Gabe Newell suggested to a developer that his shooter be among the first games on Steam – but nothing came of it.
Which game is it? As the Polish developer Adrian Chmielarz recounts in an interview with PCGamesN, he once received an email from Gabe Newell, even before he launched Steam.
- Chmielarz is the creator of the first-person shooter Painkiller, which was released in 2004 and has since gained cult status among many gamers.
- The gameplay of Painkiller follows the premise of titles like Doom and Serious Sam: You slaughter your way through the armies of Lucifer as a solo fighter in purgatory to stop the ruler of Hell from advancing to Heaven and to gain entry to Heaven to reunite with your deceased partner.
- Throughout the game, you complete several levels per chapter, with a boss battle against one of Lucifer’s generals waiting at the end of each chapter.
Painkiller also featured a multiplayer mode with modes like Deathmatch and Capture-The-Flag, which closely resembled Quake and even had its own e-sports scene.
That was Newell’s request: According to Chmielarz, Newell suggested in an email at the time to offer Painkiller as one of the first games on Steam:
“I remember receiving an email from Gabe [Newell] – I don’t remember exactly when, but it was before the launch of Steam. He wrote: ‘Hey guys! We’re going to start this really small shop and we’d like to offer some games there, and we are fans of Painkiller. What do you think? Do you want to join us?'”
However, Chmielarz was not very convinced about the idea at the time, as he explains: “I thought to myself: ‘Uh, I don’t know…'”
That’s why Painkiller didn’t end up on Steam: The developer reports that he didn’t even have the decision-making power, even though he was unsure about it:
“Imagine: We had the opportunity to be among the very first games [on Steam], but we didn’t have the rights to Painkiller, so that was out of the question anyway. But I remember my honest reaction was something like ‘haha’. I was really indecisive!”
The rights to Painkiller were not with Chmielarz and the developer studio “People Can Fly” at the time of the shooter’s release, but with the publisher “DreamCatcher Interactive.” Since then, the rights to the brand have changed hands multiple times.
In the early days of Steam, enthusiasm for the platform was limited. Gabe Newell also mentioned that many companies did not believe in the success of Steam: Gabe Newell says, 99% of gaming companies believed Steam would fail because they saw a big problem
