by the Network: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, and Steam software get repeated announcements of big updates and new content, to the exclusion of almost all of their other properties.
• Approval of God: Valve has showcased various fan works for their games, such as Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and the Portal series.
• Breakthrough Hit: Half-Life for FPS and Portal for Puzzle genres respectively.
• He Also Did: Among Valve's voice actors, John Patrick Lowrie (The Sniper) is also a novelist, Ellen McLain (The Administrator, Combine Overwatch, and GLaDOS) sings opera (although those who have completed Portal 2's single player story mode already know this quite well), Hugh Dillon (Nick) is a rock singer, and Jim French (Father Grigori, Bill, Elder Titan) was a radio personality. Composer Mike Morasky did special effects on the second two Matrix movies and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. CG animator Karen Prell is the Muppet performer of Red Fraggle in Fraggle Rock.
• Killer App: Half-Life 2 was this for Steam back in the day. By all accounts, Half-Life: Alyx is meant to be this for the Valve Index headset (any owner of an Index gets a copy of Alyx for free), as well as for VR in general.
• Man of a Thousand Voices: But without reading the credits or being told, you probably won't guess they're the same people. Ellen McLain is particularly ubiquitous; her voice is in every game in the Orange Box, the other Half-Life 2 games, Portal 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and Dota 2.
• Promoted Fanboy: Several employees at Valve were people who made mods for the Source games. MINERVA: Metastasis, for example, was a one-man project whose creator was later hired by Valve.
• The Red Stapler: Ellis' trucker cap (and subsequently, the RED Team version of it, once it was released as a Team Fortress 2 item) and "Bull Shifters" t-shirt, Chell's tank top, an Aperture Science shower curtain (doubles as a Mythology Gag, because they started off manufacturing shower curtains to the military), The Mann Co. Cap and Soldier's Grenadier's Softcap.
• Schedule Slip: Their release date delays are so infamous that their fandom has coined the term 'Valve Time' to refer to their ability to single-handedly dilate time around themselves. This is probably mostly thanks to Valve's loose internal corporate structure, where no-one has a single, set-in-stone role to play in the company. They claim it is due to their attempts to produce high-quality games that are fun, and the developer commentary often mentions features that were not fun that had to be discarded, which certainly consumes time. The most infamous moment was the drought of games between Dota 2 and Artifact, with years upon years going by with nary a word. Externally, it looked like Valve had stopped caring; internally, it appears their loose, work-on-what-you-want structure ran headlong into the fact they hadn't finished the Source 2 Engine, and the whole company deadlocked itself.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: While Valve usually doesn't get too protective of their IP rights, they decided in 2024 to send their lawyers to take action against fanmade games "Team Fortress Source" and "Portal 64". While it's still unknown why they took action against Team Fortress Source, the developer of Portal 64, Jedi James Lambert, stated that he already knew that Valve would eventually take action and for people not to be mad at them since he was creating the game using Libultra, the official Nintendo 64 SDK, and since Valve didn't want to also involve Nintendo and their lawyers as well.
• Teasing Creator: Valve hasn't yet given a definite answer concerning Pyro's gender or the release of the next installment of Half Life.
• Vaporware: Half-Life 2: Episode Three is legendary in the industry for becoming this. Episode Two is considered the high point of the second game, and it ends on an infamous Cliffhanger. Fans eagerly awaited news on the next game to no avail, and the departure of Marc Laidlaw, the series' lead writer, was believed to be the final nail in the coffin for the Half-Life series... until Half-Life: Alyx was announced.
• What Could Have Been: They're pretty tight-lipped about the work that goes on behind the scenes, even if it's been aborted, but Gabe revealed that they had been working on an RPG about fairies at one point before they decided that it was going nowhere.

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