G Fat and V Society
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “Luming Finance” (ID: luminglab ) , author: Pang good.
Wen|Pang Hao
Edit|Kang Chenwei
The man in the photo who sits on a stone ball and plays games like a child is called Gabe Newell (Gabe Newell). If you are still a little unfamiliar with this name, his other name is unknown to the gaming circle-G Fat.
His Steam store is a harvester for players’ wallets. This man who has never counted three (there is no third-generation game produced by Valve). Another quirk is: never let his company go public .
After all, what he loves is just being immersed in the game like in the photo. Such a pure life is already the “Final Fantasy” of every game fan.
“V agency only has three employees, one is making skins for “Dota2”, one is putting on the rumors of “CS:GO” national service, and the other is helping G Fat count money in Hawaii”, so as The ridicule of “personal employees” is in the Fan Circle It can be said to be common in the child, and when you carefully savor the meaning of it, it is not difficult to discover a unique and deep love.
The V club led by Fatty G never chases things that can be easily seen.
01 From the rabble to the mysterious army
In 1983, under the influence of his idol and senior Bill Gates, Gabe Newell, who was only 20 years old, dropped out of Harvard at the instigation of his brother (with Microsoft) and became the 271st Microsoft employee. He was not fat at the time.
In the 13 years of working at Microsoft, G Fat gradually revealed a generous figure and extraordinary genius. He was responsible for the program management of the first two generations of Windows operating systems. He also held positions in multiple departments including systems, programs and advanced technology, and later became a core member of Windows NT and its server version.
While he has accumulated excellent skills, his interest in game development has become increasingly irresistible. Especially after a colleague resolutely resigned and joined the strongest game company Id Sorftware at the time, G Fat became more determined to try game development.
Migrating “Doom” from DOS to Windows was his last job at Microsoft. Four days after “Doom 95” was released, G Fat took the nearly $1 million he saved at Microsoft and founded Valve with his colleague Mike Harrington. On the same day, he married his girlfriend. Since then, Fatty G has embarked on a road completely different from ordinary people.
The utopia of a gaming circle slowly rises.
After the establishment of V agency, the first problem G Fat faced was hiring people. But the old-fashioned methodology does not seem to belong to G Fat by nature. His recruiting method is completely “authoritarian” and unreasonable-no matter what position you have been in, as long as the idea is approved by my G Fat, you can directly enter the job.
As a result, among the first batch of employees of V company, there are college students who dream of games but deliver takeaways, and there are snacks that want to make games.The shop owner, there are dentists, university lecturers, and even street singers, but this group of people in the eyes of ordinary developers Hezhizhong, but with one game, it made a sensation in the entire gaming world.
“Half-Life”.
Perhaps after transplanting “Doom”, G Fat’s first thought was to make an FPS (first-person shooter) game. At that time, Id Sorftware was the absolute leader in the FPS field, and most games on the market implemented the theory of Id Sorftware founder John Carmack-the plot is not important, the shot is the key.
A worker must first sharpen his tools if he wants to do his job well. G Fat directly brought Quake engine (Quake), this is the world’s first real-time 3D game engine, in order to make the tool fully meet their own vision of the game, G Fat took a lot of effort to rewrite the engine 70% of the code, what he is determined to do is a game that can surpass the Id company.
It took a year and “Half-Life” was basically completed. At the upcoming E3 game show where the game is about to be released, Carmack’s “Thor’s Hammer 2” was also unveiled at the same time as “Half-Life”. When G Fat saw the latter’s game demo, he suddenly felt like his game. Not fragrant, he believes that there is still a lot of room for improvement in the game’s levels and AI design.
After a year of hard work, Fatty G returned with the rebuilt “Half-Life”, and the official release of the game was an unprecedented success. Different from the “dutu” of the common shooting games at the time, “Half-Life” has an excellent storyline; a large number of interactive NPCs; and unique seamless levels. This novel and immersive experience made the players at that time unable to stop. It almost subverted the entire industry and rewritten the course of game development.
Continuing Carmack’s open source spirit, G Fat decided to disclose the engine code of “Half-Life” and at the same time released the game’s MOD (modified the original game’s mod Group) production tools. Subsequently, various premium MODs and self-made maps created by players came out one after another, the most successful of which were “Team Fortress” and “Counter Strike”. After these two maps became popular, G Fat immediately recruited the author under his command, and later derived these two self-made maps into independent games under the V agency.
The influence of “Team Fortress” even made Blizzard years later in its first FPS game “Overwatch”, there are still a lot of gameplay and many hero designs. Learn from; and “Counter Strike” is a well-known game for all people. It pioneered the multiplayer confrontation game type. Today, it is still one of the most concurrently online games in the world.
In November 1999, October 2001 and April 2005, “Half-Life” was hailed by PC Gamer as the greatest game in history. Subsequently, the V agency successively launched the “Portal” series, the “Lead to Survival” series and “DOTA2” and other outstanding works. After achieving many successes, the V agency has gradually become a big crowd from the rabble in everyone’s eyes. The mysterious legion hidden in the city.
Today, V agency is still a private company, but “no boss”-neither the project manager nor the personnel department has been established. According to a Chinese employee who has worked for V agency for two years, V agency never recruits people easily. Although you don’t have to get G Fat’s approval one by one, you can only enter this mysterious company by means of inference. .
Chengdu Liang Chaowei (Zhihu ID) said: “I established contact with the V agency development team through emails in the game community.
Participating in volunteer work under the V agency lasted about three and a half years. I was invited by chance to watch the second DOTA2 International Invitational Tournament in Seattle, and I also met them (referring to V agency employees). gameDuring the period, I helped them to do a lot of communication and coordination work, provided reference opinions on some related decisions, and also contacted people in various project teams of the game.
The turnaround happened not long after, when a project team member suddenly said that he would come to China to meet me. The conversation took place on a section of the winding mountain highway. I was driving him while chatting with me. I only remembered that I had been holding the steering wheel carefully. As for the content of the chat, I no longer remembered it until I was hired. All aspects of the interview. “
Anything that can be called a utopia must be unique. V agency’s management of employees is super flat, or no one manages them at all. Each employee can decide what he wants to do, whether it is mining products or developing new games, as long as you want to do it. In 2012, in order to facilitate newcomers to quickly adapt to this “flat world” without being “scared”, members of the V community collectively produced a new employee manual. In the eyes of the outside world, this is not just an entry guide, it is the best clue to explore this mysterious group.
On page 6 of the manual, enthusiastic seniors will answer the question “Why does your desk have wheels?”
Please use these wheels as symbolic reminders to remind yourself that you must always think about how to make you more valuable. But at the same time, you have to treat these wheels as real wheels, because wheels are useful for wheels. When you need to move the table, you will need them.
In V agency, people always move around, and sometimes the entire team has to move tables to get closer. Here, there will not be any organizational structure barriers to affect the communication and mutual assistance between colleagues. It is the duty of a V company employee to choose a project and then plunge into it. When a person’s desk is moved, the socket connected to the internal network will show his new physical position on everyone’s computer desktop, so that there will be no missing people.
Like his dear employees, Fatty G never does things he doesn’t want to do.
02 Steam and the Great Ship
As we all know, G Fat is never counted three, because there will not be a third sequel in any game series under the V agency. G Fat’s explanation for this is that he is unwilling to ruin the reputation of the original work with unintended works. In the eyes of many players, the reason is that G Fat no longer wants to make money by developing games.
In fact, as early as when G Fat was still writing the code for the game himself, an idea came up, that is, to completely solve the contradiction between the player’s update cost and the manufacturer’s benefit protection. It is difficult for players to update the game’s patches and follow-up content after buying back the game CD, and the backwardness of the game CD encryption technology has also led to a large number of piracy. Manufacturers spend a lot of effort to make games, but in the end they may not even collect the cost. Just like the previous “Legend of Sword and Fairy” series, one work sold more than 1 million copies, but there are at least tens of millions of players who have played the fairy sword in China.
In order to change the status quo, Blizzard’s plan is Battlenet< /span>. But Battle.net is only used by Blizzard to protect the interests of its own games. What G Fat has to do is to build a unified digital distribution platform for all manufacturers. But to truly build such a platform, it must be supported by major manufacturers.
