A fun myth to hear about relates to a friend’s uncle working at Nintendo to get the scoop on secrets. But what if your buddy’s aunt actually did work at Valve, and his CD-burning gifts to you sparked Valve’s utilization of DRM decades ago? That’s apparently what happened, according to former Valve chief marketing officer Monica Harrington.
PC Gamer reports that Harrington told the unlikely Valve DRM origin story featuring her 19-year-old nephew at the Game Developers Conference. “At the time, consumer-level piracy was just becoming a real issue,” Harrington said. “My own nephew had just used a $500 check I’d sent him for school expenses and bought himself a CD-ROM replicator, so he sent me a lovely thank you note essentially saying how happy he was to copy and share games with his friends.”
Keep in mind that CDs were the distribution model for PC games decades ago, before digital storefronts existed. So the fact someone could easily rip a game and share unlimited copies with friends was a threat to companies. As such, Harrington credits her nephew’s antics for sparking Valve to act with a DRM strategy.
“Because of gamers like my nephew, we implemented an authentication scheme,” said Harrington. “Customers had to validate and register their copy with Valve directly. Soon gamers were flooding message boards, and they were saying, ‘The game doesn’t work.'”
Harrington added that Valve co-founder (and her ex-husband) Mike Harrington remembers it a bit differently, as he believes the company was working on DRM already. But Monica Harrington stresses that she was making a big deal about an authentication system to everyone at Valve after hearing about what her nephew did.
This isn’t the only story Monica Harrington shared about Valve’s early days at GDC. She also discussed the dramatic Half-Life deal that altered the fate of the company forever. Meanwhile, earlier this year, Valve seemingly banned any games that required watching paid advertisements to play.
Earlier this month, Valve’s digital storefront Steam broke a new concurrent-players record with over 41.2 million users.