Company: Valve

In 2009, Justin McElroy, reviews editor for the now-defunct gaming blog Joystiq, contacted Gearbox co-founder Randy Pitchford asking the story of how Gearbox got its name for a puff piece series about different companies' names. Pitchford proceeded to tell an extraordinary story about how he and Valve co-founder Gabe Newell mistakenly boarded a cruising river boat together in New Orleans instead of a crossing ferry, and ended up getting into a high stakes Texas Hold 'Em poker game.

The stakes in particular were over the name "Gearbox", which he claimed came about from him and Newell discussing potential names for their up-and-coming game studios, and "realizing that something cool for a video game studio would have something to do with engines and machinery." Pitchford thought that the name was "sticky and simple and gears are cool things that have both an art and a precision to them and it's generally a nice, short but really cool word." Whoever knocked the other player out of the game or ended up with the biggest stack would win the Gearbox name. The stakes were higher for Pitchford, because according to him the other co-founders would have ditched him and shuttered the game studio entirely if he lost.

After four or five hours of play, Pitchford, being an avid poker player while Newell was not, found the right opportunity to turn the odds in his favor, leading to him winning the match, and Gabe Newell had to settle with Valve. Pitchford assured McElroy there were no hard feelings between the two as Gearbox would later work with them on future expansions for Half-Life, and the article was published and further corroborated by fellow outlet Kotaku.

However, later that day, McElroy was contacted by a spokesperson from Valve, who informed him that Newell and Pitchford first met after Valve shipped Half-Life, making the story impossible. Upon this discovery, both outlets later contacted Gearbox, and a spokesperson confirmed to them that the story was fake. Pitchford then explained to a reporter at Kotaku that the intent of his "Tall Tale" was to entertain and not to mislead, and promoted the original articles on his Twitter account as such.

It's currently unknown how Gearbox actually got its name, or if the inspiration for the name featured in the story is true while the poker game surrounding it is fabricated.

In December of 2012, Chris Prynoski, founder of the American animation studio Titmouse, Inc., posted several hashtags on Twitter hinting at a collaboration with Valve before posting a picture of himself with Gabe Newell in Titmouse's offices. The collaboration was most commonly speculated to be a video game based off of the Titmouse-animated Cartoon Network series "Megas XLR". In August of 2015, Prynoski clarified that the collaboration was scrapped due to licensing problems.

Some of the machines that create Valve's Steam Controller are branded with the Aperture Laboratories logo, the company featured in Portal.

According to The Valve Employee Handbook, during Half-Life's development in 1996, there was another game being developed called Prospero. In 1997 the game was permanently cancelled.

Along with "The Orange Box", a collection of five Valve games utilizing the Source engine, Valve was originally going to release "The Black Box", which would only contain the three previously unreleased games: Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. The Orange Box also includes Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One, each of which had already been released individually.

Production of physical copies of The Black Box was cancelled, but the collection is still available for download through Steam, using a coupon found in an ATI bundle that included an ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT and a coupon for the Black Box.

Team Fortress, Day of Defeat, Counter-Strike and Ricochet were all originally fan-made mods.

The bald man with a red valve on the back of his head, often used during splash screens for Valve games, is somebody who "was literally pulled out of a coffee shop or book store".

Gabe Newell served as a producer for the first three versions of Windows (Windows 1.0, Windows 2.0 and Windows 2.1x) before going on and founding Valve.

Valve has a working sentry from Team Fortress 2 and a working turret from Portal in their lobby. Both were contributed by WETA Workshop.