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Valve CEO says there was no meeting with Tim Cook

Gabe Newell tells SevenDayCooldown that the much-rumored meeting with Apple CEO Tim Cook at the gaming software maker's headquarters didn't happen.

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Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
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Valve CEO Gabe Newell at Sony's E3 press conference in 2010. Josh Lowensohn/CNET

Quite a stir was caused last week by reports that Apple's Tim Cook had paid a visit to Valve headquarters in Washington state.

Speculation ran rampant over why the CEO of the world's most famous hardware maker would pay a visit to the popular gaming software maker after AppleInsider reported the rumor. Might a gaming console for the long-awaited Apple TV be in the works? Or perhaps a challenger to Google Glasses, the augmented-reality specs the Web giant is working on?

Apparently, the excitement spread to the Valve campus, the software maker's CEO, Gabe Newell, explained to SevenDayCooldown. However, the rumor turned out to be just a rumor, much to Newell's own disappointment:

We actually, we all sent mail to each other, going, "Who's Tim Cook meeting with? Is he meeting with you? I'm not meeting with Tim Cook." So we're... it's one of those rumors that was stated so factually that we were actually confused.
No one here was meeting with Tim Cook or with anybody at Apple that day. I wish we were! We have a long list of things we'd love to see Apple do to support games and gaming better. But no, we didn't meet with Tim Cook. He seems like a smart guy, but I've never actually met him.

[Via Macrumors]