Valve’s Gabe Newell given GDC 2010 The Pioneer Award

Gabe Newell of Valve has won the Pioneer Award for the Game Developers Choice Awards 2010. The award was given to him for his work in the creation of the downloadable PC game platform Steam, as well as his work with masterpieces in game design like Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Portal, and the Team Fortress games.

Newell will be on stage to collect the award at the Game Developers Conference 2010 in San Francisco on March 9-13.

Previous winners of the Pioneer Award, which celebrates individuals who were responsible in developing a “vital technology” or game design “at a crucial juncture in video game history, paving the way for the many who followed them”, include:

2009: Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy (founders of Harmonix)
2008: Ralph Baer (inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey)
2007: Alexey Pajitnov (creator of Tetris)
2006: Don Woods, Will Crowther (creators of the early text game Adventure)
2005: Richard Bartle (co-creator of MUD, ancestor to MMOs)
2004: Masaya Matsuura (founder of NanaOn-Sha, pioneer of music/game integration)
2003: David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Jim Levy, Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead (founders of Activision)
2002: Hubert Chardot (creator of Alone in the Dark)
2001: Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer (creators of Lucasfilm’s Habitat)