Valve’s games are pretty much exclusive to the PC, but can you imagine if Valve had made games for consoles? Turns out that the company nearly had because apparently Valve’s founder Gabe Newell met up with Nintendo to discuss a possible joint venture of sorts, although unfortunately this was many years ago that did not result in anything.
This was revealed during the Valve News Network show with Tyler McVicker in which Gabe Newell’s son, Grey, came on the show and spoke a bit about his father. During the show, Grey revealed that he got to play Mario Galaxy with the game’s designer Shigeru Miyamoto during a trip to Japan in which his father met up with Nintendo.
While Grey was not specific in who exactly his father met up with (it is possible that it was either the late Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, or he could be referring to Miyamoto), he did confirm that they discussed the idea of a joint project. However Grey notes that the meeting was “super casual” and took place about 7 years ago, which was roughly around the time of the Wii U.
However as PCGamesN points out, Grey’s recollection of the event is in line with an interview with Joystiq back in 2011 in which Newell did praise the Wii U console, indicating his interest in possibly developing for it. We suppose it would have been interesting to see what Valve could have brought to the Wii U, but given that the Switch is now gaining popularity, perhaps Valve might want to revisit their console efforts.