As a teenager, Gabe Newell delivered paper telegrams by bicycle for Western Union. Decades later he built an 11 billion dollar empire by dismantling the physical distribution of software. This deep dive follows his path from Harvard dropout to 13 years at Microsoft working on the first three versions of Windows, and the moment that changed everything: porting Doom to Windows 95 and realizing a dozen-person studio distributing over bulletin board systems had their game on more computers than Windows itself.

The hosts trace the founding of Valve in 1996, the self-funded Half-Life, the blank-check development of Half-Life 2 and the legal fight with a publisher that nearly bankrupted the company until an intern uncovered hidden distribution records, and the 2003 launch of Steam, which gamers initially hated before automatic patching and central ...