Oh, you’ve screwed up now, hero. Gabe Newell just put on his beard.
We thought Valve Software would be the first to turn the company’s beloved co-founder Gabe Newell into a playable video game character, but that honor has instead been snatched by the Australian design team behind co-op dungeon battler Crawl.
As reported to Eurogamer, designer Barney Cumming took to the game’s development blog on Thursday to post a brief but tantalizing GIF of his latest in-game creation, and it appears to portray Newell as a playable “boss” in the game . Crawlcurrently available on Steam’s Early Access service, works by having four players battle each other to take charge of the game’s “hero” role – meaning anyone who isn’t human can destroy the bodies of evil creatures must invade to make the hero’s life miserable.
Cumming’s gritty, supersized take on Newell – which he insisted wasn’t an April Fool’s joke – looked like it was a lot of damage to Crawl‘s in-game hero. It came in two forms: one that depicted Newell’s former clean-cut style, in which he attacked exclusively with an uppercut, and one that depicted his more recent, long-haired, bearded appearance, complete with giant daggers and spinning attacks. The brief blog post indicated that this in-game character, along with a few others, would be hidden or available only as a “rare image”, so as not to upset the game’s balance or disrupt its relatively serious tone. While we wait for Newell to be added to the Steam version, we’ll continue loving Crawl‘s unique twist on the Glovestyle dungeon crawler, especially since the Early Access phase already contains major updates and promising new features.
The only other major, digital version of Newell we can remember ever appearing in a game came in the form of a fan-made Dota 2 mod from the game’s retailer, but that mod is no longer available through the Steam Workshop. We’ve reached out to Valve Software to ask for their thoughts on this Crawl‘s new boss, and we will update this report with any response.