Valve lead Gabe Newell is nothing if not an eccentric billionaire, much to fans’ amusement – so eccentric, in fact, that he apparently went through a… throat singing phase?
Yes, you read that correctly. Counter-Strike co-creator Minh “Gooseman” Le recalls as much in a new interview with Indie Game Joe over on YouTube (below), explaining how Newell would bring his interests to the office – whether or not his coworkers approved – starting with Mongolian throat singing.
“He watched this documentary on them and he really got really fascinated with this concept and he started to practice that.”
Yes, at work.
“So he started to do this Mongolian throat singing stuff and he was doing it throughout the office,” as Le says. “You would hear him try to sing with his throat as he’s walking down the halls. And, I remember a lot of people in the office, they were kind of annoyed with this because it’s kind of loud, right?”
Did that deter Newell? No. “He would just walk along the halls just doing this throat singing thing, and he would do it daily.”
It got so bad, Le states that “people would just started closing the doors and it started to become quite a closed office,” describing it as “an interesting time.” How long did it all go on for, though?
A whopping “five months” or so, apparently… and Newell ended up picking up other wild hobbies afterward, too. Le discusses everything from knife collecting to whole rooms filled to the brim with medieval-style axes and swords.
So, there you have it – Newell has always been a bit quirky (in the best way possible, of course). This is the same man who invested his $9.5 billion fortune into yachts last year, after all, after making clear that he’s a scuba diving enthusiast.
I wonder what else he’ll pick up, honestly. There’s plenty out there to collect and hobbies to adopt, much to the Valve boss’s delight, I’m sure… even if not his poor coworkers’.