Valve is a critical player in the modern resurgence of VR. They are known for their friendly competitions and cooperation they had with Oculus in the early days of virtual reality spanning from July 2012 to March 20113. Blake Harris’ History of the Future does a great job of laying down a initial timeline (albeit without complete citations as well as an unknown amount of dramatization), but in my interview with Harris he also shared with me beyond very limited conversations with Valve’s Joe Ludwig and Alan Yates, he didn’t have any conversations with any current Valve employees. The only Valve representatives he was able to talk with were former Valve folks who left to work at Oculus. Harris had access to some e-mail correspondence between Oculus and Valve, but in the absence of Valve’s participation, the overall perspective captured in Harris’ book is heavily influenced by Facebook’s side of the story.
On Monday, May 23, 2016, Valve’s Alan Yates responded to a thread on Reddit titled “Oculus becoming bad for VR industry?” after Revive stopped working after an Oculus Update. Responding to eposnix’s comment that “Competition drives innovation and [the Oculus Rift is] the only reason the Vive has its feature set to begin with.” Yates chimed in to say,
While that is generally true in this case every core feature of both the Rift and Vive HMDs are directly derived from Valve’s research program. Oculus has their own [Computer Vision]-based tracking implementation and frensel lens design but the [Oculus Rift Consumer Version #1] is otherwise a direct copy of the architecture of the 1080p Steam Sight prototype Valve lent Oculus when we installed a copy of the “Valve Room” at their headquarters. I would call Oculus the first SteamVR licensee, but history will likely record a somewhat different term for it…
For me, this was a pretty explosive allegation, and on May 24, 2016 UploadVR’s Ian Hamilton wrote a piece called “Inside The Growing Rift Between Valve And Oculus” where he shows an image of Mark Zuckerberg trying out the Valve Room demo in Oculus’ offices on January 29, 2014 — just 55 days before Facebook’s deal to acquire Oculus was announced on March 25, 2014.
This blurry photo of a @brendaniribe presentation shows Zuckerberg trying "Valve prototype" before buying @oculus. pic.twitter.com/lFrm8ZrvY5
— Ian Hamilton (@hmltn) February 26, 2015
Did Zuckerberg know that he was demoing Valve’s technology here? Did the investors from Andreessen Horowitz know that they were trying out some of Valve’s technology when they came to demo the Valve Room demo at Oculus’ offices in Irvine, CA? Blake Harris reports in History of the Future that on October 31, 2013 Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Brian Cho & Gil Shafir “visited Irvine to check out the progress of Oculus. And over the course of several hours, the folks from Andreessen Horowitz found themselves quite impressed.”
Iribe was able to experience VR without any motion sickness after seeing the Valve Room demo at Valve’s offices in Bellvue, WA in September 2013. He was in the process of trying to raise a Series B round in his talk at the Gamer Insider Summit on October 17, 2013 where IGN reported that he said,
“I’ve gotten sick every time I’ve tried [Rift],” Iribe said. He stated that, after just a couple minutes, he feels ill and tends to stop using his company’s own device. “In the last couple weeks, I’ve tried a prototype internally where I did not get sick for the first time, and I stayed in there for 45 minutes.”
Again, it’s unclear under which contexts Iribe was sharing with people that this breakthrough “internal prototype” was actually Valve’s technology. Whether it was disclosed or not may be a moot point now, but what’s important is that Valve has been a crucial driver of innovation in VR, even to this day. However, Valve is a private company in every meaning of the word, and they have not talked much publicly about some of this history, especially when it comes to their past relationship with Oculus.
Valve News Network’s Tyler McVicker has been reporting on Valve for over 10 years now as a fan / investigative journalist / archivist / historian / digital archeologist. He’s got some deep insights into the history of the projects Valve has been working on, the culture of the company, and what motivating Valve to get into VR in the first place. So I wanted to talk to McVicker to get some deeper context on Valve, why they’re so hard to communicate with (he referred to this Steam Dev Days talk by Robin Walker which comprehensively explains Valve’s philosophy when it comes to “external communication”), how he’s able to break stories about Valve by hacking into game patches and Source 2 function calls, what he thinks happened between Valve and Oculus, why he thinks Abrash is the bad guy in this story, and some more about his personal experiences with Half-Life: Alyx, and the underlying motivations for why he does what he does in covering Valve.
LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE OF THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
TIMELINE OF VALVE’S COLLABORATION WITH OCULUS + VR Events
After I interviewed McVicker, I went through Harris’ History of the Future to record a specific timeline of the relationship between Oculus and Valve. Harris told me in my interview with him that he had to cut out a lot of information about the relationship between Oculus and Valve due to space considerations, but there’s actually a lot that’s on the public record about the cooperation and collaboration between Oculus and Valve. I didn’t buy my Oculus DK1 until January 1, 2014, and so I was not observing in real-time what was happening with VR between August 2012 and December 2013.
At GDC 2015, Valve was showing off the HTC Vive room-scale VR demos to developers and VIPs in the gaming industry. I was not able to get a demo slot at the time, but I was able to sneak in behind the scenes and take some photos of this mini museum that they had set up.
My full Twitter thread of these photos is here, and the dates are from Road to VR’s coverage who were able to get more dates at the time.
A 16-part visual history of @SteamVR Vive.
Original fiducial-based positional tracking used April Tag format, 1/16 pic.twitter.com/Mts7eUXrFQ— Kent Bye (Voices of VR) (@kentbye) March 10, 2015
Fiducial-based Positional Tracking – May 2012
Telescope Low-Persistence Prototype – January 2013
First Low-Persistence AMOLED Panel – January 2013
Team Fortress 2 “VR Mode” Shipped – March 2013
Early Low-Persistence Headset – April 2013
Early Laser Tracking System – September 2013
“The Room” Demo – September 2013
Desktop Dot Tracking and Controllers – October 2013
Steam VR Arrives and “The Room” Demo’d to Public – January 2014
First Laser Tracked Headset – May 2014
First Laser-Tracked Input – October 2014
V minus-1 Headset – November 2014
VR Controller Prototype – December 2014
Miniaturized Laser Base Station – February 2015
HTC Vive Dev Headset – March 2015
NOTE: I originally posted this timeline on August 28, 2020, but I will be updating it as I find more information and context.
July 26-27, 2012
Oculus’ Palmer Luckey & Michael Antonov go to Valve to meet with Michael Abrash and Gabe Newell and show them an early Oculus Rift Prototype in order to get a quote for their Kickstarter Video.
(History of the Future, pg 114-129)
Late July 2012
Days before Oculus Kickstarter Launch, Valve’s Michael Abrash & Gabe Newell submit video testimony for the Oculus Kickstarter pitch video.
(History of the Future, pg 133)
Aug. 01, 2012
Oculus Kickstarter launches
Archival link of first day: https://web.archive.org/web/20120801212942/https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-step-into-the-game
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-step-into-the-game
12:14 PM · Aug 1, 2012
First Oculus Tweet from @Oculus3D
We've reached Kickstarter our goal in our very first day! Thank you all for the support!
— Meta Quest (@MetaQuestVR) August 1, 2012
August 2, 2012
Thank you!
First blog post from Oculus after reaching their Kickstarter goal
https://www.oculus.com/blog/thank-you/
5:50 PM · August 2, 2012
Wow– We've reached $1 million in less than 36 hours! Thank you so much for your support.
— Meta Quest (@MetaQuestVR) August 3, 2012
August 3, 2012
“Virtual Insanity” QuakeCon 2012 Panel featuring Oculus’ Palmer Luckey, Valve’s Michael Abrash, & id’s John Carmack. Within 18 months they’ll all be working at Oculus.
Abrash originally started with AR, but says that VR is here now and VR is a subset of AR. Abrash also announces that Valve is “doing in R&D into VR & AR at Valve.”
YouTube Video posted Aug 5, 2012
August 9, 2012
Quakecon Recap and Rift News from Oculus’ blog
https://www.oculus.com/blog/quakecon-recap-and-rift-news/
August 10, 2012
Virtual Insanity at QuakeCon blog post from Michael Abrash on Valve’s site:
I should have posted this sooner, but it’s been a little crazy. It was a blast getting up on the stage with John and Palmer and talking about VR, but it was more as well. As I said during the panel, it felt like this might be one of those seminal moments when the world changes, the point at which a new technology that will change our lives started down the runway for takeoff. Of course, it’s entirely possible that that won’t happen, but it feels like the pieces are falling into place: affordable, wide-field-of-view, lightweight HMDs that can deliver a great experience; inexpensive tracking (cameras, gyros, accelerometers, magnetometers); and, critically, an existing software ecosystem – first-person shooters – that can readily move to VR (although that’s just a start; many other experiences more uniquely suited to VR will emerge once VR is established as a viable consumer technology). VR can only take off if all three pieces are working well, and we’re getting close on all three fronts. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but the remaining issues seem solvable with time and attention, and once they’re solved, we may be off on a long, transformative journey. Where that ends, I have no idea, but I’m looking forward to the ride – and I think it might have started at QuakeCon.
August 14, 2012
Oculus press release
“Former Gaikai and Scaleform Officer, Brendan Iribe, Joins Oculus as CEO”
Both Iribe and Antanov were seed investors of Oculus and technically already co-founders, but this was announced during the Kickstarter campaign and before Iribe had left his previous job.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120818143925/http://oculusvr.com/press_release_081412/
October 2012
Two members of Valve’s AR/VR team Joe Ludwig & Tom Forsyth start to port over Team Fortress 2 over to VR. “What they wanted to do was port an existing Valve game to work in VR.” It’d be cool, but “it would be a great learning experience in what works, and what does not, in current VR.”
(History of the Future, pg 220-221)
Jan 6, 2013
Oculus PR reps Jim Redner & Eric Schumacher start bringing journalists to their Venetian hotel room for the Oculus CES 2013 demos.
(History of the Future, pg 210)
By the end of CES, Oculus had won a ton of awards at CES 2013 without even having a spot on the showroom floor. They’d be able to raise a $16M Series A round later in the year.
The Verge – Best in Show, Best in Gaming, Reader’s Choice
IGN – Best Prototype
Wired – Best of CES
Laptop Magazine – Best Gaming Device
PCMag – Best Gaming Gear
GameFront – Best of CES
https://www.oculus.com/blog/oculus-rift-at-ces-2013-recap/
Jan 8, 2013
Valve starts to promote early hardware experiments at CES 2013.
The Verge: Valve’s Steam Box gets big push at CES as Gabe Newell meets with major hardware partners
https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/8/3851740/steam-box-inches-closer-to-reality-ces-gabe-newell
Jan 8 2013
Gabe at CES talks about some of Valve’s hardware efforts saying to the Verge: “You can always sell the Best box.”
Valve News Network’s Tyler McVicker says that Valve as a company likes to create the absolute best technology and experiences that they can.
Exclusive interview: Valve’s Gabe Newell on Steam Box, biometrics, and the future of gaming
https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/8/3852144/gabe-newell-interview-steam-box-future-of-gaming
January 2013
Oculus’ COO Malamed calculates with the burndown that they’ll run out of money in 6 months from the $2.5M seed investment + $2.5M Kickstarter money, and this catalyzes Oculus CEO & seed investor Brendan Iribe to start fundraising VC money.
(History of the Future, pg 249)
February 11, 2013
Luckey, Iribe, Patel visit Valve
Valve’s Joe Ludwig & Michael Abrash will be presenting at GDC 2013 to communicate that developing for VR is hard.
Again, it’s unclear when Valve first received a Rift Prototype to do the TF 2 port, which started in October.
Antonov, Mitchell, & Luckey were also presenting at GDC 2013
(History of the Future, pg 250)
Feb 12, 2013
Valve’s Jeri Ellsworth was working on AR at Valve when she was suddenly fired, as well as 25-30% of Valve’s staff are laid off.
Wow. I suddenly have a lot of spare time.
— Jeri Ellsworth 🐀 (@jeriellsworth) February 13, 2013
(History of the Future, pg 250)
March 8 2013
Brenan Iribe is raising money and pitched Chris Dixon from Andreessen Horowitz.
(History of the Future, pg 258)
March 11 2013
Iribe pitched Marc Andreessen directly, who asked him, “How long do you think it’s going to take you to solve motion sickness?”
Iribe didn’t know, and Andreessen Horowitz passes on investing in their Series A. They may be interested again if Oculus ever finds a viable solution for VR motion sickness.
(History of the Future, pg 258)
March 18, 2013
Announcement of Team Fortress 2 will have a new “VR Mode” that “supports the Oculus Rift, available this week!”
https://www.oculus.com/blog/team-fortress-2-in-the-oculus-rift/?locale=en_US
March 18, 2013
Article in Engadget “Valve’s Joe Ludwig on the uncertain future of virtual reality and partnering with Oculus”
[Reporter Ben Gilbert is] “the first anyone outside of Valve will see of the company’s VR efforts thus far.” Ludwig says, “We think that both augmented and virtual reality are going to be a huge deal over the next several years.”Regarding Oculus: “We’re friends. They help us out with hardware and we help them out with software,” Ludwig says.
“No money changed hands; Oculus provided development kits, and Valve’s providing Team Fortress 2’s VR Mode. The casual nature of that relationship is reflected in Valve’s attitude about releasing the new mode — Team Fortress 2’s VR-enabling update in the coming weeks is essentially a giant beta test in which Valve will measure and analyze the way TF2 players interact with virtual reality hardware.”
“We don’t have any hardware,” Ludwig says when asked about working with Oculus and why Valve didn’t create its own VR headset. “We’ve done a bunch of experiments with various bits of hardware, but we don’t have a display that we can ship. Oculus is actually out there doing this, and so we’re partnering with them because they have the hardware and we have the software and we can help each other out. And we can both learn a lot in the process.”
https://www.engadget.com/2013-03-18-valve-joe-ludwig-interview.html
March 20, 2013
VR @TeamFortress 2 update now live on @steam_games! http://t.co/x0aa15Qzbk… Make sure to add " -vr" to the command line to enable VR mode!
— Meta Quest (@MetaQuestVR) March 20, 2013
Mar 21, 2013
Oculus Rift Development Kit Unboxing
March 26, 2013
Oculus blog: “Valve announced the new “VR Mode” for Team Fortress 2 last week and we brought the latest Oculus-ready build of the war-themed hat simulator with us to GDC. One of the coolest looking games in Valve’s arsenal, the feeling of actually being Heavy, looking down and seeing the mini-gun in your hands, is worth the trip alone.”
They also promote two of Valve’s GDC talks: “Valve is also giving two talks on virtual reality you won’t want to miss”
https://www.oculus.com/blog/oculus-at-gdc-2013/
March 27, 2013
“Running the VR Gauntlet – VR Ready, Are You?” with Michael and Nate
Wednesday, March 27 @ 2:00PM – 3:00PM (Room 302, South Hall)
Mitchell mentions Valve’s TF 2 Demo at Oculus’ GDC Booth, but also demoing Hawking Mech game.
March 28, 2013
“Virtual Reality: The Holy Grail of Gaming” with Palmer and Brendan
Thursday, March 28 @ 11:30AM – 12:30PM (Room 301, South Hall)
Oculus VR @ GDC 2013: Q&A with Palmer Luckey
[posted April 17, 2013]
March 28, 2013
“Why Virtual Reality Is Hard (And Where It Might Be Going)” presented by Michael Abrash
Thursday, March 28 @ 5:30PM – 5:55PM (Room 2014, West Hall)
March 28, 2013
“What We Learned Porting Team Fortress 2 to Virtual Reality” presented by Joe Ludwig
Thursday, March 28 @ 6:05PM – 6:30PM (Room 2014, West Hall)
Developed TF 2 using the Nvis ST-50 & Rift Prototype HMD
NDI Tracker cost $40,000. at (~30min) 1/10 mm accuracy 300 Hz
March 29, 2013
And so it begins: Oculus Rift Development Kits are officially shipping! Read all the details here: http://t.co/wJnXv8ekaJ
— Meta Quest (@MetaQuestVR) March 29, 2013
After May 7, 2013
Recently fired Valve employee Jeri Ellsworth tells Luckey & Patel she’s starting Technical Illusions rather than come work at Oculus.
(History of the Future, pg 288)
6:38 PM · May 9, 2013
It's OFFICIAL. Big thanks to #valve @joeludwig for Half Life 2 VR Beta support! #HL2 #oculus https://t.co/biaUtnLEt6
— Meta Quest (@MetaQuestVR) May 10, 2013
May 16, 2013
Valve’s Joe Ludwig IGNITE TALK in Seattle: The second coming of Virtual Reality
May 22, 2013
I joined Oculus! http://t.co/OJCuUpPpLu
— Tom Forsyth (TODO: care about the Debt Ceiling) (@tom_forsyth) May 22, 2013
Announcing Valve’s Tom Forsyth left Valve to work for Oculus
https://www.oculus.com/blog/meet-tom-forsyth-and-steve-lavalle-science-blog-nates-talk-at-gdc-and-unity-trial-extensions/
Forsyth on why he left Valve:
“Because when it’s all said and done,” Forsyth explained, “I just… I like shipping stuff… But the real big payoff is seeing people use you thing. And being a graphics engine person, my job is to bring a fake world into realization. I enjoy watching people use my stuff.”
(History of the Future, pg 292-293)
May 30, 2013
Oculus VR @ GDC 2013: Behind the Scenes
June 17, 2013
Oculus announces series A funding of $16 million
Oculus VR says plans won’t change, as it raises $16 million in venture capital for its virtual reality dreams
https://www.theverge.com/2013/6/17/4439608/oculus-series-a-funding-15-million/in/3631187
June 21 2013
Email from Carmack starts official negotiations for him to join as Oculus CTO.
(History of the Future, pg 297)
July 2013
Iribe & Patel travel to Korea, and showed off “something that ‘shouldn’t work’: a 90 Hz Samsung phone that Valve’s Monty Goodson had hacked to get workin in low-persistence mode” as a proof of concept that Goodson wanted Iribe to show to Samsung.
(History of the Future, pg 299)
August 7 2013
Oculus blog: John Carmack Joins Oculus as CTO announced
Carmack says: “I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming – the intensity of the first person experience, LAN and internet play, game mods, and so on. Duct taping a strap and hot gluing sensors onto Palmer’s early prototype Rift and writing the code to drive it ranks right up there. Now is a special time. I believe that VR will have a huge impact in the coming years, but everyone working today is a pioneer. The paradigms that everyone will take for granted in the future are being figured out today; probably by people reading this message. It’s certainly not there yet. There is a lot more work to do, and there are problems we don’t even know about that will need to be solved, but I am eager to work on them. It’s going to be awesome!”
https://www.oculus.com/blog/john-carmack-joins-oculus-as-cto/
September 2013
Abrash tells Iribe “we have somethin in the office at Valve that you’re gonna want to see…”
Iribe goes up to Valve to see the Valve Room demo, at the time they were calling it AtmanVR (by Atman Binstock).
Iribe was in VR for 30-45 minutes and he didn’t get motion sickness, and he’d start raving about his experience of presence.
(History of the Future, pg 307-310)
September 2013
Abrash offered to give Iribe a ride to the airport after seeing the Valve Room demo, which would “give him some one-on-one time to take Abrash’s pulse about maybe leaving Valve and coming up to work at Oculus. Over the past year, Iribe had half-heartedly floated the idea on several occasions.” Iribe tells Abrash that he needs him and Binstock at Oculus. “I need both of you guys at Oculus championing this thing with me. So what will it take to make that happen?”
[Apparently, Iribe had already been trying to poach Abrash for a while. It’d take another 6 months or so for him to be successfull.]
(History of the Future, pg 309)
September 2013
Abrash was not interested in making a move “at this time” and tells Iribe, “You know, Brendan, I think the company that’s going to make VR really successful is going to be a big company. Because the capital that’s going to be required to do the custom displays, the custom hardware, the custom sensor systems, and all this work – to build out the full headset – it’s going to be very expensive to really do this right.”
(History of the Future, pg 310)
September 2013
Abrash told Iribe that Microsoft had been spending hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps billions, on HoloLens, and it “wouldn’t even be consumer ready for years!”
[NOTE: HoloLens wasn’t publicly announced until January 21, 2015, and when Abrash was asked directly during Quakecon if major companies where working on developing AR/VR platforms he simply said that major companies will be interested in it.]
(History of the Future, pg 310)
September 2013
Iribe gets back to Oculus and emails the exec team about “Valve’s Holy Grail” – created a VR experience with “zero simulator sickness” “I’d like a group of us to visit Valve and experience the demo first hand.”
(History of the Future, pg 311)
October 2, 2013
Iribe proposes a tech trade to Abrash & Binstock: “We can send over single 120 Hz and dual 90 Hz samples, dev boards with screens, and our screens for the Note 3 driver” in exchange for “one of Atman’s VR room demos.”
(History of the Future, pg 312)
~October 3, 2013
Iribe hears back from Abrash about the tech trade. “Abrash thought the trade he had offered with regard to the Note 3. Abash thought this could work, but also wanted similar assets for Samsung’s S4. Iribe was amenable to that. Over the next week, Iribe and Abrash negotiated a trade. Valve — after signing an NDA with Samsung — would get Oculus’ driver specs and datasheets for the Note 3 and S4; and in exchange, someone from Valve would head down to Oculus and install their “VR Room.”
(History of the Future, pg 313)
October 9, 2013
Internal Oculus Iribe email to former Valve employee Forsyth regarding VR tracking systems: “nothing I’ve seen works nearly as well as what I saw at Valve and we simply don’t seem to have the bandwidth to get it there.” Forsyth pushes back on Iribe saying, “We need to strike a balance somewhere between our mad rush to ship something and Valve’s mad rush to never ship anything ever.”
(History of the Future, pg 314)
October 17, 2013
On October 17, Iribe is so excited about the Valve Room demo that he talks about during a talk during the Games Insider Summit. He describes the tech as “a prototype internally” implying that it’s Oculus technology developed in-house.
“I’ve gotten sick every time I’ve tried [Rift],” Iribe said. He stated that, after just a couple minutes, he feels ill and tends to stop using his company’s own device. “In the last couple weeks, I’ve tried a prototype internally where I did not get sick for the first time, and I stayed in there for 45 minutes.”
Oculus: Motion-Sickness is Solved, 4K ‘Not Far Away’
https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/10/18/oculus-motion-sickness-is-solved-4k-not-far-away
October 17, 2013
Again, either the news org isn’t providing enough context or Iribe was deliberately being oblique.
“In fact, even he gets sick when he uses it, though he says it’s getting much better as they work on it. With the newest update to the headset, he says he’s finally getting to be able to use it.”
“I was able to stay in it for 45 minutes,” he said. “Usually I can’t stay in it for more than two minutes.”
CEO Promises Oculus Rift Won’t Make You Sick
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2013/10/17/ceo-promises-oculus-rift-wont-make-you-sick/#257556039715
October 17, 2013
After he gave his Gamer Insider Summit speach claiming that motion sickness has been solved, “as soon as Iribe stepped off the stage and turned on his phone: he received a message from Brian Cho, one of the partners at Andreessen Horowitz.”
“Cho was at the Summit and had been intrigued by Iribe’s talk. If motion sickness had really been solved, then perhaps Andreessen Horowitz could play a role in Oculus’ series B.”
“Shortly after receiving Cho’s email, Iribe wrote back to say, ‘We have a new prototype in the office which you guys really need to see. It ties everything together for a comfortable experience that proves VR is very close to mass market ready.’ From there, Iribe reconnected with Chris Dixon and then directly with Andreessen, who replied: “We’re ready to engage.”
[Note: Again, unclear as to whether or not these investors know that some of it is not their tech.]
(History of the Future, pg 316-317)
~October 2013
Binstock installed a setup of Valve’s VR room demo in an empty office at Oculus HQ in Irvine, CA with QR-code fiducial markers “By the end of the day, installation of this demo was complete. And though, going forward, guests to Oculus HQ would be given tours of what they were told was called the Valve Room…” but also internally referred to as “Temple of the Shitting Bird.”
(History of the Future, pg 317-318)
October 31, 2013
Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Brian Cho & Gil Shafir “visited Irvine to check out the progress of Oculus. And over the course of several hours, the folks from Andreessen Horowitz found themselves quite impressed.”
(History of the Future, pg 319)
Dixon would later cite five reasons why Andreessen Horowitz invested in Oculus:
- the technology
- the quality of the team
- the hand-controller prototypes Luckey had been working on
- an hour-plus meeting with Carmack
- a demo of the Valve Room
(History of the Future but no specific citation provided by Harris, pg 319)
“We are fully converted believers,” Andreessen emailed Iribe.
[Their concerns over motion sickness in VR where alleviated once seeing the Valve Room’s proof of concept, but again, did they know some of it wasn’t their tech?]
(History of the Future, pg 319)
November 5, 2013
Andreessen emails Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg – “Have you seen Oculus?… Blew my mind wide open.” After talking to Oculus CTO Carmack he thought, “I wanted to just give all my money to him on the spot.”
Dixon tells Iribe that want to “correct that mistake” of passing the first time, and led a $75M Series B funding round.
(History of the Future, pg 319)
Nov 19, 2013
Andreessen put Zuckerberg in touch with Iribe. Short call between Iribe and Zuckerberg asking about the “killer app?” Iribe says gaming & communication.
(History of the Future, pg 319)
Late 2013
Valve and Oculus pushed each other to innovate on tracking: “many at Oculus relished the chance to go head-to-head with Valve. And that chance came in late 2013 when – in a series of meetups that Nirav Patal affectionaly dubbed “bake-offs” — the two companies compared positional tracking systems.”
Oculus DovTrack vs Valve’s ProTrack.
“The net result: by almost every relvant metric (i.e., distance, precision, FOV), Oculus’s DovTrack was the winner.”
(History of the Future, pg 321)
Dec 12, 2013
Oculus raises $75 million to jump-start the virtual reality business [with Andreessen Horowitz leading the investment.]
https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/12/5205852/oculus-raises-75-million-to-jumpstart-the-virtual-reality-business
Late 2013
Former Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka worked at Facebook and knew Andreessen, and asked “if he should go chat with the guys at Oculus.” Reply was “Yeah… You should definitely meet Brendan.” He got in touch, and made plans to visit Irvine to see the Valve Room demo.
(History of the Future, pg 322)
January 15, 2014
3:00p: Robin Walker “Community and Communication in Games-As-Services (Steam Dev Days 2014)”
Recommended by Valve News Network’s Tyler McVicker, this Steam Dev Days presentation by Robin Walker does an amazing job describing Steam’s philosophy of communication focused primarily on their customers of gamers.
Jan 16 2014
3:00 to 3:30p: Michael Abrash “What VR Could, Should, and Almost Certainly Will Be Within Two Years”
PDF: http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%20Days%202014.pdf
Abrash spoke about the need to share technologies with other companies:
Abrash: “Valve’s goal is to enable great VR for the PC. So we’ve shared what we’ve learned through our R&D with Oculus. We’ve shown them our prototypes and demos. We’ve explained how our hardware works. And we’ve provided them with feedback on their hardware design. By showing them a prototype with low persistence, we convinced them of it’s importance. And the lack of blur in Crystal Cove is a direct result of that. We’ve collaborated with them on tracking as well. And we’re continuing to work with them to improve tracking, displays, lenses, and calibration. And we’re excited about where they’re headed.”
Jan 16 2014
3:30 to 4:00p: Palmer Luckey “Porting Games to Virtual Reality” at Steam Dev Days on
Luckey says, “Some of you might have already seen Valve’s VR demo… and it’s probably the best consumer virtual reality system in the world right now.”
January 16, 2014
4:30p: “Virtual Reality and Steam” talk at Steam Dev Days by Joe Ludwig
Joe Ludwig announces Steam VR API during his Steam Dev Days talk, which apparently upset Oculus. According to the dramatized account in History of the Future, Oculus says that Valve was saying to developers “Why write your game for Oculus when you can just use our platform instead?” Oculus wasn’t happy. “It was as if they had spent the last eighteen months creating a toolkit, and now Valve was essentially offering a toolkit of toolkits.”
(History of the Future pg 326)
~January 2014
After Ondrejka sees the room demo at Oculus HQ in Irvine, he tells Zuckerberg, “Their current tech is the best I’ve seen by quite a bit. But you have to actually go down and see the Room demo they have in Irvine.”
“Zuckerberg was intrigued… but still not enough to rearrange his schedule.”
[The fidicial markers and calibration of the Room demo makes it impossible to travel around easily, and so Zuckerberg is opting for a demo of the DK2 precursor of the Crystal Cove prototype that won so many awards at CES 2013.]
(History of the Future, pg 326)
January 23, 2014
Iribe flys to Menlo Park to demo the Crystal Cove VR HMD to Mark Zuckerberg, Ondrejka, FB CTO Mike “Schrep” Schroepfer, and FB VP of Product Chris Cox.
Ondrejka says, “And if you liked that, you gotta get down to Irvine and go check out ‘the Room’ demo.”
“Zuckerberg agreed it was important that he make time to visit soon.”
(History of the Future, pg 326-327)
January 29, 2014
Zuckerberg visits Oculus Headquarters in Irvine, CA.
“With limited time, Zuckerberg demoed the Room, checked out some prototypes of DK2.”
[Again, it’s unclear as to whether it was disclosed that the Room demo was Valve’s technology or not.]
(History of the Future, pg 328-329)
January 30, 2014
Iribe dinner with Zuckerberg who “elevated the conversation from collaboration to acquisition”
(History of the Future, pg 329)
January 30-31, 2014
Oculus execs deliberated and initially “didn’t have much interest in selling the company,” but then over the next couple of days they were open to the idea if the price was right.
(History of the Future, pg 331)
February 2, 2014
Iribe tells the board “We told them we’d rather build than sell unless it was for 4 [billion]. Pretty sure they’ll pass for now.”
(History of the Future, pg 331)
Feb 1, 2014
Zuckerberg email “I’m disappointed the conversation with your investors has increased your price expectations to a point where it may not make sense to discuss futher.”
(History of the Future, pg 332)
Feb 15, 2014
Zuckerberg tries the VR demos at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab with Jeremy Bailenson, and then texts Amin Zoufonoun “I just went to this VR lab at Stanford and it was totally awesome. It also confirmed to me that Oculus is miles ahead of everyone else…”
~February 2014
Iribe and Mitchell travel to Bellevue, WA to visit Valve’s Abrash & Binstock. “Over the next couple of hours, Iribe and Mitchell pitched the deal hard [for them to come join Oculus], offering equity, autonomy, and the chance to actually ship an incredible product.” They couldn’t convince either of them, and “So, not long after, Iribe decided it was time to call in some reinforcements. Chris Dixon and Marc Andreessen… They flew up and helped Iribe and Mitchell make Oculus’s case over a meeting with Abrash and Binstock at the Seattle Hyatt.”
Again, neither Abrash or Binstock decided to join Oculus yet.
(History of the Future, pg 334-335)
~February / March 2014
“Meanwhile, Abrash and Binstock were increasingly feeling like they were wasting their time at Valve. They both appreciated the freedom that the company had given them to explore virtual reality, but as each became more invested in this technology, it was harder to ignore the fact that this investment did not seem mutual. That, financially speaking, Valve just wasn’t willing to commit much to VR. And after about 18 months of working with this technology, Abrash and Binstock felt like Valve was perpetually dithering and it was time for them to piss or get off the pot.”
(History of the Future, pg 342-343)
First week of March 2014
Abrash and Binstock spent the first week of March meeting with Gabe Newell and Valve’s board of directors to find out if Valve wanted to actively “push forward a VR revolution” and to get some “assurance that this work they had been doing was headed somewhere.”
(History of the Future, pg 343)
Second week of March 2014
“The following week, in a surprise to most, Atman Binstock decided to leave Valve and accept Iribe’s offer to join Oculus.”
Binstock says “Valve is like this jolly fat man who just keeps getting more money and jollier but isn’t willing to take any risks. They aren’t pushing for VR to happen; in fact, I’m not even sure if they care at all whether VR succeeds or fails. Whereas Oculus is different. Oculus is this rocket that is either going to deliver VR or explode spectacularly. And I want to do everything in my power to help ensure the former.”
(History of the Future, pg 343)
March 10, 2014
Iribe emails Gabe Newell:
“Sorry if we caused pain. We love Valve and want to maintain an awesome relationship with you guys. You’re an inspiration to me, Palmer, and the crew. There’s no one we’d rather change the world with…”
(History of the Future, pg 343)
March 11, 2014
Newell emails Iribe
“Yep, we look forward to continuing to work with you and Atman. I’m moving onto the VR team for a bit.”
(History of the Future, pg 343)
March 11, 2014
Oculus blog announcement: Welcome to Atman Binstock Oculus’ Chief Architect
“Atman was one of the lead engineers and driving forces behind Valve’s VR project, creating the ‘VR Room’ demo that garnered so much excitement at Steam Dev Days.”
https://www.oculus.com/blog/welcome-atman-binstock-chief-architect/?locale=en_US
March 16, 2014
Iribe & Carmack visit Zuckerberg’s home after Zuckerberg invited them via email “so they could talk in person about an acquisition… He ended with five words that Iribe loved hearing: I WON’T WASTE YOUR TIME.” After hearing Carmack’s vision, “Zuckerberg wanted to do a deal.”
(History of the Future, pg 344)
March 19, 2014
GDC 2014: Oculus Rift Developer Kit 2 (DK2) Pre-orders Start Today for $350, Ships in July
https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-rift-developer-kit-2-dk2-pre-order-release-date-specs-gdc-2014/
~March 19-24
Abrash resigns from Valve, but doesn’t tell Iribe until the day of the Facebook acquisition on March 25, 2014. “Abrash texted Iribe with some rather big news of his own: days earlier, he had resigned from Valve.”
(History of the Future, pg 361)
March 24, 2014
“Finally, after four nearly sleepless days of negotiation, it appeared a deal would be reached.”
(History of the Future, pg 349)
March 25, 2014, 2:30 pm
Mark Zuckerberg Facebook post·”I’m excited to announce that we’ve agreed to acquire Oculus VR, the leader in virtual reality technology.”
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10101319050523971
March 25, 2014
Facebook to Acquire Oculus
https://about.fb.com/news/2014/03/facebook-to-acquire-oculus/
2:31 PM · Mar 25, 2014
BREAKING: Facebook announces it has reached agreement to acquire virtual reality tech company Oculus for a total of approx. $2B. $FB
— CNBC (@CNBC) March 25, 2014
March 25, 2014
Chris Dixon on Oculus: “I’ve seen a handful of technology demos in my life that made me feel like I was glimpsing into the future. The best ones were: the Apple II, the Macintosh, Netscape, Google, the iPhone, and – most recently – the Oculus Rift.”
https://cdixon.org/2014/03/25/oculus
March 25, 2014
Abrash calls Iribe and tells him he resigned from Valve, and then Iribe tried to convince him to join Oculus. Abrash asked to talk to Zuckerberg because “he wants to hear [Facebook’s] true commitment to VR.”
Shortly afterwards, Abrash “agreed to become Oculus’s chief scientist.”
(History of the Future, pg 361)
March 28, 2014
Oculus blog: Introducing Michael Abrash, Oculus Chief Scientist
Fast-forward fourteen years. I’m at Valve – which started its existence by licensing the Quake source code – looking for the next big platform shift, and I conclude that it’s augmented reality. Thanks to Valve’s unique structure, I’m able to start working on that, along with several other interested people, including Atman Binstock, who I recruited over coffee at St. James Espresso in Kirkland; Atman is thinking about moving to Paris and writing a debugger, but finally decides to join up. John, meanwhile, is poking at virtual reality, seeing if it’s finally feasible. He sends me mail on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of Quake’s release, saying that he has a feeling that something really big is just around the corner, something bigger than anything that’s happened so far. He’s talking about VR.
Then two things happen at about the same time. On one path, Palmer develops his first VR prototype, John and Palmer Luckey connect, Oculus forms and its Kickstarter is wildly successful, DK1 ships, and John becomes Oculus CTO. Meanwhile, I read Ready Player One, strongly recommend it to several members of the AR group, and we come to the conclusion that VR is potentially more interesting than we thought, and far more tractable than AR. We switch over to working on VR just as Palmer’s homebrew project is morphing into Oculus.
From that point, both VR paths have been pretty well documented, Oculus’s in this blog, in the press, and all over the Internet, and Valve’s in my blog and talks. The end result, a year and a half later, is a VR system that can create a sense of presence – the feeling, below the conscious level, that you really are someplace. This is an experience that no one except a few researchers using awkward, hugely expensive equipment had ever had, but within the next couple of years it should be available in a comfortable form factor at a consumer price. In the space of two years, a relative handful of people at two companies, none of them VR experts at the start, somehow managed to resurrect VR from the trash heap of technologies-that-never-were and make it the most exciting technology around.
https://www.oculus.com/blog/introducing-michael-abrash-oculus-chief-scientist/
~March-April 2014
Blake Harris attributes Iribe saying, “We’re not just putting together the best VR team on the planet, but we’re cutting off Valve’s head and offering it to Zuckerberg.” *
* There’s a footnote from Harris says, “Iribe does not recall making this comment. ‘I always maintain a very respectable, good relationship with Valve.'” he says. “And I didn’t make comments like ‘cutting off their head.'”
(History of the Future, pg 362)
Post-March 2014
Valve News Network’s Tyler McVicker says it’s hard to get solid information about what was happening between March 2014 to March 2015 at Valve in my interview. See the hardware history pictures listed above that were shown at Valve’s demo area at GDC 2015.
May 2014
Valve goes on to collaborate with HTC to create the HTC Vive.
~October 20, 2014
Valve gathered devs in Seattle to a secret meeting to get early access to Vive dev kits, and for them to build the room-scale experiences that would premiere at GDC 2015.
https://www.engadget.com/2015-03-10-valve-htc-vr-owlchemy-indie-games.html
March 1 2015
HTC Vive is announced at Mobile World Congresss
March 4 2015
HTC Vive demos at Valve’s GDC area.
Please let me know if there’s other information that should be included in this timeline, or if you’d like to speak to me or do a Voices of VR interview about your stories from this period.
LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE OF THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. So Facebook has been doing a lot of different things over the last week, and a big question that comes up is, who's going to be a viable competitor to what Facebook is doing? Is Valve going to be able to be able to do anything in the VR space that's going to be any sort of viable market competition, especially when it comes to standalone? There's also a lot of deep questions around the history of the evolution of the technology itself when it comes to the relationship between Valve and Facebook, and there's a lot of that story that still hasn't exactly been told. I remember May 23, 2016, Alan Yates, he's a hardware engineer that is at Valve, he posted to Reddit, this was in the aftermath of Oculus shipping some update, Revive stopped working, and then they're like, oh my gosh, now Facebook, who bought out Oculus, is going to start trying to eliminate any type of access from third parties into their system. And then someone wrote a post on Reddit, is Oculus bad for the VR ecosystem? And Alan Yates said, what is generally true is that every core feature of both the Rift and the Vive HMDs are directly derived from Valve's research program. Oculus has their own computer vision-based tracking limitation in Fresnel Lint's design, but the CV-1 is otherwise a direct copy of the architecture of the 1080p StreamSight prototype Valve Lint Oculus when we installed a copy of the Valve Room at their headquarters. I would call Oculus the first SteamVR license, but history will likely record a somewhat different term for it. So I think a lot of people within the VR community were like, whoa, wait, we knew that there's maybe some sort of cooperation happening between Valve and Oculus, but yet we didn't necessarily know that it went to that degree, because up to this point, all the specifics and details of those interaction and collaboration weren't necessarily all reported on. There's photos that Ian Hamilton had posted in the aftermath showing Mark Zuckerberg actually doing a room demo, and it's like, whoa, wait, that's Valve's technology. Did Zuckerberg know that he was seeing Valve technology when he bought Oculus? Like, what kind of situation was going on there? There's actually quite a lot of information in the public record in terms of what the relationship between Valve and Oculus was, starting from 2012 all the way up to when Facebook bought Oculus. I got my Oculus DK1 on January 1st, 2014, and there was a lot of stuff that happened in 2013 that I wasn't paying attention to. And so part of what happened in this conversation that I have with Valve News Network, Catalyze me to dive deep into the history to figure out what this relationship was, but I also wanted to just ask Tyler Vicker He does valve news network and there's this larger question of like valve is very mysterious and secretive like how do you know what they're doing and Tyler McVicker is it's kind of like this weird combination of fan but also investigator and journalist and doing lots of digital archaeology and historical research archival traces in the code he's reverse engineering patches and looking at strings and he's done a lot of just reporting on what valve has been doing for the last 10 years and his YouTube channel valve news network and he's cultivated a lot of inside sources and he just basically That's his one topic just as I like to cover VR. He just covers valve and everything that valve is doing So I wanted to invite him on just to talk about VR valves relationship with Facebook what happened there but also just like how do you deal with a company like valve and why are they the way that they are and but also Half-Life Alyx and Half-Life itself was a huge inspiration for why Tyler does what he does. And he talks a lot about his own personal experience of Half-Life Alyx in the last third of this. So after an hour, we're gonna get into some Half-Life Alyx spoilers, but also just talk about like the future of where Valve is going with their technology. But it's roughly the last third of my interview with Tyler after about an hour, we dive into Half-Life Alyx stuff. So if you still want to experience Half-Life Alyx or Half-Life in general, then I recommend maybe skip ahead. And just as a caveat, Tyler does at some point say that there may have been some illegal things that happened between the interaction between Valve and Oculus, and there's no evidence that he puts forth by the end of it that would indicate to me at least that there was any necessarily illegal thing. whether or not there was unethical things or whether there's duplicitous actions and whether or not you can cast Michael A. Brash as a villain or maybe he's a hero that catalyzed VR, you know, it's hard to know exactly what happened without really being able to talk to Michael A. Brash or anybody else at Valve, but also, at least in the history of the future, it gives a little bit more of Michael A. Brash's side of that story. So I'll try to, at the end, walk through what I see as a bit of a timeline of that time period just to see the evolution of VR and kind of go back for how this all unfolded. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Tyler happened on Monday, August 24th, 2020. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:05:02.474] Tyler McVicker: hi i'm tyler mcvicker i am the guy behind valve news network i'm like the only person that does anything on that channel other than my wife who tells me i'm doing something stupid or maybe my you know i have a person that makes me thumbnails for about four or five years i had been covering this mythical a project called HLVR that started around late 2015, early 2016 is when the first signs of that project came out. And then I had been almost religiously covering that topic until the game came out this past March. And in between, I had been doing a lot of investigative work on what became the Index, Valve's relationship with both Oculus and then HTC, and then more independently through a series of just a series of crap that happened with Valve. And nowadays I am an avid VR, I don't know what the word would be. I'm just, I'm a VR guy. I play VR almost every day. I play pretty much everything that comes out. I do a lot of interviews and research on not only what Valve is up to, but what other creators are up to. Give some shout outs to Zlubo and Anton and Alex and the guys over at Stress Level Zero. You know, yeah, there's just VR is a nice little community to be a part of as compared to something like Team Fortress 2 or something. Everybody's very nice. Everybody seems to be a bit mature and know what they're doing. And yeah, I'm just a big fan of VR and I do a lot of coverage on both Valve and their virtual reality space, but also SteamVR and that space.
[00:06:45.170] Kent Bye: Well, being in the VR community, I know Valve has obviously been a huge contributor, both in the technology that they've created, but as a company, they're also extremely secretive. They're not a publicly traded company. They're a private company. My experience with Valve is that they'll interact and talk to me when they want to, or they're releasing something. Yes. I'll go to GDC and one year, Chet just said, you can talk to anybody that's walking around. And so on one hand, they'll give unprecedented access and, you know, if you're in, but if you're on the outside, I can have trouble having them respond to my emails at the same time. They're kind of like this paradox where they're in a very unique position, but yet they're very private. But yet you've found this niche of being able to both dig through these code and decompile things and to develop your own sources. So maybe you could just give a bit more context as to you and how the Valve News Network even came about.
[00:07:42.654] Tyler McVicker: Sure. Well, Valve News Network's been around for about 10 years now. I started it as a a feverish passion project born out of a very young obsession of mine. I was about 13 when I started Valve News Network as just like a little project out of my parents' basement and it just kind of slowly grew until college and then it blew up because of a lot of Source 2 reporting that I was doing at that time. And then I was able to move out of my parents' house in 2015, and I have been supporting myself independently ever since. Valve News Network has evolved. I'm well-known nowadays for having inside sources and the scoop and that kind of thing, whereas it sounds a lot more interesting than it legitimately is. A lot of what I do is exactly what you said. You spend a lot of time learning Valve's tools. learning how they make the games that they publicly produce and release, so that you can understand when you're decompiling something, plain texting a DLL, possibly using Steam Command to get an early build, you know, be able to read between the lines, learn, oh, maybe this doesn't go to this project, maybe this goes to something else, keep Really really detailed notes and refer back to any previous thing that you find and just a lot of connecting the dots a lot of speculation a lot of professional guessing and then when you're lucky sometimes somebody will be angry at valve or Upset that their project didn't get released or they just got fired or you know people under specific Circumstances come to me as almost therapy I've found it's really strange and then they'll just like unload And I'll be like you realize who you're talking to like I'm taking no. No. Oh, yeah I want to see that stuff in a video So really it just boils down to building relationships and reading through code but to your point of How difficult it is to be able to get into contact with anybody from Bellevue on a professional level? professional level on like an actual legitimate, this is a professional one-on-one conversation. It's exactly how you put it. If you are not generating value, if an interaction with you as a human being is not generating internal value, then they will never consider doing it. Right? So it's always got to be them reaching their hand out and being like, yes, you have been given the privilege to speak to me. I, the Valve employee, and then you can have an interview and then you can have a conversation. But if in their situation of the time, if having a conversation with you is more of taking away development time and not advertising something, then they're just not going to say anything. And it's never personal. You know, you speak to having a difficulty of, of getting a single email answered once in a while. It's not a personal thing. It's just, is it going to generate value in this very short amount of time? No. Okay. I'm not going to answer you. I'm not going to talk about it. And I'm sorry that I'm like all over the place, but Valve is just such a complex set of issues. I don't know. Yeah.
[00:10:45.895] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, their structure is the decentralized, non-hierarchical, they kind of move around. And the way that I conceptualize the difference of someone like Valve and say Oculus is that Valve will invest all this energy into trying to engineer the best technology they can make. And they abhor the marketing process to a certain extent where they're almost adversarial to the press or journalists or to anything that's remotely involved with marketing. And yet at the same time, you have the opposite end of the spectrum, which is Oculus, which is, they have great engineering, but they also invest a lot of money in marketing and putting things out there. So I see the bottom up versus the top down approach between these two. And that the fascinating thing that I've seen that you're doing is that you're actually like, looking at patches to all of their Source 2 games and embedded in these patches apparently is like these Source 2 commands that are strings that are indicating what they're working on, which to me seems weird that, I mean, they're not using Unity or Epic or Unreal or anything. They're creating their own thing. So they create their own thing. They have all these custom commands that are leaking out. And you would think that they would try to stop that, but yet,
[00:11:58.108] Tyler McVicker: Oh man, huge can of worms. I'll try my best. Okay, so first of all, I'd like to give credit to the people over at Steam Database. This isn't all just my individual work. Xpaw and Marlamin over at Steam Database have created some amazing tools based around Source 2. The Source 2 Resource Viewer and the Steam Database GitHub Diff Checking Repository are excellent resources that I use. Now with that said, Valve had been working on Source 2 beginning in 2008 or 2009. Left 4 Dead 2 was being developed and published around 2009-2010, and in 2009 they had published a demo on Steam. That demo was running very early Source 2 software. If you decompiled the executable file from Left 4 Dead 2, the demo of Left 4 Dead 2, there were a massive amount of strings that referenced Engine 2 and Source 2. Now with that in mind, Source 2 was in development hell from about 2010 until Half-Life Alyx was effectively released or decided that that was the project. So let's say 2010 to 2018. In that time, you had three or four versions of Half-Life 3, canceled Portal game, canceled Left 4 Dead 3 game, like five canceled virtual reality titles, all being developed on one branch of Source 2. Because at this point, you didn't have instance versions of the engines that were being developed for different projects because the engine itself was in its infancy. And Valve wasn't at the point where, okay, this is gonna be the project where we also finish up the engine, like Half-Life 2 was for Source. So they just kept throwing stuff at it. And by the time they finally shipped the title with Source 2, which started with Dota 2, it was all using code from like 18 different projects. And even to this day, it's still kind of that nightmare where they don't have instanced versions of the engines for the most part. Underlords is instanced. So because of that, any update pushed on any Source 2 platform is going to be affected by any internal update from any unreleased platform, because they're working on the same base. So let's say, internally, you have five projects being developed for Source 2. Artifact, Underlords, HLVR, Dota 2, and CSGO, right? Only some of those are public. But they're all being updated simultaneously internally. So when somebody wants to push a feature in, let's say, Underlords, and that feature involves some technologies that had already been written in another game, Well, it would save time and add value just to pull that feature and reuse it in Underlords. But the thing is, that feature is from an unreleased title, and it has many dependencies that are specific to that unreleased title. So, they pull that in, and all of those dependencies come in as well. and it's Valve, so they're not going to spend the time to rename anything because that's wasted value, and they'll push. And then when you actually decompile the code, diff check it against the previous update, stuff like HLVR underscore Vortigaunt underscore Pulse gets pushed out into the ether. And so it's like, you know, that's why it happens. That's why it happens. Why doesn't Valve care about covering it up? Because there's a part of Valve that is proud that there are insane people like me that care about their company enough to do this work, right? There's an excellent talk by Robin Walker at Steam Dev Days 2014 about how they communicate without communicating. And one of those big things is sometimes they'll purposely put stuff in to then have it leak and have the community talk about it so they can gauge fan feedback. Now, that doesn't mean every time something leaks, it was purposeful, right? I've reported on some things that Valve was very upset that it somehow became public, but it's just kind of the nature of the beast. When you're that uncommunicative, when there is just so little information, anything possible becomes fact. and anything possible becomes incredibly valuable, right? And so they kind of have created this scenario where they're proud people like me exist. They're proud that people want to be able to go out and find this kind of information. But at the same time, it's frustrating because they don't clean, usually, and a lot of stuff will come, like Citadel. I don't think they wanted anybody to know about Citadel, but they accidentally- Their next VR game, right? Well, we'll probably talk about more details. I don't want to like put words in anybody's mouth, but it's yes. But in an update in 2019 to Dota 2, they accidentally pushed a bunch of soundscape manifests, which are the files that mix essentially live audio to sound like atmospheric sounds for a game called Citadel. When it first happened, I was like, Oh, you go to the Citadel and HLVR, but then you kind of just went out like that. And we found a few more things just to put in case anybody's listening that wants to write an article. Citadel is the rumored next title in VR that Valve has been working on since early 2018 at the end of the final hours of Half-Life Alyx that Jeff Keighley put out last month. He does say that there is a game that is in development and has been since early 2018 on Source 2. If you connect the dots. It's a game called Citadel. It's a asymmetric, cooperative, competitive game that involves putting out bots, like controlling, and maybe like an RTS. There's a lot of unanswered questions. If you want to learn more, Valve News Network on YouTube. There's a great video about it. Yeah.
[00:17:38.862] Kent Bye: I'm wondering, like, do you consider yourself a journalist or like, do you have like non-disclosure agreements with Valve? Like, how do you, like, what is your, like, what do you consider yourself?
[00:17:48.681] Tyler McVicker: I don't know, man. I don't know. I consider myself a new kind of thing, I think. I consider myself something that is becoming more popular and that I was lucky enough to be on the forefront of. I consider myself to be an avid fan with a lot of time and energy to do things that kind of look like journalism, but I never want to come out and say definitively what I'm doing is journalism because I have a degree in journalism and it's not. It doesn't follow any of those rules. So I think, I don't know, I call myself an investigative journalist. I think it's more of just, I'm an investigator. I'm an archivalist and I'm a conspiracy theorist at some level, but I'm usually right. So I don't know if I'm a conspiracy theorist. I don't know. I just like what I do. Yeah.
[00:18:39.119] Kent Bye: I ask because there's a part of you that it feels like you're a historian.
[00:18:41.740] Tyler McVicker: You're like, Oh yeah, I feel that.
[00:18:44.048] Kent Bye: You're kind of like looking into this, like a digital archeology in some sense. You're like looking at, you're like archeologist historian, who's like digging through this trace of these like impacts of what the developers have been doing and trying to like tell the story of what's happening. But yet I just want to sort of bring that out because I feel like you've got this interesting insight into Valve and I want to first go to Half-Life, Alex, and then go into there, but then kind of broadly into the VR generally, because there's a lot of stuff there to get into. But first, when was the moment that you realized that you may have stumbled upon a VR game of Half-Life? Because that's pretty big.
[00:19:21.658] Tyler McVicker: I love this. Yeah, okay. So in early 2016, two things happened. Well, let's say the first half of 2016, once in February, once in June. In February, Valve screws up very badly. and releases this thing called the SteamVR performance test bench demo. Now, the release of it isn't a mistake. They purposely wanted to publish this test bench. It was released in February to be able to inform consumers if your computer was ready for VR. And it was like a month before the Vive shipped. And when you ran it, it would pop up a window and it would show you Atlas from Portal 2 in a room. And it was effectively like a bridged version of the robot repair demo from GDC 2014 and 2015. Okay, that's fine. But it also means that it runs on Source 2, because it's running that software. SteamVR has a lot of components in it that run on Source 2, so it's effectively testing to see if your components are capable of handling SteamVR, which was about to launch. Problem was, this piece of dev tech, this program, had been in development for about a year. There was a lot of stuff that had to go into it. It had to be able to essentially know every single major component on the market at the time. It had to be able to test those components against the known factors of running VR fluidly, 90 Hertz at the resolution, yada, yada, yada. So there was a lot of work that had to go into it. A lot of it that had nothing to do with the actual Source 2 engine or Source 2 assets. So like any game, you have a version control. which means that it keeps track of everything you've ever interfaced with this specific program so that if there's a regression bug, if you accidentally delete something, if you commit something that overwrites something important, you can always go back in time and grab that file or an earlier version of the file or hell, an earlier version of the build just to be safe, which is fine as long as you private your version control when you ship because Steam has version control built in. which means that any user that has access to that title is capable of accessing the version control if you don't private it. Some people probably see where I'm going. Valve didn't private their version control when they shipped the test bench. And literally, like, I think 30 or 40 gigabytes of Source 2 development content was just left on their server for a day, public. And people like me, when a new program comes out, you do what's called manifest ID searching, and you try and pull any builds that you can. There was a build from July of 2015 that had just a bunch of maps and assets and textures and just, like, it was a goldmine, especially for the time when everybody was, you know, Half-Life 3 confirmed was still a meme that people thought was funny. You had the retired engineer texture set, which is an interesting video that I want to get to soon. Russell from Half-Life Alex. is just a crazy amalgam of three different games' characters. Left 4 Dead 3 had one of the survivors called the Retired Engineer. Russell's basic look was taken from that. Half-Life 3 had a character called Lazlo. It's in the final hours. It's an Asian-American man who has a daughter. We'll get to it in a video. And then Yosef from Half-Life Alex, it's crazy, but Russell's texture set leaked with it, but nobody knew it was Russell, and the earliest, earliest version of the male citizens from City 17 leaked, and a bunch of Half-Life 3 stuff. Now, at the time, in July of 2015, Half-Life Alex was not in development. Half-Life 3 was. And so I was like, oh shit, they're working on Half-Life 3 for real. So that was okay. Keep that in the back of your mind. Flash forward to June, Valve releases a piece of software called Destinations, which was their pre-SteamVR home photogrammetry software that was running Source 2. And again, They didn't make the same mistakes. They didn't leave their version control public. But what they did do is not clean their build whatsoever. So when you decompile it, there was a whole bunch of Half-Life 3 stuff, stuff related to headcrabs. And then for the very first time, I saw the acronym HLVR. Right? And I immediately knew that that was something because it wasn't just a random file name. It was a directory listing, meaning they had an entire new project folder called HLVR. Stuff related to a build, like actually putting together a game called HLVR. And according to the timeline of HLVR's development, this is like the first months of development that we now have from the final hours. I start following this title and I do a, just a, what's called a wide sweep data mine where I don't even take a look at patches. I do whole builds, which takes days because it's millions of lines of code. I started that project in June. In October, that's how long it took me. In October, I published my big findings report of everything known about HLVR and everybody picks it up. and everybody doesn't understand it. There's this video on Inside Gaming where somebody reported on my findings and thought it was a sequel to The Lab, but didn't understand what The Lab was. It's just, oh, it must be a sequel to that bow and arrow game Valve was making. Okay. All right. Okay. Anyways, so I published my findings in that and nobody believes me. Everybody thinks I am a crazy fan who's just grasping at straws, can't accept that Half-Life 3 is gone, and Valve would never make another Half-Life game. Okay, that's fine. Now, of course, this leads to death threats and significant verbal abuse from many sides of the community, but I stuck on it. In January, Gabe Newell does an AMA on a meme subreddit called rslashthegaben. the admin of this subreddit got in contact with me and was like, uh, Gabe said yes. Like, cause he had sent me a message like, I'm going to ask for an AMA. Wouldn't that be funny? And I go, yeah, that would be funny. Ha ha. And then Gabe Newell says, okay, sure. Fine. And the guy freaks out, obviously. And I freak out. Cause it's like, Oh, Oh crap. Okay. So I, I, me and my wife spend like an evening writing out these long paragraph questions that like really get into like. Source twos development source twos application, not only internal development, but in terms of licensing it out, because two years prior, they said they would license out source two for free. Where's that? Are any other titles other than Dota two, maybe TF two and CS go getting ported over those kinds of questions, you know, Are you going to be manufacturing your own VR headset? What is HLVR? That kind of thing. And then at the bottom, Elektra was like, why don't you just ask for an interview? So it was like these three massive paragraphs and then like question four, could I interview you? And the AMA happens. And I'm live streaming the AMA, right? And there's like 10,000 people watching this live stream. I had to leave class early to make it home to live stream this AMA. And I'm essentially just refreshing it so I could read the questions and read what he's saying. And then I try and like interpret what he's saying. Little did I know that it's Gabe Newell, Ida McGall, Dave Riller, and I think Doug Lombardi sitting in a conference room with a television watching my live stream at Valve. And I guess somebody asked, are you a fan of Valve News Network? And Gabe Newell, I guess had not heard of me at this point, said it's the first time I'm hearing about him. And this was when he learned about me. And he publicly says that. And on the live stream, I'm like, oh shit. It's like a huge hit to my morale. Three minutes later, he takes a look at my massive paragraphs and my one little question, ignores the massive paragraphs and said, sure, email me. You can interview me whenever. I email him and then he says, we're working on something behind the scenes. Could you give me a couple days and then we'll, you know, we'll arrange the times. I'm like, okay. Little did I know, because I had asked him to interview him, they did research on me and realized, oh shit. He found out, he knows about HLVR. How the hell did he find that out? So they're like, okay, so we obviously can't let him do a one-on-one interview with you for very long. He'll do leading questions. He'll get some information out of you. So he's like, why don't we just invite him down, put him in a hotel, give him a tour of the office. And like, he can talk to you for like 10 minutes and then he can talk to the Team Fortress team or whatever. I don't care. So they're like, oh, okay. And then they're like, well, if we're going to invite him down, why don't we invite some other journalists? Oh, okay. Well, if we're going to invite more journalists, we should give them more than 10 minutes. Oh, okay. And then that's where the round table came from. I remember that.
[00:28:17.069] Kent Bye: Yeah. I remember that when that happened.
[00:28:18.790] Tyler McVicker: So I was invited down or over to Bellevue on my 20th birthday. I was standing in valve for the first time and only time up until this point, we'll get to it. And I was surrounded by these legitimate games journalists, and I was completely over my head. Completely over my head. And in the interim, in the following years, I learned that this was all kind of a trap. It's really complicated. Valve is very smart in what they do. But they invite that many journalists because they know they're all gonna argue for airtime, so that no one journalist can ask a series of questions. And so my dumb ass sitting in a room with like Polygon, IGN, PC Gamer and Valve News Network, which was hilarious, like Venture Beat and Game of Sutra and then me. So we had to go around the table and introduce ourselves. And it's like the Team Fortress team, the Counter-Strike team and the Dota 2 team have like figureheads sitting at the table. And Gabe Newell is sitting on his iPad in flip flops with his leg up reading something. Like he goes, well, I represent Polygon. I'm from Polygon. And I go, hi, I'm Tyler McVicker. I'm from Valve News Network. And everybody looks at me, kind of goes, aw. So anyways, the interviews go on and Gabe Newell is sitting in front of me with a bunch of VR developers. It was like Matt Brown, Powers. Oh God, I don't remember. Joe Ludwig maybe? Joe Ludwig was there. Greg Coomer was there. Love you, Greg. And I just go. Hey Gabe, yeah, what's HLVR? It's on camera, it's on my channel. And they all just look at me and then laugh. And I'm like, I brought receipts and I had like five different independent sources of HLVR existing. And they are just kind of trying to make a joke and they trying to cover it up, but they can't. And then Gabe goes, we're not gonna be talking about the individual games we're developing. And then I go, so it's a game, nothing. That was in February of 2017. I asked Gabe Newell to his face, hey dude, what's Half-Life Alyx over three years before the game came out? And people still think I'm not good at my job. Anyways, I'm sorry. I just had to tell that story.
[00:30:40.733] Kent Bye: Oh, it's a, it's a good, well, it's a, I, I, what I remember is that you had been, I had heard of it from your network and I was one of those that was like, oh, well, this is just may or may not be true. Who knows. But then once Jeff Keighley had done his final hours interview that the transcript of that leaked, then that's when it seemed to be confirmed. And then, then at that point, that seemed to be a moment of validation for you at least like, yeah, at least say, oh, here's the thing I've been saying now it has actually been confirmed.
[00:31:08.617] Tyler McVicker: Well, there were a lot of other things that I had been saying that were much smaller, right? On the same day they announced Half-Life Alyx, they pushed Operation 9 for Counter-Strike Global Offensive called Shattered Web, which I had been predicting for about two years. I had predicted the Battle Royale mode for CSGO. I had predicted the Oculus split, which we'll talk about, and a lot of other small stuff related to TF2, that kind of stuff. I love what I do. I know what I'm doing. And if you want to kill me, I live in Ohio. People take pictures of front doors and go, sleep well tonight, baby. And they never get my door right. But people are insane. But I love what I do. And I really, really enjoy being able to do it. But speaking to that point of when it leaked, I already knew that it was real, right? And I had already known for about six months that it was absolutely legitimately happening, completely. Because I had about five different independent people communicating with me quite actively about the development of the game. I have a feeling, this is pure speculation, but there were a series of events following my quote-unquote validation that feel like a conceded effort to undercut me by people in higher power. So I had been also doing a lot of reporting on Left 4 Dead 3, which we now know from the final hours was a completely real thing for many years. Somebody had leaked to me. Well, no, no one had actually leaked to me. I had found screenshots of a map from Left 4 Dead 3, and then I had also found a very silent leak On Facepunch, somebody was given, it's a long story, but it wasn't leaked directly to me of a bunch of zombie head renders from Left 4 Dead something. And I had been claiming Left 4 Dead 3 was in development. Valve comes out and just says, no, it's not real. Somebody does an interview with IGN referencing me directly saying people are just having fun spinning up rumors in the community. And then two months later, the final hours comes out and it turns out all these rumors I'm spinning up are completely true. I don't know. They don't like me at all nowadays. It doesn't seem I've had some conversations with people that seem to be very upset with the actions that I've been taking as a professional. And, you know, I'm trying to figure out the right way of doing what I do. But at the same time, when you do what I do and you find stuff as consistently as I do, people are going to be upset. Everybody loves it except the people you're doing the investigations on. They get pretty mad after a while. But that's just kind of the state of things. That's just kind of how it happens.
[00:33:39.601] Kent Bye: Well, I wanted to dive into some historical issues that I know that you have probably covered and may or may not have reported on actually in any videos and the larger context here is that Facebook has bought Oculus and yes. for two to $3 billion. There's a whole book, History of the Future, that goes into this a little bit in terms of what was going on with the relationship between Oculus and Valve. And Gabe Newell's actually in the Kickstarter for Oculus. And so clearly there was a relationship and interaction there between Gabe Newell and Oculus. And then there was actually technology that was shared. Alan Yates had talked about at some point, and then also in the History of the Future. And Ian Hamilton is a reporter from Upload VR. was at a investor meeting where they showed a picture of Mark Zuckerberg in the room demo, which is Valve's technology in like January of 2014. So a couple of months before the news of Oculus being acquired, here is Mark Zuckerberg using the technology from Valve, which is sort of like, okay. Did Oculus disclose that, you know, hey, Mark, this technology isn't ours, it's from Valve. And, you know, there seems to be a cooperation where Valve just wants to make cool stuff, but then once Facebook acquired it, then that whole relationship kind of fell apart. Yes. And then, so like, maybe you could pick up from how you make sense of the story, because there's a lot of the story that hasn't been told at all. Valve just doesn't seem to want to really talk about it too much. And the people that have been involved, they're just kind of like, they're just going to do their thing without really acknowledging maybe some of the ways in which that this technology cooperation helped to feed into this whole thing that has now become Facebook and Oculus.
[00:35:20.334] Tyler McVicker: Yeah. Early consumer model prototyping era of Oculus was built almost entirely on the back of Valve production. I do want to preface everything I say with nothing is confirmed. I'm just a kid from Ohio that really loves this stuff. Okay? I may be tuned into certain channels. I might spend every waking hour of my life doing research on stuff like this. But at the same time, the official accounts of anything that I may say may contradict what I'm saying for one reason or another.
[00:35:56.717] Kent Bye: I think that's important just because I'm starting with you because I want to know what the overall story is. And then maybe on my podcast, have people come out and speak. And it'd be great if you're wrong. And then people are like, no, no, no, that's wrong. Here's what actually happened. Yeah.
[00:36:11.209] Tyler McVicker: I mean, there's a lot of that. There's a lot of people at both Valve and Oculus and people that are independent that were just kind of involved that don't, they're scared. These are massive corporate entities. that may or may not want all of the truth to be completely confirmed under specific circumstances because what happened was Likely illegal? I don't think it was. I mean, it was slimy as all hell, you know. Okay, there's a couple of sources that I recommend people take a look at. Number one, Steam Dev Days in 2014 took place about a month or two before the acquisition. Steam Dev Days 2014 had talks from Michael Abrash and Palmer Luckey. Michael Abrash and Steam Dev Days 2014 talked about the importance of sharing each other's work. Michael Abrash, a few months later, took an executive position at Facebook during the acquisition and was paramount in the talks between Oculus and Facebook. I have heard from people at Valve that a lot of people were against the sheer amount of information, prototypes, hardware development kits, and the like that Abrash was very keen on sharing with Oculus. Abrash championed the idea of rebuilding a couple room demos for Oculus, those room demos being the ones that Zuckerberg saw before the purchase of Oculus went through. Did Zuckerberg know that what he was using was not Oculus's work? Huh. I'm not gonna say one way or the other because that's the big nail here. That's the, I've heard no, he didn't, but I can't say for certain, like you have to talk to Mark about that. And yeah, you're gonna get him to answer that question. Okay, fine. So during the Oculus Kickstarter era, there are two Valve people in the Kickstarter video. You have Gabe Newell, then you have Michael Abrash. Michael Abrash is very, very important to the history of Valve. There's a great story that's just like in the canon of Valve lore, where Mike Harrington and Gabe Newell, in their Microsoft days, wanted to put together this game company called RhinoScar. And they wanted to build a submarine game, a game called Prospero, and another game called Quiver. The submarine game was going to be on their own unique engine and was their backup plan if they weren't able to license idTech. They go to id through a contact that used to work at Microsoft, Michael Abrash, to be able to try and license id tech from id. Quake 1 had come out, Quake 2 was in development, and Abrash was still at id. No one would talk to them. Carmack laughed at the idea. Romero was obviously already gone. And Abrash, who had famously co-authored the Quake engine, was the only person that was like, OK, I'll hear you out. And he was the one that licensed the id engine to valve for a very good deal And if it wasn't for a brush, we wouldn't have half-life. We wouldn't have counter-strike. We wouldn't have anything valve would not Valve's first game would have been this weird sci-fi submarine simulator and they would have disappeared So he was important He worked at a bunch of different places, and then he joins Valve in the early 2010s to work on Dota 2 at first. After a little while, Gabe gets this huge idea to start a hardware division. That was born out of Microsoft wanting to kind of wall off Windows video games, maybe push Steam out of the market. And so he's like, okay, well, we're going to build our own hardware base so that not only are we ubiquitous on PC gaming, we make PC gaming ubiquitous for anyone. We're going to make living room boxes. We're going to do what Nintendo was doing with the Wii, where we bring grandma into playing the game, but for PCs. And then we have like a Xerox PARC kind of thing, where we're trying to create 10, 20 years down the line. That's where you get Jerry Ellsworth. That's where you get Alan Yates. Mike Lambinder, Joe Ludwig, and a bunch of Valve hardware people come together. That started with Jerry Ellsworth. And I want to put credit where credit is due. The hardware division at Valve was pretty much led by Jerry. She is very important to this story. Jerry, I did a long interview with her earlier this year. She's great. I wish her the best with Tilt 5. I got to experience it. It's amazing. But at the time, She was hiring all these people, including Yates and the like, and they were putting together all these different projects. And Abrash was good friends with Carmack. Carmack was interested in VR, thanks to Palmer Luckey. Carmack leaves ID to join Oculus. Abrash is at Valve. And look, the timeline is confusing. This all kind of condenses.
[00:41:20.032] Kent Bye: There's a whole Zenimax lawsuit. The Zenimax lawsuit isn't really connected to this.
[00:41:25.497] Tyler McVicker: The Zenimax, that's separate in relation to Valve's story. But what happened was you had three or four different major groups of people in the hardware division at Valve. Jerry latched on to augmented reality. Abrash locked on to virtual reality. And then you had people like Scott Dalton working on Steam Controller, Steam Link, Steam Living Room stuff, Steam Big Picture, SteamOS. Virtual reality at this point was nowhere. It was pretty much exactly what it was in like the Oculus DK1. There was no tracking, really. There was no room scale, no motion control. What we know today is VR. This was infancy. It was nothing. AR, however, they had a finished prototype that could have been shipped in 2014. There's a great example that Jerry gave me of a Left 4 Dead game where they yanked the director out of Left 4 Dead. You had split-screen co-op on a television using SteamOS, Steam Link, Steam Controllers, that kind of thing. And there was a person in augmented reality looking at a table which represented the entire map that the Left 4 Dead survivors were in, and you were the director. You had like a motion controller and you were picking when zombies were attacking, where zombies attacked from. They had this really cool pirate ship game where two people in AR would battle each other on these pirate ships. And whenever they gave NDA tours of Valve, the real tours of Valve, and they were allowed to show off like software and hardware they were working on, this was the thing that people would sit there for. They have to be asked to leave. So this was ready. VR was not. However, you had Carmack and Abrash being very good friends, and Abrash brought Carmack in to see what Valve was doing with VR, and Carmack was dead set on the idea that VR was the future, and motion controllers were stupid. VR is going to be, you're going to be sitting with an Xbox controller, nobody's going to want to use motion controllers. Carmack thought that. That's why the Oculus shipped with an Xbox controller, and Valve shipped with the Wands. And then Oculus shipped with the touch, but whatever. So Valve was on the forefront of all of this. Valve was pouring infinite money from the Steam money fountain into developing just futuristic technologies. Gabe was off trying to put chips in people's brain and wasn't really involved, but that's fine. So you had the VR and AR teams, and Jerry gave this big presentation about how we could ship AR as a Steam product by the first quarter 2014, and they turned her down saying, that will make zero billions of dollars. That will make zero billions of dollars. A few months later, there was a mass layoff of hardware people. They laid off anybody that wasn't related to the virtual reality teams. Almost the entirety of the AR team was gone. And that was done as per the recommendation of Michael Abrash. Because Abrash was like, we need to focus on one thing and VR is the future. Let's put all of our resources in developing VR. Let's forget about this AR thing. Nobody's going to want to use that. Let's do VR.
[00:44:40.544] Kent Bye: Can it just remind me what year was the layoffs? Like what time? 2013, mid 2013. Okay, so this is after Oculus Kickstarter is August, 2012. The development kits are arriving spring of 2013.
[00:44:51.590] Tyler McVicker: Yeah, so they were riding off of the hype from the Oculus Kickstarter, but internally the AR stuff was way farther, right? And I'm not saying one is better than the other, but I'm just saying that at the time, if you were there, you probably would have been like, well, this seems like a product. This seems like an idea, you know? They start developing the room at this point, you know, you have robot repair and the archery demo, the Dota 2 demo, and they fired a lot of their team. And then surprise, surprise, they sell to Facebook and a lot of that VR team is left without a director. because Abrash, the person that pushed to fire the AR team and push all of their resources into VR, the person that championed against a lot of pushback from Valve to share the room demo, the trackers, a lot of the software with Oculus, now takes an executive position at Oculus the week they sell. And he was the one being like, I don't know about AR. We should work on VR. Well, we got to share things. We'd be better as a community. We don't want to compete. This industry is burgeoning. This industry is in infancy. We need to share each other's findings. And like you said, there's an image of Mark Zuckerberg in a valve room demo with the QR code looking things. And yeah.
[00:46:16.093] Kent Bye: Did he know? Yeah, January of 2014. So before... Did he know?
[00:46:20.375] Tyler McVicker: Yeah. That was probably at Dev Days, by the way.
[00:46:23.516] Kent Bye: No, no, no, no. So Dev Days was happening in Seattle and that thing that was at Oculus' office. Oh, okay. They had actually set up within Oculus' offices a room demo. So when Mark Zuckerberg saw it, he was seeing it in Oculus' offices. Now, again, we're both sort of... We don't know.
[00:46:42.365] Tyler McVicker: Obviously, we don't know if he knew or not. I've heard people say that he didn't. I've heard people say that he did. I tend to believe both, really. So, I mean, I can't say for certain if it was literally something like them lying to Mark to be like, hey, buy us, look at this cool stuff you get. Because comparatively, the Oculus prototype versus the Valve prototype, Valve's was eons ahead. And Oculus didn't want to make motion control to begin with. You had Carmack at Oculus at this point. So the whole idea of room-scale VR wasn't in Oculus' DNA in early 2014. They were just finally figuring out how to do this with the DK2, and that was done through a friggin' webcam.
[00:47:26.172] Kent Bye: Yeah, moving your head around is what you were doing.
[00:47:27.633] Tyler McVicker: Yeah, that was it. And Valve was like, no, you can walk around. You can interact with your hands. You need presence. It was Chet Faliszek that was like, no, presence. That's what you need in VR, not Oculus. But then they show Zuckerberg the room demo and he buys like a week later. So it's like, that was so, that was, look, Valve got screwed over. Regardless as to what happened, Abrash did take an executive position at Facebook, or Oculus, literally the week they sold. And he was the guy that was in charge of VR at that point at Valve. Period. Huge loss for Valve. And it took Valve quite a while to recover because we didn't learn of the HTC Vive until a year later.
[00:48:15.987] Kent Bye: Yeah, it was at Mobile World Congress in 2015. It was announced and then at GDC 2015, I was there trying desperately to get in and see a demo and I couldn't, but I was doing interviews with people that were there talking about it, but saw it after that. But yeah, Mobile World Congress 2015 is when it was announced. But when do you think that after Abrash left, like when was the decision, Valve, to kind of go and find maybe a collaborator like with HTC because were they in discussion with other
[00:48:42.677] Tyler McVicker: Not at the time, not at the time. Okay, there are interviews of Valve people on the record before the sale to Facebook where they say for certain they have no interest in releasing any hardware of their own and they're just going to help push Oculus as the hardware so that and they can just help develop technologies and software and things like that. Many people, Abrash included, said that stuff before the sale to Facebook took place. You then have this blackout period from Valve in relation to VR. There was development on SteamVR and that kind of stuff, but in terms of actual hardware of any type, things were up in the air. Facebook obviously was going to want to make a walled garden, and they did very soon after with the Oculus platform and all that stuff, and Valve just had to piggyback off of it So 2014 at Valve is a very difficult year to get any solid information on. And I also have to watch what I say because I don't want to out specific people who have communicated with me. And there are probably very specific identifiers in this story that could be like, Valve could be like, it's them, cut all ties, you know. So what I do know is that this was hugely, hugely upsetting to Valve. And it wasn't like, oh, we got to get back at them because that's not how Valve really works. It was just like a bunch of depressed people, a bunch of very sad, because they were tricked. There's no doubts about it. They were duped. And now they're left with no hardware. Now they're left with no marketable platform for all of this work they had been doing. Because now that Facebook has Oculus, they pretty much knew immediately, oh, they're not going to use SteamVR. There's no way. They don't have control over Steam. There's no way. But it's funny because there were some talks, as far as I know, and they landed on HTC. However, there were talks with other companies. It's just the problem was nobody really believed in VR at this time. And all these big companies were like, you want us to do what? You want us to manufa... What? And unfortunately, the one company that did agree to work with them wasn't great to begin with. especially at the time, they were overpricing everything on purpose because it's new hardware and early adopters don't care, you know? Remember when a replacement cable for the friggin' Vive was like $150 plus shipping? My God. Anyways, it's funny to flash forward to GDC 2015 when they are showing off the Vive and they're showing off the Steam Link at the same time and SteamOS at the same time. And you've also got somebody like Eric Johnson coming out and being like, oh, Source 2 is going to be licensed out for free. Any developer that wants to use it, you just have to release it on Steam, but not exclusively. As long as it's on Steam, it's free. That never happened. But it's funny to like look back on these 2015 talks with Faliszek, who was essentially like their figurehead for VR, like taking over for Abrash. And they would talk about the history of their VR development. And they would set up those like museum looking pieces of like, oh, these are the phone panels we bought off of eBay. And these are the first ones. No mention of Facebook. No mention of Oculus. It's like they didn't exist. even though they were helping, especially in the HMD design. They were sharing stuff back and forth, and I'm positive there's some Facebook design in their initial prototypes for their HMDs. So they just erased Facebook and Oculus from their minds. They're no longer a part of it, and now it's a competition. And early Valve VR stuff was competitive. I don't know what happened to make them not be competitive so much anymore, but I remember when VR was first being released and talked about, this is 2015, early 2016, you had like videos on the Valve's YouTube channel of indie VR developers in roundtables with Falisek, talking about what it's like developing for VR. You had Valve allowing certain developers create their projects in-house, like NeatCorp in the first version of... Budget cuts. Thank you. I heard a rumor once that valve was like, why don't you make budget cuts portal something? I remember hearing about that and I'm like, oh that perfectly fits because they have a cave Johnson type This is obviously a picture of science inspired. Damn. Why didn't they take it? And then somebody's like because they wanted to release their game. Oh No, but it was like they were helping developers. They were pushing things like Fantastic Contraption and early versions of Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, Hand Grenades. They had The Lab, which had Justin Roiland in it and Ashley Burch. And, you know, like they were actually like doing things, right? And then they disappeared. So the whole point, you know, we want, you want to hear about Oculus Valve stuff. You got to ask me questions or I'm just going to ramble on forever. But Abrash, man. I have a video on my channel called everything known about the Valve Index or the history of the Valve Index or something like that, where I go into this very in-depth, but I don't say anything directly. It's my personal opinion that Abrash is a snake. And he was duping his colleagues and people that cared about him. And he really screwed up Valve's hardware development stuff for a long time. But that's just my opinion.
[00:54:17.487] Kent Bye: You said that the story has some potential illegal things. Are you talking about what Abrash did?
[00:54:22.309] Tyler McVicker: No, I'm just, I'm just worried about like them just trying to like not get that story. I just, look, I don't know. I, I'm, I'm, I don't understand legality stuff very well. I've been kind of tapped on the head by Valve Legal a couple of times and been told, hey, hey, you gotta stop. So it's like, you know, I just don't want to like cross any lines or say anything that, that may be like slanderous or anything. which is why I'm saying like nothing is confirmed or anything. But just help me, direct me here.
[00:54:51.885] Kent Bye: I think part of the reason why I wanted to have this discussion is because the whole history of the cultural DNA of Facebook and the origins, I think there's a lot that we can look at. And there were certain aspects of, let's say Palmer Luckey and his relationship with Mark Bolas and the USCICT in terms of, there were certain aspects of the FOV to go and ways in which that he was working with Mark Bolas and getting help from people like Evan Summa, giving him different pieces of information. But yet when the marketing of the story that was being sold was that Palmer had created this on his own in his own garage, right? And so the history of the future kind of goes into that a little bit more, but there's certain aspects of whether it's Mark Bullis and USCICT and the relationship of the whole academic community and their involvement for over 50 years in terms of, well, at least for the most part of the last 20 to 30 years, for sure, but going all the way back to like Evan Sutherland, and there's the whole history of like, this didn't just come out of a vacuum. But I think there's something else about this story about this collaboration between Valve and Oculus and how there was like a technology exchange, but yet Valve has been seemingly unwilling to state on the record what happened, which you can imagine, like if this did actually happen, if let's say Michael Abrash was a double agent or some sort, or he did do some sort of duplicitous, be the funnel in which a lot of this technology went into Oculus, but yet he kind of left, but yet Valve is sitting there and they don't say anything about it ever. I think Alan Yates was maybe one of the rare instances where he made a comment on Reddit where it was like, oh, and by the way, you were using a lot of our stuff. And it was almost like he was resentful for all the attention and not getting proper credit and, or just the fact that there wasn't any acknowledgement that there was that type of relationship. So it just seems like a part of history that's been completely memory hold.
[00:56:39.793] Tyler McVicker: I've heard from many different people that Yates is probably the most likely person to ever answer a question like something like that. And there have been multiple occasions of Alan saying things on Reddit in particular, expressing his frustrations in the botched relationship between Oculus and Valve. I've also heard there were people that did want to continue a relationship with Oculus following the acquisition. Because there were people that had built such a close relationship with purely Oculus people, and felt like, well, you know, they took capital from Facebook, they've been acquired, okay, but like, if we're still unified, then we would still have like one platform, we could still get SteamVR. That's wrong. But there were still a lot of people that were like, no, we can still continue this relationship. And, you know, I can't put all the credit on Yates, but Yates was definitely a person that was like, no, fuck that. Absolutely do not. This is, are you kidding? Like, I think, you know, he was the person that kind of spearheaded the whole idea of like, no, we're going to do our own thing now. We have to, this is impossible. Because they're going to slowly drag people in. They're going to slowly get people into their platform and then force them into a walled garden completely. And I mean, didn't Facebook, like, try to push, like, hardware limitations and software limitations years ago to try and get Oculus usability taken out of SteamVR? They don't want collaborative effort. They want a competition. And now Oculus's position seems to be, well, we don't need to be the best. We need to be the most product-like. You know, let's take an Apple approach here, but without the quality. Valve doesn't want to tell this story because Valve doesn't want to focus on it. This is the same kind of thing that happens with any other problem that Valve has ever gone through. Half-Life 2 was stolen in 2003. Valve doesn't want to talk about that. I mean, Gabe Newell has told me directly to my face that the only time Valve ever looks at the past is if they're trying to learn from a mistake. They're not going to celebrate an anniversary of a game. They're not going to try and have any kind of celebration of anything they've done in the past whatsoever. Again, it comes back to that value creation proposition. That's paramount to the structure at which Valve operates. So digging up the past, talking about the past, to me, doesn't feel like they want to hide it. They just don't want to do it. They don't feel like it's necessary. And to be honest, it's not, you know, we want to know about this kind of story because it's Facebook is, and they're continuing to do crappy things and maybe Valve would have the power to pull some stuff back. But again, that's not Valve's intentions, that Valve doesn't want to be an antagonistic entity at all, ever. Like you say what you want about, the issues that exist within the structure that Valve has and continues to stubbornly hold on to. And there are many. There's the whole idea of, let's get into it. Valve has problems. A lot of people think I'm blinded by fanboyism or whatever. It's like way too much of Valve are just white guys. And there's a reason for that. It's because they hire each other's friends. And so there's very little diversity in those hires. And a lot of the people that work at Valve are hired because somebody knows somebody, not because you're talented and you sent in an application. It's because there is no hiring arm or hiring department. Everybody hires. And so who are you more likely going to hire? Somebody you're comfortable working with or somebody that's very talented that you have no idea about at all? Valve has a lot of problems in terms of the high school clique nature of how things kind of form. The projects that get off the ground do not always have to do with the value that those projects are creating. It just has to do with if the higher-ups are interested in producing those products. And Valve has higher-ups. There is no structure, there are no titles, but people have power over other people. And that power is derived by how long have you been here, what have you shipped, Are you publicly known, or were you a rock star in your field before we brought you on? If you don't fit those categories, you're being paid significantly less, you likely do not have as many stock options, and you do not have as much deciding power in terms of what projects are being worked on, and you're more likely to get fired. So, Valve has problems. One of the things that they don't have as a problem is their want to be an antagonistic entity under any circumstance. They want to be chaotic neutral as much as possible. They're going to do whatever they want, but if they're stepping on toes or causing other problems in the industries that they're a part of, they will back off. And telling the story going live and being like here is a press release as to what happened with Facebook. We are upset about it. Would cause a divide in the VR industry that was already burgeoning and they didn't want to add to that. They didn't want to go out and be like, okay, your valve or Oculus pick Because that would just hurt the market overall. They didn't want to add to the trouble that Oculus was already producing. They instead wanted to be the mature side, which they have been, and try and do something on their own. That's not the successful side, unfortunately. Oculus is more successful. But Valve could have done many things in the past. to hinder Oculus' growth. And they instead thought, we're not going to put our energy into starting a war with Facebook. We're just going to produce the best damn stuff that we can, and hopefully the quality rises to the top. Whether or not it has is an argument that many people could have. Half-Life Alyx may not be the single best implementation of VR mechanics that we've ever seen, but it's definitely the best damn polished game that exists on the platform. Yeah.
[01:02:24.635] Kent Bye: Um, yeah, my, my big complaint with valve, I guess, is going back to that transparency or accountability or just being able to engage. And, you know, it's like, they have so much power in the industry, but yet they're kind of sitting in a position where they do have the steam and they have so much money that's coming in that, that gives them, we don't need to interact with anybody and ask them any. answer any of the questions and it's there's questions that I have around privacy and you know I know that they're likely on the right side of privacy but yet I've just been having trouble just like reaching out saying hey do you have anybody on staff that could you know talk about your privacy policy or your approach to privacy as a contrast to what Oculus is doing and even just to get responses to emails is difficult so I don't know, I feel like there's a certain level in which that, you know, I can understand why they don't want to like dive into the past, but at the same time, the non-hierarchical bottom-up approach I think has been a key part for why some of the things like VR probably even were able to flourish in that type of environment. And that, you know, if you read through Facebook's AR-VR strategy memo that Mark Zuckerberg wrote back in June of 2015, he said, we have an innovation problem at Facebook. And, you know, there's such a top-down hierarchical corporate environment that it's no wonder. I mean, that type of innovation happens in places like Valve where people just, like, I was told that, you know, did one of the interviews with Valve employees. And they said that, you know, when the Valve room demo was created, they realized that people were leaving their desks to go immerse themselves into that a lot more. And there was something there that was just inherently interesting to the developers there. even if like technologically it wasn't viable for like their prototypes were like tens of thousands of dollars and it wasn't like it wasn't affordable to actually but they're proving out what was the coolest thing that you could think of and I think you needed that type of innovation and that as you're saying that level of innovation sort of found its way into the technological DNA and the evolution of Oculus itself.
[01:04:14.938] Tyler McVicker: Oh, very much.
[01:04:15.920] Kent Bye: And it's a part of the history. So as an oral historian myself, trying to capture these stories, I think it's a part of that history that I, I mean, I take what you're saying as like a good starting point, but
[01:04:26.033] Tyler McVicker: I'm not stating anything as fact, obviously. I'm not in a position to do that, yeah.
[01:04:30.734] Kent Bye: It's at least a good starting point, but maybe we'll sort of tie things up here with coming back to Half-Life Alyx, because I know that there's a bit of a paradox that you're so deep into the literal code of this game, but yet, as someone who wants to experience it, you risk the potential of ruining certain aspects, but you still have to have the embodied experience. Yeah, yeah. But I know that you you showed a video of yourself playing it and that it was like you actually very emotionally moved. Oh, yeah. And I don't know if you've done a video yet where you've talked about all that, but I'm just wondering if you could. Well, if you want to say that, that's fine.
[01:05:04.572] Tyler McVicker: No, that's cool. I'd love to talk. I, you know, I guess I'm young and afraid that people are going to be like, oh, he's crying. But, you know, what was happening?
[01:05:13.199] Kent Bye: What was that experience like you once you finished? Oh, man.
[01:05:17.662] Tyler McVicker: How much time we have? I might talk for way too long about this, but this is very, very important to me. So video games are my favorite thing ever, period. There are very few moments in my life where I can actually like think back as like pivotal moments that have affected me as a human being and as an adult. First time I played Super Mario Galaxy coming home from school in like fifth grade or whatever, that has stuck with me since I was 10. First time I've played Portal, that has stuck with me since I was like 12. And the first time I played TF2. Oh, no, no, no. First time I saw them meet the team shorts for Team Fortress 2. I was like 13. Those moments I hold so dear to my heart and are probably the reasons why I do Valve News Network and Nintendo News Network because You know, I had a rough childhood. I was, you know, abused and I didn't have any friends, you know, that kind of sob story or whatever. So I kind of like latched on to video games as escapism. And I value them more than anything other than like my wife. It's like my wife, video games, and then like food and stuff. But very specific video game. I remember when I played Half-Life, the Half-Life series for the first time, I was 13 years old and it was through the Orange Box on the Xbox 360. And I remember not sleeping. The first time I ever played it, started Half-Life 2, immediately hooked, not because of the gameplay, but because of the atmosphere and the story and these characters that I gave a shit about, which I had never experienced to this level that Half-Life 2 was putting forth. Episode one, not as good, but we love it. Episode two, holy shit. Episode two ends, I'm 13 years old in tears. because this game hit me like a freight train because it was just like, oh, you're on this roller coaster. Oh my God, it's getting crazier and crazier. You launched the rock. Oh, you know, and then Alex is crying and then the credits roll. The moment I saw that for the first time was the moment I started Valve News Network because I wanted to know what was next immediately. And I stuck with it. for a decade. And that whole time, I was trying to find any little bits of information that may complete this story, conclude this story, and let me know what these characters that I grew to love more so than some people in my own family, I wanted to know how they were doing. And so I did. I spent a decade, I spent my entire teenage years searching for this game. And I was berated the whole time. Do you know Funhaus? Do you know the YouTube channel Funhaus? They're a subsidy of Rooster Teeth. They did a video where they interviewed an ex-Valve employee about the cancellation of David Speyer's Half-Life 3. And they stated a few facts and a lot of bullshit. I was working at Walmart at the time, and I remember on my lunch break watching that video and being like, oh, they don't understand how Valve operates at all. Okay, went home, their video was called Half-Life 3 Will Never Release, Here's Why. My video was called Half-Life 3 Will Release, Here's Why. It's got like a million views. Literally, a week later, they do their podcast called Dude Soup, and Adam Kovic, or whatever his name is, I love Funhaus, but the guy in charge of Funhaus and Inside Gaming goes, oh, fucking Valve News Network, makes a living by just riding Gabe Newell's dick. That has stuck with me since it happened, and that was like six years ago. Fuck you, I love you, but fuck you, because I was right. The day Half-Life Alyx was announced was such an emotional moment for me. because I was right. Look, I know that's super full of himself to be able to be like, look guys, look, I was telling you the truth. But it's a really great victory moment after years of every move I ever made publicly being dissected and yelled at because everybody was in denial. So that's one thing. Then the game comes out, right? And it's no longer a professional thing. This is a personal experience for me. because Valve News Network started when 12-year-old, 13-year-old Tyler saw Eli Vance, spoilers, die in front of me. And these were the characters that I loved more than people. What the fuck? The game comes out and it's a prequel. And so I'm like, okay, shallow victory. They're not gonna conclude the story. And I had been spoiled on specific parts of this game. You know, there were some asshole journalists out there that got early review codes and went, it's G-Man, he's in prison, you're going to rescue G-Man. And I'm like, fuck you. But little did I know that was not the ending. So I went into it thinking, oh, I know the ending. I rescued G-Man, the G-Man speech is fucking amazing. And then Eli shows up. on the ground in that position that emotionally affected me to the point where I didn't waste, but I completely threw away ages 10 to 20 on this fucking game. My lenses were fogging up. You can hear me cry a little bit. I'm crying. Then the credits roll and I'm just like, what the fuck did I just see? What the fuck was that? And then the after credits happens. Gordon! Good, she's gone, Gordon. That bit, I'm weeping. It's so genius what they did. And they threw it together in the summer before release. I had been told from my inside sources that Half-Life Alyx was great, but the ending was garbage. And I guess Eric Wolpaw, according to the final hours, was like, fuck it, let's do something crazy. And it worked. You're playing as Alex the whole game. They recast Alex, which is fine. And then you're in the HEV suit. Eli is alive in the helicopter hangar. Dog, who ran off to kill the advisor that killed Eli, returns with the fucking crowbar. And Eli Vance is like, come on, Gordon. We got work to do. Are you kidding me? It's no longer professional. This is my life. And that's super sad on a bunch of levels. But not only was I right, but I got my fucking closure. So there's a video of me online with like 600,000 views with me weeping. I took my headset off, put it on the couch, sat down and went, okay, I guess we're gonna do this. Switched to my camera and I'm in tears. I'm usually the guy that says random shit on his live stream and makes a bunch of predictions that nobody believes. And I'm speechless, covered in tears, just saying thank you. to Valve for finally doing it, for finally getting their shit together. Because I had been through, oh Left 4 Dead 3's gonna, oh Half-Life 3, you know? And then they make it and everybody's like, oh, well, it's a prequel, so I don't care. And then they do it. It's not a VR game. It's a story. The value in this game, for me, is way more than one-handed weapons and four types of enemies. It's a conclusion to the story that was so masterfully done that I'm like, I did it. My job's done. I will never top this, so I'm just gonna try and do some other stuff now. Because this is like, this is the season finale. This is the series finale of my life. And it's not about me. Half-Life Alyx isn't about me. But in my head, I've been so intimately involved with literally every step of the process that I've been more involved with the Half-Life series than most of the Half-Life developers on Half-Life Alyx. So it's like, yeah, I'm in tears. Yeah, go ahead, I'm sorry.
[01:13:56.922] Kent Bye: When was the first time that you experienced VR? Maybe you could go into like, because you went through the whole history of VR, but like, when did you actually try VR for the first time?
[01:14:07.572] Tyler McVicker: So first time I got to try VR was January of 2017. I was in a car accident, a bad one, and I caught a sizable settlement and could actually afford a VR kit. Little did I know that Chet Falisak personally emailed me in the lead up to the HTC Vive to send me a free kit, and I never saw the email. That's a meme on my channel. Every video I've ever made is going to say Tyler McVicker missed out on a free Vive in the comments section. But the first time I got to try it for real was the first part of 2017, and I immediately knew, immediately knew that this isn't the future of gaming, but it sure as hell is a brand new, amazing way to play video games. We can have the Switch. It seems like a common misconception in this industry that VR is supposed to be the only way we're ever going to play video games. That's obviously not the case. Sometimes you want to lay in bed and play a game. But VR is now top. It's the coolest way of playing games. It's super expensive. You need a whole room for it. But when you have it set up and it works, holy shit. The first game I got to play was probably the same first game a lot of people got to play, and that was Job Simulator. And I was immediately like, oh my God. Oh my God. I love, you know, it's so simple compared to what we have now. Still love that game. Vacation Simulator, great job, guys. That was cool. But then I played Arizona sunshine, hot dogs, horseshoes, hand grenades. Uh, there was, there was a lot of the early stuff, you know, trainer.
[01:15:55.921] Kent Bye: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
[01:15:57.001] Tyler McVicker: And then all of them, I spent so much money on VR games that, that month. And it was just me, you know, I showed my wife who has epilepsy and we didn't know at the time, so she wasn't into it, but there was the itch in the back of my mind of like, Yeah, this is all cool, but what is Valve doing? And the thing that pisses me off about Valve, and I hope someone from Valve is listening, because Valve isn't listening to the developers as much as they should be right now. Half-Life Alyx was fucking awesome, guys. You nailed it, for the most part. I'm gonna put out a video talking about the stuff I didn't like about the game. There's no excuse for no two-handed weapons, come on. But... There are so many amazing creators that have stuck with this scene, making a fraction of what they could be making if they were making pancake games right now, and you are not helping them whatsoever. And this is apparently your platform. And in the face of Facebook now trying to not only wall garden themselves and their hardware and succeeding, but now mandatory Facebook accounts, guys, Email these devs, give them some money. There's no reason that Stress Level Zero has to be afraid that they can't afford to make their next game after Boneworks. No fucking reason. There's also no reason that someone like Denny has to rely on the PSVR sales of Pistol Whip. Guys. VR is in a very good place right now because we're riding off of the momentum of the index being sold out around the world because of both COVID and Half-Life Alyx and being the thing that literally every PC gamer wants to have. And the only negative reviews you're going to see for Half-Life Alyx is, well, I can't afford it. I don't like that this Half-Life game costs a thousand plus dollars. That's fine. That's just because it's a new industry, but Guys, there are so many, Anton, Denny, Stresslevel0, come on, guys. You have people that have not been bought out by Facebook, have not created exclusives for Facebook like we ended up getting with Asgard's Wrath, rest in peace. Beat Saber was bought out by Facebook. They're not going to stop. If you wanna keep your industry, if you want SteamVR to succeed, you have to play the game, guys. You have to get into contact with some of these people because they love you and they hang off of every word you say. And you haven't even shipped a complete tool set. You just shipped the best VR game ever made. And credit where credit is due, you did ship prefabs and your raw map data, but you haven't shipped all of your tool sets, your decompiled assets, or your code base for what is supposed to be the bar for VR. So what? You expect them to rewrite your years of million dollar work from scratch? They're all going to go to Facebook because Facebook's going to pay them. Do you want the index to just be the valve machine? Do you really want to be Nintendo that badly? Or do you want to have an open and free VR marketplace that you were championing until Falisak left? Come on, guys. You're better than this. Half-Life Alyx is the start, not the end. And a lot of you thought it was the end. That's something that needs to be stated. There were a lot of people working on Half-Life Alyx, Robin Walker included, that didn't think it was gonna have the reception that it ended up getting because it was VR only. In the interviews that came out before the game released, Robin kept saying, well, we might be wrong. We might be wrong. And yeah, I get how that's a fear, but it's because you were in your own bubble for a decade. You were proved wrong on three major counts in two years. Artifact was a dud. No, we don't want to buy a card game. Epic can do what they're doing because you're still on the archaic 30%. And yes, we wanted a Half-Life game. Duh! But we also want to be able to see what Boneworks can do or what Pistol Whip would look like if they had the money that you guys do. The only reason Half-Life Alyx is half as good as it is is because you can spend billions of dollars polishing it up. People are going to compare Boneworks and Half-Life Alyx very unfairly because Boneworks was made with the budget of one level of Half-Life Alyx. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. This is not, I don't know, but just
[01:20:50.959] Kent Bye: No, it's, it's, there's a lot of, obviously, I mean, you're so close to, I feel the same way with the developer community. There's a lot of things that you hear where you feel that in the absence of actually being in a direct dialogue or dialectic with someone like Valve, it's like, It's a one way interaction. It's not a conversation. And so it's like when you have an opportunity to speak your mind, there's a lot that there's a lot of people have a lot to say, you know, and I think there's to try to really look at the larger context of what's happening and to try to figure it out. You know, it's it.
[01:21:22.482] Tyler McVicker: The only people that could take down Facebook in this situation is Valve. And what Facebook is doing is bullshit. And we all saw it coming. The people that don't use Oculus hardware 100% of the time, which I'm lucky, and I'm sure you're lucky enough to have access to multiple HMDs to be able to test stuff out, that kind of thing. Yeah, I have an MR, I have an Odyssey Plus, I have an Index, I have a Vive, and I have an Oculus sitting in a box right there that I was supposed to give away for a contest, and I'm canceling that. The only people that have the power, the money, the resources, and the know-how to be able to pull this off is Valve. And Valve is just twiddling their thumbs, working from home, making an update to Left 4 Dead 2, and putting all their VR dev on mostly hold, because the only way you can playtest VR from home is to send builds around. And I understand that you're afraid somebody's gonna leak that build. But guys, in the meantime, all these indie devs are used to working from home. Anyways, it would be cool to slap a Valve logo on Pistol Whip, wouldn't it? Guys, they need to play the game or they're going to lose their industry. Facebook is going to try and privatize... Privatize is the wrong word. They're going to try and take everything. And they're slowly doing it. The moment they got Beat Saber was the moment I realized that shit got real. There's no question. They tried to take down Revive. There's no reason I need to either use third-party software or buy your damn hardware to play Asgard's Wrath, one of the best games on the platform. Come on, guys. It's just, you know, Valve won't directly speak with me much anymore because people are either upset with me or afraid that I'm trying to get them fired. But it's just like, guys, I love you more than you probably love yourself. And what you do means so much to me. What you were trying to do with budget cuts and turn that into a portal game, do that. If Bridge Constructor Portal can exist in this world, there is no goddamn reason. why Stress Level Zero can't make a Half-Life spinoff. It's obviously a Half-Life game, guys. Come on. They did headcrabs better than you did.
[01:23:36.075] Kent Bye: Well, just to kind of wrap up things here, I'm just curious what you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable.
[01:23:46.378] Tyler McVicker: Not brain interfacing, I'll tell you that much. At least not invasive brain interfacing. I've had many conversations with Gabe's eldest son, Gray, who is a very pro-BCI guy, and that's fine. But they keep using the Silicon Valley-esque talk point of, well, you can do something invasive that would take 10 extra years for external. And it's like, oh, cool. You're not drilling in my head, though. So what can you do external? And I've heard rumors of really scary shit that exists in the hardware labs at Valve of like, I heard a rumor once of like, oh, you put a helmet on and it makes you feel like you fell over. And I'm just like, no. No, that's okay. I predict an index two within the next two years. If COVID hadn't happened, it would be in the next year. I predict that we're going to be seeing some form of official valve wireless. It would have happened this year. I'm positive that this year we would have had some kind of add on that would have activated some sort of Wi-Fi because they invested in that one. They like almost bought out that one wireless streaming high frequency. Yeah. It's your podcast, you do the research for that. But COVID has put a damper on pretty much anything. You can't do a whole lot of hardware engineering on a large scale when everybody's working from home, especially considering that Valve has their own separate building that's a hardware fab. So that's fine, that's expected, and you can't get mad at Valve for something like that. Another rumor I heard was about the audio solution on the Index being separated as its own independent product. Totally down for that.
[01:25:21.932] Kent Bye: It's going to be on the G2, the reverb.
[01:25:23.973] Tyler McVicker: It's going to be on the reverb. Yeah, but no, I'm hearing like, it's going to be like a pair of headphones that you can put on so you can experience the off-ear magic in any video game. Shout outs to Emily Ridgway, you're a genius. But I also predict that because of the success of Half-Life Alyx, Half-Life Alyx is not only going to become the standard, for better or for worse, in terms of mechanics required in VR games, but you're going to see a lot of other companies try and copy it over the next two or three years. You're going to see a couple of Facebook exclusives of like Quarter Death or whatever, a bunch of ripoffs, which is going to be fun. But then you're going to see Valve do something completely different. So we've talked about Citadel a little bit. Citadel is not a Half-Life game. It could be Team Fortress, as far as I'm aware, but it's like asymmetric. You're going to see Valve do a bunch of weird shit. You're not going to see Valve go like, okay, every game we make is a massive AAA undertaking. That's all of our franchises. You're not going to see a Portal 3 in VR anytime soon. You're going to see a bunch of their little prototypes be turned into fleshed out products in order to be able to teach people like, oh, here's some other stuff we learned, you know, because Half-Life Alyx is mostly a teaching tool for VR devs, you know, like a hands-off kind of teaching tool because they figured out a lot of, if Gravity Gloves isn't a standard in VR for the next year, I'm going to be very mad. What else will happen? Facebook will continue being shitty. Forcing a Facebook account as small as some of the Oculus fanboys are gonna try and make that seem is obviously the beginning. Facebook's got cameras on you, brah! Now they have it connected to an account? They're gonna sell that data? Duh!
[01:27:01.273] Kent Bye: You're a product. Sell it to advertisers. Yeah, you know, you know.
[01:27:04.154] Tyler McVicker: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you're a product. How does Facebook free? Because you're a product, you're a commodity. That's how Facebook makes their money. And you can't get mad at them for that. You signed up. And now people have been like, well, then I won't have a Facebook account. Well, if Facebook gets their way, you're not playing VR either, bud. So. What will Valve do? They're either going to remain as silent as possible and try and crank out small experiences until they get the time to be able to finish their next big title, which I'm not going to talk about. And indie developers are going to be expected to pay their own way, which means a lot of them, unfortunately, in order to survive, are either going to leave the VR industry entirely, which is a massive shame if that happens. But someone like Anton has been saying some scary shit on Twitter. Shout out to Anton. I love you, man. And people are going to go over to Facebook. They're going to be bought out by Sony or they're going to be bought out by Facebook. And I'd rather see them be bought out by Sony because Sony ain't Facebook. But then again, I don't own a PSVR and I don't really care. Cause it's nothing like an index. And unfortunately it's not may the best hardware win right now. It's may the best underhanded tactic win. And Valve doesn't play that game. Valve doesn't know how to play that game. The only underhanded tactics that they ever do is shut down indie devs because they tell them they can make a game for them and then pull the plug, you know, rest in peace Rogue.
[01:28:33.095] Kent Bye: Well, the big thing is that Facebook has the standalone. Do you know if Valve has even considered doing anything around standalone?
[01:28:39.980] Tyler McVicker: No, and I don't think they will. Valve is very much what's the best possible thing we can create, and that's always been their mindset. If Valve were to create a standalone piece of hardware, it would cost so much money. Like Facebook's big thing is, oh, it's like a console, right? But then you're dealing with like couple generation old Snapdragon processors and games being downgraded to the point where they're unrecognizable. If Valve were to go about doing a standalone product, they would not ship unless Half-Life Alyx could run on the thing at high settings. And you're nowhere near that being an affordable price point. Do I have any information like that could say 100% Valve would never consider doing standalone? No. But the standalone hardware would have to run SteamVR in its entirety. And that's not going to happen anytime soon. Valve is all about what's the best thing we can get into our consumers' hands at a decent price. And you can yell at the $1,000 for the index as much as you want. Pretty sure they're losing money on that. Or the profit margins are razor thin because they don't care if they're making money on the hardware. They want you in their ecosystem, which is so open that they're getting their asses handed to them with Facebook and their underhanded tactics. What else is coming up? You're gonna see little games from Valve here and there. You're gonna see more from Valve once they get back into their offices. It is such a shame on, I mean, obviously the world is falling apart, but if this hadn't happened, we would know about the next Valve VR title by now. and you might actually have all of Source 2. It just, that's a mess. I'm sorry. This is probably one of the most chaotic podcasts.
[01:30:18.816] Kent Bye: No, you, of all the people in the world, you have like the deepest insight in what's happening with Valve and they're one of the biggest players. And so in some ways that's... That's scary to me.
[01:30:28.822] Tyler McVicker: That's so terrifying to me that I could be called, oh, I have the deepest insight into what Valve does. I'm 23. I live in Ohio. And I make minimum wage on these freaking YouTube videos. And I know the best. Come on, Valve. That should be a message to Valve that maybe you should make me completely irrelevant. That's funny. I would love to lose my job because Valve is actually talking to people. That would be my dream. Oh man.
[01:31:00.278] Kent Bye: Well, is there anything else that's left and said that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[01:31:06.937] Tyler McVicker: I love you, everybody. VR is so much fun. If you haven't had a chance to play it, if you have a friend that has it, go wear a mask at their house and go try it out. I'm working on a video about the best way of getting into VR on a budget. And also, go watch Valve News Network. If you used to watch it and you think I'm just a little kid that doesn't know what he's saying, not anymore. I was. But not anymore. Please go check out some of the content that I've been making lately. And yeah, Valve, if you're hearing this, I'm sorry if I've upset you over the years. I'm sorry if it seems like I'm some kind of antagonistic entity that wants to see you fail. That is not the case. I want you to succeed so badly. And I know that you're a billion-dollar corporation and I'm talking to you like you're a family member. But some of what you've done means more to me than some of my own family. So I just want to say, guys, I love you. I so appreciate what you did with Half-Life Alyx. But I really think you could be doing a lot better on your developer outreach. And that is your card that you could play to save the industry. And answer my emails. Okay, thank you.
[01:32:13.837] Kent Bye: Well, Tyler, I just wanted to thank you for, for joining me on the podcast. And, uh, you know, as I was gearing up for half-life, I was watching some of your videos, but not too much. Cause I didn't want to spoil myself, but as soon as I, I finished, I went back and watched a lot of that stuff. And I just really appreciated your deep dives and some of your Twitch streams that you were doing and kind of diving into everything and just, yeah. Thanks for all the coverage that you're doing and yeah, just for joining me today and give me a little bit more insight into this story that up to this point, hasn't really been told.
[01:32:39.962] Tyler McVicker: I'm sorry if it wasn't as much as you wanted, and I'm also sorry if it's like super all over the place, but I kind of need to have stuff written down to sound coherent. But thank you for inviting me on. I've been a fan of this since you interviewed Jeep in early 2007. Yeah, there's a video of me talking about going to Valve, and behind me there's a laptop with your podcast opened up on it. I'll try and find a picture to send you.
[01:33:02.678] Kent Bye: Um, yeah, I know there's, there's people that listen and I, I sort of work from the bottom up. So there's people that sort of listen and, um, but yeah, thanks again for, for joining me here and, uh, give me at least the first draft of history as it were, when it comes to this story. So thank you.
[01:33:17.567] Tyler McVicker: Yeah, no problem.
[01:33:19.508] Kent Bye: So that was Tyler McVicker. He's the creator and founder of Valve News Network. So I have a number of front takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, there's a lot in this conversation. And for me, I want to just first say thanks to Tyler for dedicating the last 10 years of his life of just doing this deep dive and really pioneering this weird blend of. fan, but also investigator and journalist. And, you know, there's a certain level of what he does, which is speculation and gossip. And he's able to get some hard information whenever he's digging into the code, there's some actual empirical evidence that he's able to show that there's different developments. And I think in a lot of ways, what he's doing that is some of the most empirical aspects of reporting on these different things. If you look at what he says, he says it's not necessarily even reporting because there is a lot of talking to people and people may have different motivations for feeding him disinformation. And so he's just trying to do a lot of this different type of speculation. And one of the things that Tyler pointed me to is this fascinating talk by Robin Walker that happened at Steam Dev Days on January 15, 2014, titled Community and Communication in Games as Services. And so This to me is one of the most fascinating breakdown for the psychology of Valve, but also the philosophy of communication that they have. They're creative. They want to make the best thing they can, and they want to be in direct dialogue to their customers and the people that are actually paying them when it comes to their business of these free to play games and these updates. And, you know, there's a certain amount of information that Valve holds back. And, you know, whenever they have external communication that puts external obligations of if you're going to actually like live up to specific deadlines whatnot you know there's a whole thing of valve time where they've previously committed to a time and then you know their creative process is that they don't necessarily hit that and they've learned over time that it's just better for their own creative process to not engage in that type of external communication which is great for their own creative process but in terms of like dealing with the outside and journalists and the outside community and the whole non-hierarchical structure, it creates these different issues. And if I were to categorize the dialectic between that bottom-up non-hierarchical approach and the top-down approach of something like Facebook, and what Oculus was doing is that Oculus was able to actually ship things. And I think part of the frustration that I read from History of the Future was that there's a lot of people that were working at Valve that didn't feel like they were able to actually be in connection with the community, because when it comes to hardware, then you actually need to deliver and ship things. And when it came to the history of Valve and hardware, then they were just having a lot of different issues. And a lot of this catalyst in the first place was for Gabe to look at what was happening with Windows to potentially be locked out. And for the store that had been built up with Steam, they needed to have some sort of resilience when it came to the next communications platforms, whether that's the Steam Box or Linux or SteamOS or virtual augmented reality, they wanted to see where all the future technology platforms were going and make sure that this whole business that they had built with Steam was going to be compatible with that in some fashion. So that I think was a big catalyst that is likely what started a lot of the work with Jerry Ellsworth that Tyler was Talking about but just to take a step back and to cover the story of Tyler himself I think it's fascinating to hear a little bit more of who he is his motivation and that you know for a long time he was reporting on this stuff and he wasn't being necessarily taking seriously and so there was a moment of validation when it came to when Half-Life Alex actually came out that you can actually go back and look at all the reporting that he had done and And he's kind of like doing this interesting blend of that investigative journalism, digital archaeology, cultivating his own sources. And so there's a certain amount of investigative reporting, but he's also speaking directly to the fans who are really starved for information. And there's this whole culture of just wanting to know all the different specific nuances of that story. And after doing this interview with Tyler, I found that I came into that same thing. Like, who is Valve? What happened between Valve and Oculus? Why haven't they necessarily talked about it? And then it catalyzed me to go look and see what the public record was, to go look at what the history of future and Blake Harris's version of that, to listen to what Tyler was talking about in terms of this story that maybe Michael Abrash was a little bit of this duplicitous character who betrayed a lot of his team at Valve. And I think there's another side of that, which was that according to History of the Future, Abrash was like, the company that's going to make VR really successful is it's going to need a really big company because the capital that's gonna be required to do custom displays, custom hardware, custom sensor incentives, all the work to build out the full headset, it's gonna be very expensive to do that right. And Abrash had been working at Microsoft and knew about HoloLens and knew the hundreds of millions or possibly even billions of dollars that Microsoft had been pouring into the HoloLens project, and it still wasn't consumer-ready. And so he'd seen close up, and this was in September 2013, and the HoloLens wasn't announced until January 21st of 2015. This is from the history of the future. And by the way, the process of Blake Harris's process isn't to cite any of his sources when it comes to some of these specifics. And so it's an algamation of all these different sources and documents that he's looking at. And some of this is verifiable by the public record. Another is just the reporting that Blake did. And from email documentation or whatever else. And so there's not a draft of history that has like citations and sources of people speaking about the record on all of this. So I just want to put that as a caveat. But History of the Future actually does a great job of putting forth a very specific timeline. The issue with the History of the Future is that Blake Harris didn't have an opportunity to talk to any active Valve employees. All the people he talked to were people from Valve who moved over to Oculus. And so the story that's being told is maybe cast as a very favorable light for what happens for Oculus. And Valve, for whatever reason, hasn't put forth any other alternative narrative. And so at this point, the record Blake is putting forth in the history of the future, he had access to a lot of email records. And so he's trying to, the best he can, document different aspects that happened in the relationship between Valve and Oculus. but there's no active Valve employees that cooperated in the writing of History of the Future. So there's the whole aspect of the story of Valve being a huge dialectic cooperation collaborator, but also just competitor in the early innovations and evolution of VR itself, that they're a huge historical figure, but a lot of that history has not yet been fully told or captured. And so as an oral historian, like really doing a deep dive into this, you know, it's on the one hand frustrating, but on the other hand, as I listened to the different motivations of Valve, you can kind of understand how they're really optimizing for their own creativity and their own creative process, but also having the direct engagement with their fans and being able to, as Tyler says, be a little bit chaotic, neutral when it comes to all that. So I went through and put together a super comprehensive timeline of all the things that were known publicly. Blake Harris's History of the Future goes through and reports on a lot of stuff that had happened during this time period. He said one of the things that had to get cut from History of the Future was a lot of this relationship between Oculus and Valve and so there's a lot more details that had to be cut out and there's certainly a lot of gaps from just, you know, looking at what's in the public record and how some of that played out as well. But in order to just kind of like reduce down this unwieldy story that warped and changed in so many directions, that part between the collaboration between Valve and Oculus had to get cut out. But what I would say is that it does seem like that there was a cooperation between Valve and Oculus and that a lot of that cooperation was symbiotic where there was a lot of things that Oculus had access to displays, they were in contact with Samsung, they were doing all sorts of stuff where they're facilitating different technology trades, and the thing that Valve was doing is that both the software, they had all the software that they were able to just port over and do these different experiments, but also do this room scale, like the high-end tracking, and to solve VR from that perspective first and foremost, rather than from just trying to get sit-down VR done and then having a gamepad controller, which you know, kind of see that tension where how powerful VR was by seeing those room-scale demos that started to premiere back in GDC of 2015. So when you look at that, there's a bit of a symbiosis. And also, you know, there's a difference between the top-down hierarchical way in which that Oculus was doing it, where they're actually able to ship things, versus the bottom-up way in which that Valve is very creative, and that may work for software creation, but when it comes to hardware delivery, that didn't necessarily seem to work all that well. And so I think looking through the history of the future, there was this tension between, hey, are we able to actually like ship some of this stuff? Tom Forsythe, one of the first Valve employees to move over to Oculus, was not necessarily believing that there was gonna be any viable shipping that was coming from Valve. They were doing all these pie-in-the-sky, super expensive, best-in-class prototypes, but that didn't necessarily allow them to ship anything out because it was just way too expensive. But what I see had happened was that Oculus was trying to raise money. January of 2013, internally within Oculus, the CEO, Malamed, calculates the burndown rate and that within six months, Oculus is going to be completely out of money. So the CEO, Brendan Irbay, starts to go out and raise money. And there's actually two rounds of funding that happened between that moment and then leading up to the acquisition by Facebook in March of 2014. March 8th and March 11th of 2013, Brendan Earbey talks to a couple folks at Andreessen Horowitz. They ask, well, what's the deal with motion sickness? And at that point, Brendan Earbey says, uh, we don't know. We don't know if we'll ever be solved. And so Andreessen Horowitz actually passed because they think it's too much of a risk that this is not a solvable thing that they're going to be able to figure out. So June 17, 2013, Oculus raises the first round of $16 million. They have a little bit more money. More money, they're not going to run out of cash, according to the burndown rate. And then by September of 2013, Herbe goes and checks out the Valve room demo. And that room demo just completely blows his mind. He's able to not get motion sickness for the first time. everything else up to that point he would get sick within 30 seconds or a minute he was very sensitive to motion sickness he was able to spend anywhere between 30 to 45 minutes within the room demo and he was just beside himself and it was like oh my god this is amazing he comes back and everybody needs to still raise a lot more money in order to really continue to take where vr is going to go and So he goes to the Gamer Insider Summit, and in the speech, he actually says, within the last couple of weeks, I've tried a prototype internally where I did not get sick for the first time, and I stayed in there for 45 minutes. And so this is an example where he's not disclosing that that internal prototype is actually Valve's hardware. And so he's at this Gamer Insider Summit making this speech that they have this internal prototype that is this huge breakthrough. There's someone from Andreessen Horowitz who sees that, Brian Cho, He's very intrigued and Andresen Horowitz wants to go check it out and see what they're able to do. So then on October 31st, Mark Andresen, Chris Dixon, Brian Cho, and Gil Savard visited Irvine to check out the progress in Oculus. And over the course of the next several hours, the folks from Andresen Horowitz found themselves quite impressed. Dixon would later list all the different reasons why he supported Oculus, according to History of the Future. And one of them was the demo of the Valve Room, including the technology, the quality team, the hand controller prototypes that Palmer Luckey had been working on, as well as meeting with Carmack for over an hour. So it wasn't just the room demo. There was lots of different stuff that was going on there. but the room demo was definitely a part of it. And Andreessen emailed Erbay, we are fully converted believers. Again, did they know whether or not the valve room was their technology or not? I'm not sure. But at least for them, it was proving that simulator sickness was solvable and that maybe that was all that was important about that investment going forward. That even if they didn't create that technology, that it was technologically feasible to be able to come up with all the things to be able to reduce the simulator sickness. So then at the same time, there's lots of different technology trades that are happening between Facebook and Oculus, a very open and collaborative exchange. And in dialectic, I'd say there was different approaches with tracking and they would have different bake-offs of trying to see who could do the best tracking solution. At some point after the Kickstarter had launched, October 2012, there was two of Valve's VR and AR team, Joe Ludwig and Tom Forsyth, who started to port over Team Fortress 2. So they wanted to see if they were able to actually port an existing game, not just create something from scratch, just to be able to see what they can learn from that experience. And at GDC 2013, Joe Ludwig ends up giving a presentation about these lessons, and he says that they were using the Enviz ST-50 as a virtual reality HMD, as well as a Rift prototype. So in order for the early ports of Team Fortress 2, they were using prototype hardware from Oculus. So there was some sort of technology exchange that was already happening sometime between August of 2012 and the GDC that happened in 2013. Valve's Joe Ligwood does an interview with Ben Gilbert. Ligwood has said, so Nomani had changed hands and Oculus provided development kits and Valve provided Team Fortress 2 VR mode. And Lugwood says that we don't have any hardware when asked about working with Oculus and why Valve didn't create its own VR headset. And he says that we've done a bunch of experiments with various bits of hardware, but we don't have a display that we can ship. Oculus is actually out there doing this, and so we're partnering with them because they have the hardware and we have the software and we can help each other out. And we can both learn a lot in the process. And so that was on March 18, 2013. You know, there's this symbiotic relationship where Valve is really pushing forward the software side of things, and then Oculus is doing the hardware. So there's a very cooperative way in which both Oculus and Valve were using that competition to really catalyze how innovation happens. You know, I don't necessarily buy into the narrative that a brush was the bad guy and the snake in history of the future. Blake Harris, at least puts forth say all these different times that he's going to the leadership of Valve and the board of directors and say, you know, if we're really going to innovate, a new technology platform requires hundreds of millions and billions of dollars. Is that something that Valve was going to be willing to invest? And the signs are that maybe not. You know, one of the things that Tyler says is that AR was a lot ready. And I think we can look and see that AR is not nearly as ready as VR because the HoloLens is still shipping. There's lots of different, really difficult problems when it comes to computer vision that, in my assessment, VR really needed to be first in that. But it's not necessarily a valid argument to say that AR should have come first because, you know, look at all the different AR stuff that's out there. It's just not at the point of where VR is when it comes to all the challenges of computer vision and AI and everything else. That said, I think Michael Abrash likely said, okay, well, VR is likely gonna be first, and that in order for AR to exist, it needs to have all these underlying aspects of VR in order to get out there. And so you can make an argument that Valve would have never shipped any hardware had Ben Stock and Abrash not left. Had they stayed, would Valve had the incentive to be able to really put a fire underneath their ass and to go off and actually make something? I'm not sure. Maybe there was a dialectic relationship that was already there, and that betrayal that happened we don't know all the different ways in which, like, when did Abrash decide to go over. According to the History of the Future, you know, he had quit Valve in frustration. Binstock had actually quit on March 11th and already gone over to Oculus, and Abrash had quit after having this discussion with Gabe and the board of directors. And then once the announcement had been made that Oculus was being acquired by Facebook, then there's a conversation that happens between Herbe and Abrash on that afternoon, and then within less than a week, three, four days later than a brushes working at Oculus. Now, that all said, I think there's a large part of the story that is completely untold. And maybe there were people within Valve that thought that this type of technological sharing and cooperation was bad. Certainly once Facebook had bought and acquired Oculus, there's a lot of people within Valve that said, no way, we're not going to be cooperating. But at the same time, what Valve did was really take this radically open approach of, with their SteamVR, trying to create integrations to the Oculus SDK and to make it so that someone could write a VR program once and include the Steam VR API, and that would give them access to Oculus hardware, as well as Valve's and other hardware, Windows Mixed Reality. And so you see this dialectic between the closed and the open, between the Oculus have really locked down SDK, locked down store, and Valve, the really open approach. And I think you really need to have that dialectic between the open and the closed, and that there's trade-offs between the two. But if you look at a story like Big Screen, you know, Big Screen wouldn't be where it is without being able to have an open platform and to have people have access to it or, you know, there's lots of different examples where a VR game has had a huge amount of success on Steam and then it gets ported over to Oculus ecosystem as well. So, I think there's a lot more of the stories yet to be told. In the write-up here, I'm going to put this whole timeline that I put together with a lot of information sourced from history of the future, just in the spirit of seeing what the actual public record is and what the story is, and I'd love to talk to people that were potentially involved directly. I can go so far we're talking to Tyler because he's got this kind of secondhand information and he's maybe got the overall gist of the vibe of what the story is but the people that were there are the ones that can really tell what happened between like 2014 and 2015 and what was the aftermath of that and how they're really responding and how they're able to really get their act together to be able to actually start shipping stuff with HTC. and then eventually, you know, ship their own hardware with the Valve Index. And they certainly learned a lot from working with HTC and were able to maybe be a little bit more self-sustaining and then, you know, eventually starting to cooperate with folks like HP as well as Microsoft. So when it comes to just overall in the VR ecosystem, I think this dialectic process between Facebook and Oculus, I think that's a key part for how innovation happens and that you have that type of competition. And also just the whole history of that. There's certain parts of even Valve kind of memory holing that part of that dialectic and also Oculus kind of not really talking about it that much. And so I definitely appreciated being able to talk to Tyler for me to go and to really dig into this a little bit more. And I don't necessarily believe that one individual could come up with the exact truth. I think as part of just trying to capture this postpography or this oral history that everybody's gonna have their own perspective and their own lens of what happened during this time period. And it wasn't necessarily the main focus of History of the Future of Blake Harrison, so there's a lot of that dialectical relationship that I think is not contained within that book, especially since there's no active Valve employees that had participated in it. Half-Life Alyx, I mean, I've not necessarily talked about it on the podcast. I've spent 50 to 60 hours. I did a whole immersive architecture of Half-Life Alyx talk with Andrea Contecaru, as well as Frederick Helberg, and just did a huge deep dive. I, myself, started to really dig into the tools and just the way that the modding community and the tools that Valve has created to be able to not only experience a game, but also take the template of that experience and use that as inspiration to create your own virtual reality experience. It sounds like with the work from home, that really threw a wrench in their workflow of really having this being in proximity of other people and collaborating and working with them. And now that they don't have a physical office, then how are they able to maintain that type of culture that they've been able to cultivate? As well as it's just difficult to do VR playtesting when there's a pandemic. And so some of their ways of being able to test and to develop is hindered just because that's a big part of their process as well, is a large amount of playtesting. And, you know, the other big point that I just wanted to make is that it doesn't sound like Valve is necessarily going to be developing a standalone headset. I mean, they might, but it seems like they're going to the top of the line PC VR. Let's give the enthusiasts the best experience possible. And again, you can also look at Half-Life Alyx as that example. And with the Facebook moving more towards this, you know, let's make it accessible. Let's make it, people don't need a whole PC and just the standalone form factor is a whole other way in which there's a lot of momentum. And that at this point, Valve doesn't necessarily seem like they're going to be interested in necessarily like developing that type of standalone headset. At least that's what Tyler says at this point. I mean, that may change in the future. But as where things stand right now, that's where they're at. Chet Falsnak, when he left Valve in 2017, there was no direct liaison between Valve and the broader virtual reality community. And so I think, you know, I'd be very curious to potentially talk to Chet about some of this history and, you know, get a sense of, you know, what happened in the aftermath of Oculus being bought by Facebook and the evolution of the HTC Vive. I mean you go from Oculus being bought out to the next year Mobile World Congress and then GDC of 2015 is the unveiling of the HTC Vive. So in the course of that year, since the Oculus was bought out, the next year then Valve all of a sudden goes from no plans to shipping any hardware to actually having the first iteration of the HTC Vive. So, that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices in VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesinvr. Thanks for listening.
