Gabe Newell will be a bad guy in this indie dungeon crawler, with Valve's blessing

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell is going to appear as a (beautifully animated) knife-wielding enemy in Crawl, a local multiplayer dungeon crawler currently in Early Access on Steam, with the permission of "Gaben" himself.

Earlier this month, Crawl developer Powerhoof posted an animation of a pixelated, stylized Newell in the form of one of the game's bosses. Artist Barny Cumming said on Twitter that he was "adding some monsters for next Crawl update. I've wanted to animate this for ages."

"This has been at the top of my list since the very start," Cumming wrote in a blog post. After the animation got some attention — justifiably, as Newell's transformation from tame-looking nice guy Gabe to hirsute, blade-wielding Super Saiyan Gabe is great — Cumming realized he'd better ask for permission to put Newell's likeness in Crawl. So he did.

Turns out Valve and Newell were amenable to the idea of letting Crawl players slay (and be slain by) Gabe. Powerhoof tweeted yesterday that it received a "short sweet email from Valve today giving the go ahead for this silly thing. [T]urns out Valve are cool. Who knew?"

Powerhoof says it plans to put Gabe Newell in Crawl with the game's next update, which it estimates will be available "very soon."

Crawl is available now on Steam through Early Access for Linux, Mac and Windows PC.