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Mentioned in the article, but the source is the excellent YouTube documentary Valve released for Half-Life 2's 20th Anniversary [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCjNT9qGjh4

While not a criminal case, the Stringer Bell rule strikes again.

It's food for thought that something as groundbreaking as HL2 and Steam almost didn't see the light of day and the developers only survived by the skin of their teeth. In some nearby universe the games industry looks very different and sometimes people go "remember Half-Life? It's a shame Valve went out of business and the sequel was canceled."

I wonder what other amazing things we missed out on because of political backstabbing, or one-sided corporate lawsuits, or crime and fraud? We'll never know, because those projects don't get documentaries made about them 20 years later.

I wonder if the summer intern got rewarded for this save

Can we appreciate that Vivendi Universalis went after Gabe personally and no one is in jail for this.

If you enjoy reading business biographies like me you'll find that gangster tactics like deployed by Vivendi against Valve are surprisingly common. The smaller business has essentially no recourse when faced with an opponent like Vivendi. The courts are unable to hold big businesses to account because (a) diffusion of responsibility and (b) when found guilty the fines are as threatening as a parking ticket.

In this specific case Gabe Newell fought and miraculously won, but gaben is the exception and most businesses are (rightly) afraid to fight Goliath and that's a big loss to society.

Vivendi was a big ruthless bogey in that era of gaming.

The devil is in the detail, I think in the age of LLMs this will become harder as docs can now be better scanned before they’re handed out.

Nowadays you'd just ask an LLM to read through those Korean emails.

I mean, all the intern did was comb through some documents in his native language. I’m sure if he weren’t there, they would’ve just hired a translator (much cheaper than lawyers). Not to disparage the work they did or anything.

The really remarkable “hero” here is the Korean junior executive who stupidly mentioned destroying evidence on the record.

My hate for Vivendi and his owner, Vincent Bolloré, grows every time I read about either of them. He is a known far-right billionaire attempting to get his hands on the most media he can, to push his fascist agenda in France. That his company uses scummy practices to bully smaller ones in court is not really surprising.

In an era of massive scale companies and giant projects, it's fascinating how often it feels like most of the success of a project or company's big successes ultimately hinge on the actions of a few key individuals in the right place at the right time - and it never fails to surprise me how little overlap these individuals and the actual actual company org charts share.

I wonder what happened to Andrew the intern.

TLDR: a summer intern who spoke Korean was able to find a single email in a million pages of document for a rather malicious counterlawsuit made against Valve because the other company, Vivendi was distributing Valve IP outside of the discussed regions and Valve sued them for that.