Have you ever been really excited about something? So excited that you just couldn't help but commit an international felony just to get it? As a 21-year-old gamer cut off a slice of bread for breakfast early in the morning of May 17, 2004,

a squad of German police officers raised their rifles at him.

Everything was not right. He'd gotten a little too excited. Hi, this is Malicious Life and I'm Ran Levy. Welcome to season 3 of our podcast.

When Valve first became a registered corporation, Gabe Newell had little more than small team and some big ideas.

In first pitching their first video game to publishers, he and co-founder Mike Harrington were mostly turned away.

From a design perspective, the proposed concept, a 3D first-person shooter horror game,

seemed too ambitious to reasonably expect of an upstopped group with no track record.

In one instance, Newell mentioned in a meeting with a publisher that his team was planning to use a skeletal animation system,

animating the game's characters by simulating bones and joints.

Immediately he was interrupted.

Okay, meetings over.

This was where Valve was at, a rookie hitter on the plate calling his shot into the upper deck.

Rudeness aside, that executive had reason to believe he was at worst the butt end of a joke or at best wasting his time. But on November 19th, 1998, Valve Corporation released a video game called House Life.

To some of you listening to me now, that name might not mean much.

To others, old-timers, such as myself, it holds a lot of weight. The first game ever made by the

valve cooperation is now remembered as one of the greatest video games of all time. On three separate occasions

PC gamer magazine has named Half Life the best video game ever made.

Pac-Man, Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, this is its class.

For its advances in graphics, gameplay mechanics, and narrative storytelling, it has to date sold around

10 million copies.

Suffice to say, house life was really, really good. For me, hearing the game's

signature soundtrack still sends shivers down my spine. So you can imagine why half a decade after the release of

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