Originally released back in 2007, Valve’s The Orange Box is considered to be one of the best gaming bundles in video game history, offerings fans a total of five separate games at a more than fair initial price point. While many have come to assume over the years that this was an entirely planned endeavor by Valve in order to pull in more Steam users, it turns out that the reason behind the existence of The Orange Box was a bit more due to chance.

In a recent interview with IGN, Valve’s Robin Walker explained that The Orange Box actually came about because Valve ended up coming to the completion of several different video game projects at the same time. “The Orange Box is interesting… It’s a very interesting choice because it’s not… I don’t think it comes from the place that people assume it comes from,” Walker explained.

It came from what’s essentially an internal problem, which was, up until that point… we had only ever shipped one game at a time.”

Robin Walker goes on to explain that more often than not, if a member of a dev team at Valve is looking for a good way to spend their time, they would normally dedicate themselves towards putting some “final polish on something,” or doing some bug fixing.

So, we’ve got a company full of people who are used to doing that, and then we’re working on these three different games. Team Fortress 2, [Half-Life 2] Episode 2, and Portal. And, looking at, ‘Oh, man, for the first time, it looks like all these are going to finish around the same time. How are we going to handle this?'”

Combining that with not being sure how to market Portal to the public culminated in Valve’s decision to release the set of games as The Orange Box, thus creating video game history. I’d say it worked out pretty well for them, personally.

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