If you thought BioShock was big, then hear this. An interesting piece up on ComputerAndVideoGames.com reveals that Valve's Gabe Newell won't let his stiff (or himself for that matter) get anywhere near Irrational's just launched FPS, BioShock. That is until they finish Half Life 2: Episode 2 and the Orange Box of course.

"We had to ban Bioshock from our offices," Valve boss Gabe Newell told the site. "Nobody gets to play it until Orange Box is done - that's our reward to ourselves as a company; everyone gets a copy of Bioshock."

Newell continued with his speech, hinting at their company "as one of the many that spindled from the Doom and System Shock legacy," the same website posts: "Irrational is the latest example of people who've descended from the Id Software/Looking Glass family tree," said Newell.

"Somebody should do a family tree of Id and Looking Glass and it might turn out that there's nobody left who isn't a descendent of those two companies," he added.

Can you imagine what painstaking efforts the team behind Half Life 2 is making only to finish the game faster? Had BioShock been delayed, the team wouldn't have had any reasons to become restless, but given that everyone's currently 24/7 on it, they must be in agony.

But we can all understand the real reasons behind Valve's (Newell's) initiative here:

- first of all, Newell is surely using this "prohibition," only to make sure the team is on schedule, or why not even ahead of schedule - that's never bad.

- then of course, Newell might also have reasoned that the team shouldn't even get a glimpse at Irrational's game only so that Valve's FPS will be nothing like it - so the team isn't influenced in any way; this however may prove that Newell has probably played the game, found something in it that he doesn't (under no circumstances) want in Half Life 2, thus forbid his team to play it.

Yes, I did go a little too far with this last assumption but you can't say it doesn't make a little sense. There are two outcomes to this the way I see it:

- Valve delivers the games faster, to the fans' delight;
- Valve delivers a rushed - Half Life 2: Episode 2 and Orange Box, disappointing fans

Or they could just act like nothing ever happened...