Ever wondered what the first video game felt like for someone who would later shape gaming history? Gabe Newell, Valve’s co-founder, shared in a recent chat that his first real gaming experience was far from instant gratification. It involved punch cards, printers, and a whole lot of patience.
In an interview with YouTuber Zalkar Saliev, Gabe opened up about his early days with computers. Back then, videogames as we know them didn’t quite exist; instead, they were mostly university mainframe experiments. His high school had a deal with the University of California, Davis, allowing students to tinker with their computer, likely the Raytheon 703.
“We would do what was called batch programming,” said Newell. “You create a punch card, run it through a reader, then rush over to the line printer to see what your output was.” It sounds painfully slow, right? Because it was. The game he remembers playing was a text-based Star Trek variant from the early 1970s, where the Enterprise was represented by an ‘E’, Romulans by an ‘R’, Klingons by a ‘K’, and stars were denoted by asterisks.
Gabe laughed about how the “frames per second” back then were more like “minutes per frame,” often taking about 15 minutes to complete a movie. Imagine waiting that long just to see if your strategy worked! It was definitely a far cry from today’s lightning-fast gameplay, but it sparked his interest nonetheless.
Interestingly, this early exposure didn’t deter Newell from prioritizing his studies, although he admits he never completed his degree. Instead, a chance meeting with Steve Ballmer led him to Microsoft, where he honed his programming skills before eventually founding Valve.
Seeing how far gaming has come since those slow, printout-based Star Trek sessions really puts things into perspective. Who would’ve thought that a game played with punch cards and printers would help inspire one of the biggest names in gaming?
