It’s a heart warming story that surprisingly hasn’t been picked up by Disney yet. A Left 4 Dead modder by the name of Joe W-A has raised $3000 to fly out Valve bosses.
He started the ‘Fly Gabe Newell’ campaign after he quizzed him why he never got flown to Valve HQ, despite L4D2 boycotters getting airfare. Gabe Newell and Erik Johnson are Down Under.
Earlier in the year Valve flew out leaders of the Left 4 Dead 2 boycott campaign to Seattle, in an attempt to win them over. Joe W-A a Left 4 Dead modder asked Gabe Newell, of whom he’d be in contact with numerously, why he hadn’t ever flown him out to the studio.
Valve jokingly replied that they were ‘boycotting’ Joe’s mods, to which the modder replied with a Fly Gabe Newell campaign, to raise enough cash to get plane tickets for the Valve bosses to visit him in Australia. Within 48 hours the gaming community raised the $3000 needed.
Newell and Johnson are now on their way Down Under to meet Joe W-A and his mod. Apparently Valve will be footing the airfare bill themselves and having the cash raised by gamers donated to charity instead.
”The power of the gaming community and their ability to rally around a cause - be it serious or fun in nature - is amazing,” said Newell in a released statement.
”In 2003, the community helped the FBI and European law enforcement officials find the people who stole the Half-Life 2 source code. This year, the community is putting me on a plane to the other side of the world to meet Joe W-A and see his mod. It’s going to be a fun trip.”
Reports of the trip to Australia will be plastered over the Left 4 Dead blog next week.
Source: Eurogamer
