Gabe Newell—often lovingly called Lord Gaben by the internet—is the co-founder and president of Valve Corporation, the company that owns Steam. He’s not just a CEO; he’s a legend who once personally answered a fan’s email about a broken game key at 3 AM. (Okay, that might be exaggerated, but the man has a reputation for being weirdly accessible for a tech deity.) Before Steam, Gabe was a Microsoft employee who helped create the first Windows operating systems. Yes, the guy who owns your game collection also helped make the blue screen of death possible. You’re welcome.
But here’s the wild part: Steam wasn’t even a store at first. It was a necessary evil to fix the nightmare of updating games like Counter-Strike and Half-Life. Imagine trying to patch a game in 2003—you had to download a 50MB file on dial-up and pray. Gabe and his team hated that so much they built Steam, supposedly in a frenzied weekend of pizza and caffeine. Today, that "band-aid" is worth billions and controls roughly 75% of the PC gaming market. Not bad for a fixer-upper.
