Biography | Gabe Newell — One Microsoft Way, Thirteen Years on Windows

People treat Steam as his first software platform. The first platforms he shipped sat on this campus. Microsoft moved onto the Redmond site, One Microsoft Way, in 1986. Newell had already been at the company for three years after leaving Harvard. He spent thirteen years in total as a programmer and technical executive. Later company and press accounts credit him as a producer on the first three releases of Windows. By the mid-1990s he had also pushed a Windows 95 port of Doom. Doom, a twelve-person studio's game, ran on more machines than the new operating system. That fact stayed with him. In 1996 he left. Michael Abrash had already gone to id Software to work on Quake. Newell and another Microsoft employee, Mike Harrington, followed the same instinct a few miles west in Kirkland. The campus is still Microsoft's. This pin marks historical work, not a current workplace and not a home. Photo: Microsoft Building 92, via Wikimedia Commons