We all know the story of how Valve was founded. Gabe Newell, born beneath a rainbow on Mt Paektu, was visited by an archangel in his quarters and charged to build Half-Life. Then he was charged to build a Half-Life patch tool called Steam that remains inexplicably popular to this day. In return, he was blessed with 800 sacred knives and a superyacht, which he uses to travel the globe like Cain, battling his enemies.

Or so I thought, anyway. But in a new interview with YouTuber Zalkar Saliev (TikTok, IG), Newell chatted about the circumstances that led to Valve's birth in much more mundane terms. Turns out, the germ that would become Valve got its start when Newell—then working at Microsoft—was trying to convince people that maybe not every app needed its own bespoke interface and approach to graphics acceleration tech, and how he convinced them using Doom.

"Everybody would create their own interface to the hardware, and they were all over the place, right?" said Newell. "Some of them were just unbelievably slow.

"We were trying to explain to them why device-independent graphics was a useful way of improving their applications, but everybody kept explaining to us that that couldn't possibly the right solution, that everybody needed to develop their own method of taking advantage of graphics accelerators, right?"

The most bullheaded resisters to Newell's crusade to get everyone on the same graphics page? The PC games industry, with developers adamant they knew best how to get their games playing with graphics tech. "Then we'd look at it," says Newell, "and it would be obvious that they were completely underutilizing the capabilities of the devices. That they had one person working on it, and they weren't necessarily very good." Nevertheless, "they were sort of, then, under the illusion that they were going to lose a bunch of performance by moving to Windows."

Newell needed a way to prove those fears unfounded, and oh, what do you know? Around the same time he noticed a strange phenomenon where the plucky folks at id Tech seemed to be outperforming Microsoft. "Id was out-distributing Microsoft with Doom," recalls Newell of the studio's shareware approach to getting the game out there. "They had a completely alternate model of how to reach customers and engage with customers that I thought was super interesting, to the point that there were more people using Doom than were using Windows."

Plus, Doom was the most "graphically advanced" game around at the time. Newell smelled opportunity. "I contacted the people at id and said, 'Hey, we'll port Doom onto Windows and just give it back to you." The aim was to create hard "proof that you can have very high performance running videogames on Windows," and put an end to the naysayers determined to spin up their own, inferior solutions for graphics interfacing.

But getting in touch with id got Newell thinking: "id sort of presented a bunch of evidence that maybe the way of thinking about how to have customer relationships in the age of interconnectivity was wrong," that maybe Newell's home company wasn't quite keeping up with the times. "It was like, the way that Microsoft thinks about these things in terms of distribution and Salesforce and resellers and all of that was missing the opportunity represented by the advent of networking."

Newell got thinking about "the kind of company you would design as a result of that change in the relative value of different lines of business functions" and, well, you can see where this is headed, right? "Maybe in the 1950s it was like this, but in the 1990s it was going to be like this, and if that's true, then you want to redesign your businesses to take advantage of that relative transition.

"I enjoyed playing videogames, and used that as an excuse to say, 'Oh, I could go design a videogame company,' and [I] had very strong opinions about what the opportunities were to build more interesting video games. And Half-Life was sort of an expression of those concepts," says Newell. "I was willing to sort of put my money where my mouth was on the design of the game and on the design of the company, and that's when we started Valve."

So Half-Life, Valve, and the entire direction of PC gaming in the 21st century? You can thank bullheaded app developers refusing to listen to Gabe Newell about graphics interfaces for all of it. Well, you can thank id and Doom for a bunch of it, too, but we already knew Carmack and Romero's fingerprints were already all over our hobby of choice. It's all, says Newell, "a response to looking at the opportunities to build what I thought were going to be a better approach to game design, and if I was wrong, I'd have to go back to Microsoft."

Quarantine Zone: The Last Check, an intriguing zombie apocalypse simulator in which you play as a fed in charge of deciding who is granted entry into your relative safety net, has now been wishlisted by a million people as its demo nears two million downloads.

In a press release, it's announced that Quarantine Zone: The Last Check has "infected the hearts and minds of Devolver Digital," which is the game's new publisher.

"Revealed in May this year, Brigada Games' debut title has become so contagious that Steam wishlist numbers have swelled to over 1 million, indicating a level of virality that Devolver Digital is simply powerless to resist," reads the press release.

In Quarantine Zone: The Last Check, your main duty as a Last of Us-style FEDRA agent is to use things like UV flashlights, thermometers, and manual scanners to look for signs of infection or contraband in people looking for safe haven amid a city crawling with zombies.

Some folks will arrive perfectly healthy and others carrying non-zombie related illnesses, while others will risk bringing undead pathogens into your checkpoint. It's your call on who gets in and who doesn't, and you'll have to work with limited resources to test and inspect visitors while maintaining order and securing your operation's defense against the infected. That occasionally involved straight-up killing people who are beyond saving, which sounds like a lot, but someone's gotta do it.

The game's demo released to some fanfare in May, but it's since gone on to become a pretty big hit. At the time of writing, the demo has almost 2,700 reviews and 90% of them are positive, although it's worth noting that even the most positive reviews mention issues with optimization or, plainly, that the parts where you use a turret to gun down hordes of infected are boring.

With Devolver Digital as the new publisher, Brigada Games says it plans on adding some additional post-launch content, and because of that, the full game's release date has been moved from September to November.

Face your fears and play something from our list of the best zombie games right now.

Survival MMO Dune: Awakening got off to a strong start in June, but here at the tail end of July it's gotten stuck in a bit of quicksand. Even making changes to the controversial chopper-heavy endgame hasn't stopped recent Steam reviews from sliding to "Mixed," and despite several patches to squash exploits and hackers, cheating and griefing remains a problem.

A bit more bad news arrived today: Steam Family Sharing for Dune: Awakening has been switched off.

"We would like to share a quick update on cheats and exploits and inform you that we’re temporarily disabling Family Sharing," publisher Funcom posted on Steam and Discord, adding that it relates to the effort to prevent cheating: "We have unfortunately seen this feature abused frequently."

That's gonna be a pretty big blow to players who have had access to Dune: Awakening through sharing over Steam from family members (and let's face it, pals), and it sounds like the disabling of this feature could last quite a long while—as in months, or potentially even until 2026.

"We apologize to our players who legitimately used this feature," Funcom said. "We are actively working on changes that will allow us to re-enable the system as soon as possible. While we don’t have an ETA to share at the moment, we are aiming to implement those changes within this year. We will let you know as soon as we have a date.

Funcom didn't specify what sorts of exploits we being used by players on Family Sharing, though members of the Discord speculate it could be by using alt accounts to access Landsraad vendors on servers controlled by the opposite faction, to camp chests with high-tier loot and nab it when the respawn timer expires, or enjoy twice the amount of fiefs and vehicles as normally allowed to single character.

As always, it sucks that people using a feature as it's intended will be the ones hurt most by it being disabled. Cheaters will always find another way to exploit, but a lot of innocent players have just had their days ruined.

"In addition to fixing the causes [of cheating], we have also taken some direct action against players who used exploits, banning hundreds of players and removing large amounts of exploited Solaris from the game," Funcom said. "These efforts are currently ongoing: our investigations continue and our banhammer has more work to do."