You got a lot of your history mixed up here. Nvidia was founded in 1993 by former AMD, SUN and IBM engineers, eight years after Microsoft Window 1.0 released. Microsoft was a big player in spreadsheets with Multiplan on DOS, but were asked by Apple to create a new one using the mouse driven GUI of their still in development Mac that debuted in 1984. This was Excel, and Microsoft created Windows to also run it on PCs, with Window 1.0 pretty much just being an Excel launcher. Microsoft pushed for GUIs requiring graphic cards very early on, long before the first 3D accelerated cards were released.
And Gabe Newell was convinced to drop out of Harvard by Steve Balmer while he was visiting his brother at Microsoft. He spent 13 years as a programmer and executive there, and was the producer for the first three versions of Windows. His move to leave Microsoft and start Valve was first inspired by the release of the original Doom in 1993, still a DOS application because Windows wasn't optimized for games, and at one time estimated to have been installed on more computers than Windows itself, with Newell offering to port Doom to Windows for free.
And then by John Carmack plus a friend, who had gone from Microsoft to id Software to work on Quake directly (Newell: "one of Carmack's programming heroes"), telling him and Mike Harrington (also working for Microsoft) "'Hey, you guys should stop working at Microsoft and start a games company". Which they did, flying down to id Software in Texas in 1996, bouncing around ideas with them, according to Newell ending in Carmack saying "'Great, here's the source code to Quake, go build a game". Which was the beginning of Half-Life, and the rest is legend.
Valve didn't come from some indie game resistance fighers keeping up PC gaming against the mainstream declaring it dead, but from a couple of already wealthy Microsoft managers with the help of the back then most successful PC gaming development studio. And while their fame is for introducing a narrative shooter and tons of game mechanics that basically shook up the whole gaming world the very moment the Half-Life demo released, the real key to Valve's success is the introduction of digital distribution, cutting out the middle men like Walmart and other large stores that had a lot of control over video game publishing through their shelf space, and took a very large cut from every game sold.
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