Amazon tried to buy part of Valve in the days before Steam, according to former exec who says she's been "erased" from Valve's history

rockpapershotgun.com:

Monica Harrington isn't one of Valve's official co-founders, but she was heavily involved in its formation and initial success - working by day as a marketing manager at Microsoft with responsibility for the games division, while helping her partner, Mike Harrington, and Gabe Newell get the Half-Life studio off the ground. In a lengthy post on Medium - which Nic has already covered in the most recent Sunday Papers, but which I think deserves a piece of its own - Harrington takes us through those heady early days.

Amongst many other things, Harrington discusses how she and her husband poured their own money into Valve, and how she walked the complicated line of drawing upon her Microsoft experience to shape Valve's approach with Half-Life, without developing an actual conflict of interest. When the line became impossible to walk, she resigned from Microsoft, becoming chief marketing officer at Valve from 1996 to 2000.

There are intriguing memories aplenty - how Valve and Sierra fell out over the marketing of Half-Life after release, and how concerns about CD burners led to the implementation of an authentication scheme which accidentally gave Valve a direct line to their first players. Harrington also treats us to a marketing-eye picture of the industry during the 1990s and the balance of clout between developers, publishers, press, pirates and players, drawing comparisons with music and film.

There are insights upon the development of Half-Life - how it looked after its first triumphant E3 showing versus how it was shaping up internally - and to a lesser extent, Team Fortress. But I think the most interesting part is Harrington's account of a pitch she made, shortly after Half-Life's release, to set up a digital games store and community platform in partnership with... Amazon. Had that gone all the way, industry history might have been very different. Here's the excerpt in full:

In a nine-page document, I proposed that Valve and Amazon team up to create a new