Biography | Gabe Newell — The High School Where He Learned to Program Before Games Had a Career Path

Most people meet Gabe Newell as the face of Valve and Steam. The habit that got him there started on a public high-school campus in a university town west of Sacramento. Davis Senior High School sits at 315 West 14th Street. The present campus opened in 1961. Newell spent all three of his high-school years here and graduated with the class of 1980. He was born in Colorado on 3 November 1962 and grew up in Davis. Programming was not yet a recognized career. He later said he assumed he would become a doctor. He began writing software while he was still a student on this quad. Physics, calculus, and English were the classes that stayed with him, according to a 2017 interview with the school paper. He also worked. He delivered newspapers, then carried Western Union telegrams around town on a bicycle. Davis in summer is hot. He has said he does not miss that part. The school is still a public comprehensive campus for grades 10 through 12. A visitor will find classrooms, a stadium, and a performance hall, not a museum to a billionaire alumnus. What matters is the timing. In 1980 a teenager could learn to code here, then ride a bike across town, without anyone treating software as a profession. That gap is the whole early story. From this campus he went east to Harvard. He did not stay long enough to take a degree. The next useful classroom turned out to be a software company in the Seattle suburbs. The pin is the school itself, a place any alum can still walk. It is not a private house and not a shrine. It is where the work started when the work did not yet have a name. Photo: Davis Senior High School campus, GIANTPAPAYA, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons