DemoCoder said:
I'm separating the benchmark here from the game. In the event the source-code theft was not a contrivance, it could certainly have delayed the game somewhat, but not the benchmark. And, I wasn't speaking of Valve being paid, I was speaking of Newell, personally, being paid in a manner invisible to his co-workers, his publisher, and possibly others. I assume that Newell has a private life as well as a professional one, and so it is certainly possible any such arrangements could have been made privately. I say all of this hypothetically because much of the information surrounding the original release date of the game, the benchmark, and the purported theft, came directly, and personally, from Newell himself in every case I can recall.
The interesting thing for me is that the stories about the release date coming from Valve's publisher, Vivendi, and coming from Newell personally as a representative of Valve, differed at times, with Vivendi stipulating finally that (paraphrased) "Newell knows best when the software is going to be released as he represents Valve, the developer," and thus deferring to Valve (Newell, actually) in the matter of Newell's assertion that HL2 was still on for a 9/03 ship date. But as we all can see, Vivendi's original comments as to an '04 ship date were actually correct.
So, why did Newell, personally, think it necessary to contradict Vivendi's statement that the 09/03 shipdate would not be met, considering that it was not met? If we are to assume that as an employee of Valve, Newell would have known the game could not have shipped by 9/03, then it follows there was some personal agenda of Newell's at work behind the scenes about which Newell has never commented, much less explained publicly. This brings us to a couple of possibilities:
1) Newell is an idiot, and simply had no clue as to when the game might ship, but "thought" it would ship on time (Heh...
Really, can't rule that one out just yet, and simply being a dunce is not a crime that I'm aware of.)2)Newell was insisting on meeting the 9/03 ship date for some personal agenda of his own, which to him was compelling enough to cause him to publicly misrepresent the facts as he knew them, and as Vivendi knew them to be, with regard to when the game might ship. Such an agenda could run the gamut from ego, to receiving money from sources to which he had personally pledged a 9/03 ship date, etc. The fact is that long before Newell publicized the source-code theft account, Vivendi had already publicly stated the game would not ship until '04 (which Newell immediately refuted, and which Vivendi so retracted.) This indicates to me that whatever Newell's agenda was at that time, it was an agenda of which Vivendi was unaware, which reinforces the idea that Newell was acting independently in these events.
My thinking is that Newell spent the time between his contradiction of Vivendi's '04 HL2 ship-date statement, and the time he announced the source-code theft, in thinking up a plausible reason by which he could delay the game, but absolve himself personally of the consequences (public or private) for that delay at the same time. The source-code theft story fits the bill in that regard, imo.
The irony is that had Newell released the benchmark as he announced it would be released, then I would have believed the source-code theft account...
But since he did not release the benchmark, which should not have been affected by theft of the source code relative to the game itself, this immediately raised a large red flag to me as to the veracity of the entire story.Really, I have no idea what actually transpired, and can only say that it certainly appears that the facts have yet to be disclosed publicly. Privately, I have no idea who might be aware of what actually happened, but suspect that some entities apart from Newell do indeed actually know very well what happened, and that the facts differ materially from Newell's public account.
This is a complex issue, and the interests of many parties were affected in sometimes very different ways by Valve's failure to ship the game as scheduled, so there is no telling as to how many parties might've assisted Newell in contriving the source-code theft story. Or, it could have been all Newell's doing for a variety of possible reasons. Just can't say at this point. For me, though, the "missing benchmark" caused the whole scheme, whatever it was designed to cover, and whomever was responsible for it, to unravel, imo.
(Sleuthing cap removed, pipe extinguished...
)
