A developer received money from Valve for the development of a shooter several years ago, but he couldn’t get along with Gabe Newell.
Which game is it? On June 20, 2000, the first-person shooter Gunman Chronicles was released, based on the Half-Life engine. The game comes from the small, now-defunct developer studio Rewolf Software, founded by the American Herbert Flower.
Gunman Chronicles was originally conceived as a PvP shooter but was later turned into a single-player mod for Half-Life and then into a standalone game.
Today, you cannot purchase Gunman Chronicles on Steam or any other official distribution platforms. Even Flower himself is not exactly sure why that is, he revealed to PCGamer. He suspects that there are legal issues between the publisher Vivendi and Valve.
Valve helps but also has expectations
What role did Valve play? The individual developers of Rewolf Software initially worked on the game from all over the world, without an office. Flower himself lived and worked at the time in his parents’ basement and faced financial difficulties.
One of the developers, Banninga, approached Valve one day and asked the company for help due to financial difficulties, Flower recounts. Valve then provided the team with $20,000 and some goals they needed to achieve.
A year later, Valve offered that the entire team could work on the game at Valve’s office in Seattle, but the team was not entirely clear that Gabe’s plan was to finish the game quickly.
“Can’t wait to get out of the room with this guy.”
What was the relationship with Gabe Newell like? Flowers describes his relationship with the head of Valve and Steam to PCGamer as difficult: “My relationship with Gabe wasn’t really good.”
He then elaborates: “It’s not like we hated each other. It was like two people with bad breath. You’re like, ‘OK, I can’t wait to get out of the room with this guy.'”
Similar to Rewolf Software and Hubert Flowers, Valve also allegedly went through a difficult phase several years ago and was reportedly close to bankruptcy due to lawsuits with the publisher Vivendi, according to Gabe Newell: Gabe Newell reveals that Valve was once close to bankruptcy
