Yesterday marked the anniversary of when Valve famously missed Half-Life 2's release date: September 30th, 2003

It wouldn't have been such a big deal if Gabe Newell hadn't announced the date earlier that year, and then announcing the delay a week before on September 23. Half-Life 2 was even supposed to launch with a new ATi card at a sponsored event taking place on Alcatraz of all places (perhaps in reference to Nova Prospekt).

Gabe Newell was really embarrassed about the whole delay ordeal alone, but he still had to attend the event at Alcatraz due to the sponsorship with ATi and try to dodge as many questions as he could after he gave his speech that was mostly unrelated to Half-Life 2. [1] But GameSpot managed to catch Gabe before he made his escape and asked him a few questions.

One of the stand out quotes from Newell was, "I hate release dates because no matter how hard we try, we screw them up. We held back talking about our release date going into September 30 because I wanted to have a much clearer idea of what day we were going to ship on." [3] It changed how Valve approached revealing release dates, soon the term "Valve Time" came into prominence as a result.

Less than a couple weeks later the entire Half-Life 2 source code and most of the game's assets/levels were leaked online. The Leak highlighted that the game was far from complete, and only added fuel to the fire surrounding Valve. At a time that seemed like a possible end for Valve, they were able to turn lemons into lemonade, and incredibly finished Half-Life 2 a year later to great acclaim.

Other historical events that happened in the same time frame was the launch of Steam, that happened on September 12, 2003. [4] Steam was met with a lot skepticism, even when we signed up back in 2004 we had no idea if this thing was going to take off. Yet, here we are with it being one of the dominate PC Storefronts. Valve was just full of surprises weren't they?

Here's to another 20 years.