Gabe Logan Newell, popularly known as Gabe Newell and Gaben (after his work email id) within the video gaming community, is considered as the 'God' of first person shooter (FPS) games as he is the creative mind behind the iconic "Half Life" franchise of FPS games.
After working with Microsoft for 13 years, Gabe and another Microsoft employee Mike Harrington left the company to found Valve Corporation in 1996. Soon after its foundation, Gabe came up with the idea of a first person shooter game inspired by another game "Quake."
The project eventually turned into the critically acclaimed video game "Half Life" in 1998 that won over 50 PC Game of the Year awards and inspired a number of future FPS games.
Valve, under leadership of Gabe, has produced some of the most acclaimed games of all times including "Counter Strike", "Team Fortress" and "Portal".
As the iconic video game personality celebrates his 53rd birthday on 3 November, here are some of his popular quotes that proves he is "A Name You Should Know" as mentioned by Forbes in 2010.
"Most people who end up being successful have good grades, but it's orthogonal - there's no extra information than if they put together a website and have bunch of fans who love coming and seeing what they're doing."
"The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting anti-piracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates."
"A lot of times I make people better by getting stupid, distracting, bureaucratic stuff off their desk. That's an incredibly easy way to make a senior person more productive."
"One of the things that's important about family is the narrative history they create for themselves."
"If you look at a multi-player game, it's the people who are playing the game who are often more valuable than all of the animations and models and game logic that's associated with it."
"The PC is successful because we're all benefiting from the competition with each other. If Twitter comes along, our games benefit. If Nvidia makes better graphics technology, all the games are going to shine. If we come out with a better game, people are going to buy more PCs."
Source: Brainy Quote