Haven't you seen the documentary for the twentieth anniversary of Half-Life 2? Well, you should. It's full of fabulous details, but beyond the technical and the creative, the truth is that the game had to navigate very turbulent legal waters, to the point that Valve came very close to disappearing, with Gabe Newell and Scott Lynch facing ruin. Fortunately, the story has a last-minute hero, an intern who found the key to turn the situation around…
The story takes us back to the beginning of the century: At that time, Sierra Entertainment had already been acquired and absorbed by Vivendi. Thanks to a pre-existing agreement, Vivendi had international distribution rights for Half-Life and its derivatives, but only in retail format. The problem arose when Vivendi began licensing copies of Counter-Strike to internet cafes in South Korea, an action that had no support in the original terms of the agreement.
Valve's response was more than mild: While it filed a lawsuit against Vivendi, all it sought was recognition of the fault and a basic amount (in the order of thousands of dollars) for legal costs. What did Vivendi do? Enter “nuclear mode”, generating a pile of counterclaims. Scott Lynch, COO of Valve, indicates that some elements in Vivendi were not so happy with the terms of the agreement, and the claim about the cybercafe license was the last straw. In Lynch's own words, Vivendi “started World War III”.
(Editor's note: Chapters 5 and 9)
Valve vs. Vivendi: The battle for the soul of Half-Life 2
Valve's legal representative, Karl Quackenbush, explains that Vivendi changed law firms, and ended up hiring another team in San Francisco, which basically wanted blood: They sought to cancel the 2001 agreement, total control over the intellectual property of Half-Life, and block the development of Steam, among other things. This included Gabe Newell and Lynch among the defendants. It wasn't enough to make Valve disappear; they also wanted to send both to bankruptcy, raising legal costs to an unsustainable point. Newell went as far as putting his house up for sale.
The legal battle with Vivendi continued until the release of Half-Life 2. Valve found other sources of funding, but the point was to convince the judge that they were right, and that Vivendi could not license Counter-Strike outside the agreement. The key was buried in millions of pages (emails, contracts, documents, etc.) from the “discovery process”… all in Korean. The most impressive thing of all is that it was found by an intern, a “summer associate” named Andrew, who besides being a native Korean speaker, had a major in the language. In essence, Andrew detected that the “Assistant General Manager” of Vivendi in South Korea had communicated with the general manager, to report that “had destroyed the documents related to the Valve case, as ordered”.
The nuclear legal war turned into Vivendi admitting in writing that it had destroyed evidence. The final agreement between the two parties came in April 2005, and Vivendi's distribution in all channels ended on August 31 of that year. Half-Life 2 swept everything in its path, receiving 39 “Game of the Year” awards.
Source: PC Gamer
