Gabe Newell, currently the president of Valve, and Nintendo seemingly had talked about a joint project “that ended up not happening,” according to Grey Newell, Gabe’s son. The story goes that about seven years ago, a family vacation to Japan was also used for Gabe to meet with Nintendo higher-ups to discuss a collaboration. The trip was during the Wii era, but it is unclear about what console the now-scrapped project would’ve released for.
Gabe has gone on the record praising the Wii U as well. Back in 2011, in an interview with Joystiq, he stated that,
“[The] Wii U seems to be a lot more powerful than the previous generation. It sort of fits better into the scalability in terms of graphics performance and CPU performance, so I think it’ll be a lot easier for us to fit it into our scalability model.”
Take all of this with a grain of salt, though, as his comments were made via a livestream on ValveNewsNetwork. Nonetheless, it is interesting to think that Valve, a company that has never released a game on a Nintendo device, could still be interested in making games with Nintendo in mind moving forward.
Caleb has been a gamer and Nintendo fan since picking up Pokémon Red for his Game Boy back in 1998, at the wee age of 4. He’s an avid Pokémon TCG collector, and is currently enjoying Breath of the Wild on Switch, along with PUBG on Xbox. He’s a fan of the outdoors when not writing, while also being an avid runner and world traveler. Give him a shout if you’re a fan of Arsenal FC.
Plays: Switch, 3DS, Xbox One, Pokémon TCG, and Various Board Games.