Gabe Newell Is Flying To Australia!

Well, what do we think about this:

"Software Studio President Flown to Australia By Gaming Community

October 1, 2009 - Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Half-Life and Counter-Strike) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced its studio co-founder and president, Gabe Newell, will be visiting Australia next week to meet local game designer Joe W-A, who raised over $3000 for Newell's visit through the gaming community.

The fundraising began after Joe heard that Newell had recently flown the leaders of a gaming community group boycotting Valve's upcoming Left 4 Dead 2 to Valve's Seattle, WA headquarters. Joe emailed to ask if Newell would fly him to Seattle so Joe could show him his "mod" (a PC gaming term for modifying an existing game into something new).

Newell playfully replied that he wouldn't fly Joe to Seattle because he was "boycotting" Joe's mod. The Australian-based game designer appealed to the game community for $3,000-the funds necessary to fly Newell halfway around the world-and raised the money in less than 48 hours.

"The power of the gaming community and their ability to rally around a cause - be it serious or fun in nature - is amazing," said Gabe Newell, president and co-founder of Valve. "In 2003, the community helped the FBI and European law enforcement officials find the people who stole the Half-Life 2 source code. This year, the community is putting me on a plane to the other side of the world to meet Joe W-A and see his MOD. It's going to be a fun trip."

Newell and Joe will meet in Australia next week. Reports of the trip will be posted on L4D.com's blog section by Valve employee Erik Johnson, who will be traveling with Newell down under."

And on a side note, unrelated to this story, on the eve of Half-Life 2's launch, at eleven-thirty at night, just a half-an-hour before Steam was to go live for the first time ever, I sent Gabe Newell an e-mail message asking him why one of his programmers had told PC Gamer that having 2 gigabytes of ram (a huge amount at the time) would be beneficial.

I didn't think that Gabe Newell would respond to this e-mail (and certainly not that night) what with all the activity that must've been going on at Valve's studio.

Literally two minutes later I got a response.

Those boycotters are a bunch of noobs

L4d2 is gonna be godly.

I actually thought it was kind of neat that Gabe would do this. Most people in positions like this just ignore the members of the great unwashed. Getting on a plane and flying halfway around the world to meet somebody - that's cool.

Bet Gabe will have to pay for two seats.

Bet Gabe will have to pay for two seats.

bogaty

You must remember, Gabe's main reason may not be to meet the guy (he is not going to the guy's town for example) ---- but other reasons like trying to remove the ban etcnaval

I don't think so. The community made donations specifically for him to fly out there and meet the guy. If I was someone who had contributed, I would be a bit angry if I found out my donation was just used to help pay for Gabe Newell's business trip.

Also, if Gabe needed to go to Australia to sort out a ban, Valve would just pay for him to go instead of taking money from the community.

[QUOTE="naval"]You must remember, Gabe's main reason may not be to meet the guy (he is not going to the guy's town for example) ---- but other reasons like trying to remove the ban etcbroken_bass_bin

I don't think so. The community made donations specifically for him to fly out there and meet the guy. If I was someone who had contributed, I would be a bit angry if I found out my donation was just used to help pay for Gabe Newell's business trip.

Also, if Gabe needed to go to Australia to sort out a ban, Valve would just pay for him to go instead of taking money from the community.

That's nice.

Bet Gabe will have to pay for two seats.

bogaty

Bet Gabe will have to pay for two seats.

bogaty

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

I get it.

Watch out !

The evil fat man cometh ....

Bet Gabe will have to pay for two seats.

bogaty

HAhahahaha