Newell death threat dev re-joins Code Avarice

A developer who tweeted that he was going to kill Gabe Newell” has re-joined the studio whom he left to protect.

Mike Maulbeck quit studio Code Avarice last month after publicly throwing a tantrum after its game Paranautical Activity was incorrectly listed on Steam, leading to the game being pulled from Valve’s service.

Mike is back,” a studio update confirmed. This is probably not hugely surprising to some of you, but Mike couldn’t commit to his decision to leave Code Avarice. [Co-owner] Travis [Pfenning] publicly denounced his departure, and in the weeks following his official stepping down Mike had second thoughts.

Looking for a new source of income was extremely overwhelming and when it finally came time to put pen to paper, Mike and Travis agreed the best thing to do would be to have Mike return to Code Avarice.

In retrospect we should have waited until everything was finalized before making the announcement, but Mike was extremely eager to just get out and never look back. He posted the announcement to the site before even talking to Travis about his intentions.

From now on rather than blog posts being written and signed by one of the developers, they will all be co-written by Mike AND Travis, and written from the perspective of the company rather than an individual. We have also created a Code Avarice official twitter account so you no longer have to follow personal twitter accounts to get development updates.”