Valve’s Gabe Newell dubbed a Fellow in the BAFTA gaming world

THE MAN WHO BROUGHT YOU Steam, Portal and Gordon Freeman has been honoured with Bafta Fellowship.

Valve's Gabe Newell is now a Bafta Fellow and wherever he goes he will be recognised as having made an outstanding and exceptional contribution to games. He is already, of course.

Newell is a thirty year veteran of the gaming world, and he joins other outstanding game makers like Peter Molyneux (Populous), Shigeru Miyamoto (Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong) and Will Wright (Sim City and The Sims) as a Bafta Fellow.

"It is an honor for myself and everyone at Valve to be presented such an award by one of the world's most respected and recognised organisations," said Newell on being awarded his fellowship.

"Valve owes a tremendous thanks to many in the UK - to those who have played our games, I look forward to accepting this prestigious honor on behalf of everyone in our community."

Newell got his start at Microsoft and cemented his legend status with a career that includes Half Life. He's also the guy that gave us Valve and Steam, the on demand gaming service. Soon a console, or console PC hybrid, will issue forth from his camp.

He's well known around Bafta having already walked out of its parties with awards for Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, and Portal 2 in the last few years.

Listen to the chaps at Bafta and you'll realise that Newell is a giver too, and his work in the industry earned him more than one slap on the back.

"Gabe's contribution to the industry is unique, and he is very different to many others that Bafta could recognise," said Harvey Elliott, chairman of Bafta's Games Committee.

"As well as enjoying great critical and commercial success with phenomenally popular franchises such as Portal and Half-Life, his work in giving back to the games industry through developing and showcasing other games makers has been outstanding. He is an inspirational developer and truly deserving of our Fellow recognition."

Speaking to the BBC at the gaming event Newell said that testing models of the Steambox games system would be available in "months".

"We'll be giving out some prototypes to customers to gauge their reactions, I guess, in the next three to four months," he added. "There are noise issues and heat issues and being able to [deal with] that while still offering a powerful enough gaming experience is the challenge in building it." µ