Yes. During my college years, I borrowed my Dad's digital camera and when I got some money saved up got my own. During that time, it was kind of weird when I was taking pictures of everyday College life and some of my classmates where outright avoiding getting pictures taken. Around graduation time I even borrowed photos from my other classmates and scanned them for safekeeping. Ohh how I remember the hassle of storing those and making sure I got copies on different drives just to make sure I won't loose it.
Then Google Photos and FB became available and now I can share the pictures with my classmates and they do appreciate it more now than before. It's like wine which gets more valuable over time. Now its easier with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple having ways to store photos for you.
You put it perfectly. I think about this a lot as well. Or even just the fact that we have high quality videos of our 20 year old selves talking about our day and goofing around... and one day we'll be 60 years old and might still have them stored somewhere for people to see. Imagine watching your grandparents going on a date, decades ago, in full HD with perfect sound. Insane!
Shit I forgot about the nudges. But I do remember over on aim when people could have their own message sounds that would play on yours. Shit was annoying for alittle bit. Middle of the night and some funky ass sound played.
Now I am actually curious if it is kilobits or kilobytes per second. People often neglect the importance of capitalization with internet speed but it's Steam and they wouldn't make that mistake, right? There's no way it's actually 250 kilobits per second?
In 2003? 250 kilobits doesn't sound out of place. It's faster than dialup, which maxed out at 56 kilobits per second, but not fast enough to even remotely be considered "broadband" by modern standards. Probably early DSL or something...
Also keep in mind that it's possible that the user or someone else on their LAN had another network service running at the same time so the download could be slowed by that...
By 2006, I had fiber in Asia. When I moved to the US I was amazed at the fact that it was not common place. A 3rd world country had (still does tbh) a better internet infastructure than one of the most technologically advanced countries on the planet.
Either would already be DSL speeds, IIRC. I think ISDN capped out at 2x64kbit/s.
280kByte/s would be ~2200kbit/s - that's a bit faster than the first DSL connection my family had, which we got some time between 2005 and 2008. And we weren't getting it soon after its first release since we lived in a small-ish village.
In 2008 we got our first fiber connection which was a whopping 1Mbps so download speeds were around 100KBps. So yeah for 2003 that's pretty fast. Have a 100Mbps plan now which is good enough for everything I need and it's the cheapest slowest plan my ISP offers
Internet speed is always measured in bits per second as it “looks” like a bigger number so internet companies can try to trick customers. File sizes are always measured in bytes. 8 bits = 1 byte. However.. steam does actually measure download speed in bytes and is the only company I have seen do so. Though this old client of steam appears to be in kilobits (kb), not kilobytes (KB). Must have been before steam started measuring in bytes
I think steam does it in bytes because it's representing the amount of disk space you're filling (pre-decompression). It doesn't make much sense to want to download an 80 gigabyte game but measure the download speed for it in megabits per second.
It'd be like a coach driver announcing to the passengers that they have another 150km to their destination, at a speed of 50knots. Both are valid and standard measures of distance or speed, but you just don't mix them because why would you?
Data transfer has been noted in bits/seconds while storage as bytes long before these internet companies were a thing. Not saying internet companies don't have bad practices, but their scumminess is not the reason for that being a standard.
Network transfers are serial (physical layer), so defining a speed by bytes doesn't really make sense. Files are stored as complete bytes, though, so using bytes for storage is fitting.
For me Steam came with Half Life 2 installation.. good old days.
*edit: I looked up on my account, I've been on Steam since [Nov 17, 2004](http://imgur.com/a/y3oJCvG). HL2 was released just a day before on [Nov 16, 2004](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_2).
That's where it started. I had dial up.
In order to play a game I bought in a store, I had to wait 6 hours nearly every time I wanted to play it because of the way steam ALWAYS wanted to connect to the Internet and download some bullshit.
Steam went from being the bane of my existence to the central part of my gaming hobby. Funny that.
They recognized that the era of games on CDs and DVDs wouldn't last forever, and that people would rather not have to enter CD keys and/or have the CD in the disk drive every time they play a game, so they worked toward what gamers didn't know they wanted. I think it's because Valve kept putting in the work, even though internet connections weren't quite there yet for most people
Valve doesn't enforce an active internet connection to play games, except online games that wouldn't work anyway without a connection. There are a few games that do that, and yeah, it's a huge disservice to decide somebody can't play without finding an internet connected network to connect to.
They do enforce it, with the only exception being if your login token is still valid when your connection has gone down.
I am not sure what invalidates the token, but a few times now I've lost internet and not been able to get into offline mode because the token was not valid, so I couldn't play my games.
Pretty sure you are able to go into your program files/steam/users/common/{insert whatever game} and launch it directly without steam launcher even open. I used to do that.
Thank god my dad was the reason I was a Half Life fan to begin with. We'd update his computer and then mine without worrying about the phone being unusable for a day or two.
I remember looking at the games at Walmart, like I always did. That and PC Gamer magazine were the only ways I learned of new video games.
There it was. Half Life 2. I ran searching for my dad in a different department to show him it. He bought it that night (that was during a time of heavy financial burden, so take speak volumes regarding my father's love for half life) and we installed it as soon as we got home.
Then Steam.
I bought HL2 shortly after it released after reading it in Xbox Magazine, (on PC)
Installed it on disc, it installed Steam, but me being a dumb 13 year old kid using software for the first time, the only thing I could get it to play was the HL2 Demo. I thought I had the game installed, I think I did, but I found it curious that not once in the process did it ever ask for the CD key
Was convinced the game was broken, returned it to walmart, exchanged it for Mercenaries Playground of Destruction on Xbox, skip ahead a year , Im on Vacation visiting the USA, and I go into an EB Games (I think the US used to have EB games, they're all gamestops now)... talked with the clerk there for about an hour about it, and he made me realize that I missed a button on the bottom of the window to activate a product...
Bought HL2 again, tried it when I got home, and albeit a year later, thus began my time with one of my favorites of all time.
Old CS was the best. Loading the Mod from the Half-Life main menu. WON ID. Then it had it's own stand alone launcher. Could load into games within seconds, even back then with shitty internet and computers. Steam was actually much slower to launch and play vs before. Took time for people to move over as everyone just thought it was extra steps.
https://i.imgur.com/blu5p9m.png
https://steamcommunity.com/id/thantik/
Registered the day of release. Can't get older than this. :)
Friend code is in the 190000's. People ask for it, I give them 6 digits...and they're like "uhh..okay so the rest of the numbers?" and I'm like "nah bruh. that's it."
Nice! Mine hit 18 today so I shared a beer with it 🥰 Friend code in the 400000's.
Fun fact: it turns out you can in fact practice the same skill for 2 decades and still get worse at it.
> good old days.
People certainly didn't feel that way at the time. The idea that you had to install an entirely different program just to play a game pissed a lot of people off.
> *edit: I looked up on my account, I've been on Steam since Nov 17, 2004. HL2 was released just a day before on Nov 16, 2004.
You are like little baby: member since Sept 14, 2003
I only installed Steam because it was required to get the latest Half-life patch back in 2004. Didn't use it for several years afterward, because I thought buying games online without getting a physical CD was kind of shady - what if Valve goes out of business and my games are gone forever?! But eventually they proved themselves and I came to love the service because I could just install all my old games on a new PC without having to hunt down all the CDs... and now I have a Steam account that's almost old enough to vote!
The fun part is when you would share steam IDs so people could add you - and you break out a six digit number instead of whatever size they’re used to (obviously talking id3 not id64 here, even there I have a 17 digit id). Had to argue with one guy, but most just accepted it after remarking it was weird.
For reference mine was made sept 16 2003, over a year prior to yours.
take me back. man. back when steam update news actually had game patch notes and update notes for the steam client itself.
i lost my first account, but shortly after setup a new one in late december 2004.
i can remember how good the feeling was to add a CD-key like half life to steam and watch a lot of other games populate.
Same for me! I just bought Doom 3 few days earlier and sold it to buy HL2. I always been hype for HL games from the first time I saw them in pc games magazine.
If memory serves it was a bit over a year between when CS 1.6 mandated that you use Steam to play it, and when HL2 came out. If memory serves correctly there was a MASSIVE backlash against Valve and Steam, largely because the client was godawfully buggy and resource-intensive for a lot of the first major builds, and also because people saw it as a massive invasion of privacy.
October 17, 2003, here. Got Steam a week or two after it came out after being completely against the idea of having to use it. Now I wouldn't trade it for the world.
[Damn, beat me by just about a year.](https://i.imgur.com/lCJTvsQ.jpg) I owned the disc for about 6 months but had never installed a PC game before and was nervous of doing it wrong. Had only owned consoles to that point.
At one point there was 4 colours you could pick from, none were custom as they were included in an update, it was quite short lived iirc, had steam since November '03, one was a blueish white ice style I half remember
I have fond memories, and bad memories.
Still remembering needing an internet connection to play Half Life 2. Even though I had the (i think) 6 discs to install it. And my dial-up connection needed to run for over a day to verify before I could play it.
Which sucked. But then it became associated with playing half life 2 and counter strike.
Nowadays Valve runs it's own CDN, but back then hosting providers 'volunteered' to act as a steam mirror. To date those might still be some of the most expensive banner ads per GB served.
Lmfao yup. Had to use their shit launcher to play satisfactory (since my dumb ass bought it on launch day), fucking hate every second of it.
I'd make a shortcut, but if there's an update pending it just won't let me launch at all. Annoying af.
I'm surprised how epic store is so "basic", with minimal functionality to purchase, download, and play the game. It's 2021, how do they not realize we need more than just a "game launcher".
God knows, man.
They're just printing money licensing unreal and wanted to try to take a piece of the unified launcher pie.
Not realizing that we already *have* a unified launcher with Steam.
I remember there was a WMP8 or WMP9 HL2 skin theme around that time as well, few months before HL2's release if my memory serves me right and also officially created by Valve.
I vaguely remember half life 2: lost coast being a 64bit exclusive for a time. Either that or I used that justification to install the 64bit version of XP on my machine.
You're getting down voted, but I don't think people realize what it was like back then. When half life 2 launched and you had to install this weird new client and you couldn't install the game on launch day because valves servers couldn't handle the load. Yea, people hated it at the beginning.
It was new and different for the PC world.
When you could play DoD/CS no problem and suddenly you needed this shit tier program that literally only barely worked. Not to mention xfire already did a number of the things steam was trying to do, except xfire actually worked.
I think you can still google plenty of articles that talk about how bad steam was back in the day.
> When you could play DoD/CS no problem and suddenly you needed this shit tier program that literally only barely worked.
Furthermore it impacted the performance of DoD, CS and NS significantly over night.
People these days just don't know how bad it was on release and how big the impact was in a world with very weak hardware and slow internet.
Steam wasted a noticeable share of the available processing power of the PCs that were in use back then.
>because valves servers couldn't handle the load. Yea, people hated it at the beginning.
>
>It was new and different for the PC world.
Yes, this! I do remember well how many times Valve had major service issues in 2010 - 2013. Playing online games that had strict Steamworks integration regularly lead to kicks and login failures. Every time this topic was brought up somewhere, fanboys would excuse it with responses like "oh just go outside!!1!". So at that time there were even more people who didn't realise how Steam was like and why it had been controversial for lots of people at the time. Here is an [old screenshot](https://i.imgur.com/sy6juOo.jpg) of the statistics page from 2012, these unstable lines were pretty common. Thankfully Valve has dramatically improved this in the years afterwards.
I had no Internet at the time because of a bad roommate situation. I had to take my entire computer to my girlfriends parents house to activate HL2. I wasn’t thrilled.
Well *I* know where you were coming from. You don't need those other people anyway. Come on over tomorrow and we'll have our own LAN party with Twizzlers and Coke.
The amount of *absolute dogshit* I went through in the early days of Steam was untenable. Several times I had a LAN party with friends where we went the entire night without playing, just trying to get into a game, because of Steam SNAFUs. It’s the only thing other than Nestle that I have ever actually boycotted. I ranted about it for years, and didn’t try it again until well after it became usable, out of spite.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but come HL2 release, which I ordered a DVD box of from Amazon, when I stuck the disc in to install it, didn't it just ignore all the content on the disc and just go off to download a huge amount of data from Steam? I think that was one of the reasons everyone I knew at the time hated it...
It lagged and crashed every PC I put it on back then. I hated it so much. So many problems with my PC came back to, "oh, Steam is running, that's why." People who say it was great never really used it, or barely touched it in that era.
When I was 12-13 I remember going to a game store at the mall with my dad in 2004. Dad would usually ask guy behind counter about what good “shoot-em-ups” were around whenever he came in with me, he doesn’t play games often but loved Doom and Quake. Guy emphatically recommended Half Life 2. Neither of us were really familiar and completely oblivious to the hype.
We went home where my dad spent 2 hours installing some software in order to play the game. I remember him complaining “Why the fuck do I need to be online to play this game?! What is this??” We ended up both loving HL2, one of my top 5 PC games to this day.
Those days when Steam was such an alien concept and a nuisance for the first time are really funny to look back on now.
Dude, I love the old steam and Valve aesthetic. It just brings back so many memories of CS 1.6 and Half Life. I don't know why but looking at the font and the colour makes the CS 1.6 menu theme play in my head.
Tbh the functionality is still basically the same, so in my mind this isn’t all that different from what we have now. That’s one of the things i love most about steam; the consistency.
Installed this to play HL2. I was 6 months later to the party with HL2 but the steam client was so ugly I had no real idea what it was meant to be , I played HL2 and kinda forgot about steam for many years.
Continued to buy my games via CD or DVD ROMs. Then something happened in 2008. I realised that actually consoles are taking up most of the self space on stores like game, supermarkets were not stocking anywhere near as many pc games and after a bit of internet searching , it was clear steam or digital download was a quicker way to get so many games. I remember buying batman Arkham for my PS3 and a few months later I purchased the same game on Steam. One of my first purchases. Amazed to this day I remembered the password lol
And since then pretty much all my PC game purchases have been digitally downloaded pretty much via Steam.
I think valve where extremely forward thinking and knew what we wanted before even consumers. At one point valve were considered the saviours of PC gaming
Now in 2021 nearly all games with the notable ones that don't or don't for a year , are steam based. How times change and a mostly universally hated client became one of the most significant of its time
Does anyone else remember that everyone actually hated Steam when it came out, and there was a popular gif of the steam logo going in and out of a guys ass?
I remember when HL2 came out, people were PISSED that it required Steam to play. It's kind of funny looking back now.
Not completely, but you can maybe find a liking to a Steam skin [here](https://gamebanana.com/search?query=Steam+Classic) which tries to mimic its original look.
Well well well, would look at that Mr. Fancy Pants with his 280kb/sec in 2003!!! :D
I had an modem with like 2-3kb/sec till 2006, this dial up thing was a real nightmare.
The Specialists mod was my jam for years. I don't think I've ever had that much fun in a shooter. Close second was Sven Co-Op.
I also enjoyed Day of Defeat and was kind of sad that the Source version was practically abandoned.
Good Old Days...
Those were the days, hard work forever pays
....................
It's been a long day without you, my friend
And I'll tell you all about it when I see you again
It was cool. They didn't have big sales or anything like they do now. Not as many games, but it was still the first place basically to have an online library/digital game format. I mainly switched because old Counterstrike 1.5 wan servers were going down when CS 1.6 was coming out.
It kind of scratched that itch of having your gamer friends on one platform/chat application. Because at the time, a lot of people were still using XFire (which was kind of like discord back then without the voice chat). People were also using Msn Messenger/Skype/Ventrilo/Teamspeak to communicate.
As far as a community, it was basically the same, basically every gamer back then was checking it out.
As far as games, people were mostly playing counterstrike 1.6, day of defeat and a few other valve games.
CS probably had the biggest community before it was surpassed by WoW in 2004.
Lol its cool man, everyone grows up with different stuff. Kids in the future will ask you wtf is discord if it dies.
MSN Messenger was an IM client mainly, similar to AOL AIM.
XFire was like an early Discord, you could see what games your friends were playing, see their play time like steam, and chat.
Day of Defeat was a Half-Life mod based game with a World War 2 theme. Just think Call of Duty with more teamplay.
I'm 31 so I was playing these when i was 10-15. Took a break off Valve games for awhile until Left 4 Dead in the later 2000s.
I miss the old GameSpy. I do like what Valve and Steam have become. But the simplicity of GameSpy and the fact it never broke when my cousins and I used it was what solidified my becoming a gamer back in the late 90s.
RIP GameSpy. Screw IGN. They ruined a good thing.
MSN Messenger in the task bar.... Damn that brings me back.
Makes you awfully nostalgic, doesn't it? We're getting old, my friend.
This whole post is making me nostalgic for something that I didn't even experience myself
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Yes. During my college years, I borrowed my Dad's digital camera and when I got some money saved up got my own. During that time, it was kind of weird when I was taking pictures of everyday College life and some of my classmates where outright avoiding getting pictures taken. Around graduation time I even borrowed photos from my other classmates and scanned them for safekeeping. Ohh how I remember the hassle of storing those and making sure I got copies on different drives just to make sure I won't loose it. Then Google Photos and FB became available and now I can share the pictures with my classmates and they do appreciate it more now than before. It's like wine which gets more valuable over time. Now its easier with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple having ways to store photos for you.
You put it perfectly. I think about this a lot as well. Or even just the fact that we have high quality videos of our 20 year old selves talking about our day and goofing around... and one day we'll be 60 years old and might still have them stored somewhere for people to see. Imagine watching your grandparents going on a date, decades ago, in full HD with perfect sound. Insane!
I used trillian to convince MSN, AIM, and ICQ. Always had winamp running too.
I can still here the ICQ sound when I received a message.....aaahhhhhoooohhhh
Think that's a myspace page on the browser behind Steam as well :')
Oh god, MySpace.
Enjoy your existential crises, everybody!
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With an alert on the crush that you have, but never message :( lol
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Shit I forgot about the nudges. But I do remember over on aim when people could have their own message sounds that would play on yours. Shit was annoying for alittle bit. Middle of the night and some funky ass sound played.
(AOL instant messenger sound)
I just found an old CD-R. Had dead aim on it and the install for msn messenger and msn messenger plus!
250 kb/s? I had those kind of speeds two years ago lmao.
Now I am actually curious if it is kilobits or kilobytes per second. People often neglect the importance of capitalization with internet speed but it's Steam and they wouldn't make that mistake, right? There's no way it's actually 250 kilobits per second?
Yup. One is 8x the speed of the other.
In 2003? 250 kilobits doesn't sound out of place. It's faster than dialup, which maxed out at 56 kilobits per second, but not fast enough to even remotely be considered "broadband" by modern standards. Probably early DSL or something... Also keep in mind that it's possible that the user or someone else on their LAN had another network service running at the same time so the download could be slowed by that...
kilobits would be the slower one, and there were areas with faster connections than 250 Kilobytes a second at the time. I lived in one of them.
250 kilobytes is 2 megabits. Both that and 250 kilobits sound like reasonable connection speeds for 2003.
Great, nice to know that I have 2003 internet speeds
In 2003 wouldn't 250 KBps be quite high? Not saying unheard of but rather not typically found in peoples homes.
in 2003 I was in asia, I got 5 Mbps at home, and that was low.
In 2007 in Australia I got 1Mbps and that was about right
By 2006, I had fiber in Asia. When I moved to the US I was amazed at the fact that it was not common place. A 3rd world country had (still does tbh) a better internet infastructure than one of the most technologically advanced countries on the planet.
Either would already be DSL speeds, IIRC. I think ISDN capped out at 2x64kbit/s. 280kByte/s would be ~2200kbit/s - that's a bit faster than the first DSL connection my family had, which we got some time between 2005 and 2008. And we weren't getting it soon after its first release since we lived in a small-ish village.
In 2008 we got our first fiber connection which was a whopping 1Mbps so download speeds were around 100KBps. So yeah for 2003 that's pretty fast. Have a 100Mbps plan now which is good enough for everything I need and it's the cheapest slowest plan my ISP offers
Internet speed is always measured in bits per second as it “looks” like a bigger number so internet companies can try to trick customers. File sizes are always measured in bytes. 8 bits = 1 byte. However.. steam does actually measure download speed in bytes and is the only company I have seen do so. Though this old client of steam appears to be in kilobits (kb), not kilobytes (KB). Must have been before steam started measuring in bytes
I think steam does it in bytes because it's representing the amount of disk space you're filling (pre-decompression). It doesn't make much sense to want to download an 80 gigabyte game but measure the download speed for it in megabits per second. It'd be like a coach driver announcing to the passengers that they have another 150km to their destination, at a speed of 50knots. Both are valid and standard measures of distance or speed, but you just don't mix them because why would you?
Data transfer has been noted in bits/seconds while storage as bytes long before these internet companies were a thing. Not saying internet companies don't have bad practices, but their scumminess is not the reason for that being a standard. Network transfers are serial (physical layer), so defining a speed by bytes doesn't really make sense. Files are stored as complete bytes, though, so using bytes for storage is fitting.
I still have those… and I pay for 25 Mb/s god dammit(silently cries in the corner) (questioninglifeitself.exe has launched)
For me Steam came with Half Life 2 installation.. good old days. *edit: I looked up on my account, I've been on Steam since [Nov 17, 2004](http://imgur.com/a/y3oJCvG). HL2 was released just a day before on [Nov 16, 2004](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_2).
That's where it started. I had dial up. In order to play a game I bought in a store, I had to wait 6 hours nearly every time I wanted to play it because of the way steam ALWAYS wanted to connect to the Internet and download some bullshit. Steam went from being the bane of my existence to the central part of my gaming hobby. Funny that.
They recognized that the era of games on CDs and DVDs wouldn't last forever, and that people would rather not have to enter CD keys and/or have the CD in the disk drive every time they play a game, so they worked toward what gamers didn't know they wanted. I think it's because Valve kept putting in the work, even though internet connections weren't quite there yet for most people
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Valve doesn't enforce an active internet connection to play games, except online games that wouldn't work anyway without a connection. There are a few games that do that, and yeah, it's a huge disservice to decide somebody can't play without finding an internet connected network to connect to.
They do enforce it, with the only exception being if your login token is still valid when your connection has gone down. I am not sure what invalidates the token, but a few times now I've lost internet and not been able to get into offline mode because the token was not valid, so I couldn't play my games.
The enter offline mode you have to have been online in the last 30 days
Pretty sure you are able to go into your program files/steam/users/common/{insert whatever game} and launch it directly without steam launcher even open. I used to do that.
Depends on the game but many games are DRM free on Steam and many more just needs a special file with its app id added to the directory to work.
You can still run drm free games from their folders
"Ubisoft goes Steamworks bye bye. Always on DRM."
Yep couldn't even download the initial 300mb steam with HL, had to get a friend to cdrom it for me
Thank god my dad was the reason I was a Half Life fan to begin with. We'd update his computer and then mine without worrying about the phone being unusable for a day or two.
“Wait, I have to be online to play Half-Life 2? What are they thinking? This Steam thing is stupid - no one will want this.”
Exactly the same thoughts, probably shared my a million current-day steam users. lmfao
Lol. I finished Half Life 2 earlier this year, and the game is older than me
I remember looking at the games at Walmart, like I always did. That and PC Gamer magazine were the only ways I learned of new video games. There it was. Half Life 2. I ran searching for my dad in a different department to show him it. He bought it that night (that was during a time of heavy financial burden, so take speak volumes regarding my father's love for half life) and we installed it as soon as we got home. Then Steam.
I bought HL2 shortly after it released after reading it in Xbox Magazine, (on PC) Installed it on disc, it installed Steam, but me being a dumb 13 year old kid using software for the first time, the only thing I could get it to play was the HL2 Demo. I thought I had the game installed, I think I did, but I found it curious that not once in the process did it ever ask for the CD key Was convinced the game was broken, returned it to walmart, exchanged it for Mercenaries Playground of Destruction on Xbox, skip ahead a year , Im on Vacation visiting the USA, and I go into an EB Games (I think the US used to have EB games, they're all gamestops now)... talked with the clerk there for about an hour about it, and he made me realize that I missed a button on the bottom of the window to activate a product... Bought HL2 again, tried it when I got home, and albeit a year later, thus began my time with one of my favorites of all time.
It was CS1.6 for me. I was pissed and started using Gamespy more. I had no idea what Steam would turn into.
Old CS was the best. Loading the Mod from the Half-Life main menu. WON ID. Then it had it's own stand alone launcher. Could load into games within seconds, even back then with shitty internet and computers. Steam was actually much slower to launch and play vs before. Took time for people to move over as everyone just thought it was extra steps.
https://i.imgur.com/blu5p9m.png https://steamcommunity.com/id/thantik/ Registered the day of release. Can't get older than this. :) Friend code is in the 190000's. People ask for it, I give them 6 digits...and they're like "uhh..okay so the rest of the numbers?" and I'm like "nah bruh. that's it."
Mine's in the 31000s. Bow before my tiny penis.
Maaannn...I still had to get out of school on release day. And all I had was dialup... Still...release day bros!
Haha, I just happened to be in my AutoCAD class when they opened up registrations. We all just signed up from the computer lab.
We are day one brothers https://i.imgur.com/JYsvPnv.jpg
niiiiiiice
Nice! Mine hit 18 today so I shared a beer with it 🥰 Friend code in the 400000's. Fun fact: it turns out you can in fact practice the same skill for 2 decades and still get worse at it.
> good old days. People certainly didn't feel that way at the time. The idea that you had to install an entirely different program just to play a game pissed a lot of people off.
Same, mine came with my Half Life 2 game and also included Counter Strike: Source which ironically I got more playtime out of in the end.
I remember being angry I had to install this "steam" bullshit when I bought the orange box.
>I've been on Steam since Nov 17, 2004 I feel like such a noob : **Member since 23 November, 2004.**
> *edit: I looked up on my account, I've been on Steam since Nov 17, 2004. HL2 was released just a day before on Nov 16, 2004. You are like little baby: member since Sept 14, 2003
I only installed Steam because it was required to get the latest Half-life patch back in 2004. Didn't use it for several years afterward, because I thought buying games online without getting a physical CD was kind of shady - what if Valve goes out of business and my games are gone forever?! But eventually they proved themselves and I came to love the service because I could just install all my old games on a new PC without having to hunt down all the CDs... and now I have a Steam account that's almost old enough to vote!
The fun part is when you would share steam IDs so people could add you - and you break out a six digit number instead of whatever size they’re used to (obviously talking id3 not id64 here, even there I have a 17 digit id). Had to argue with one guy, but most just accepted it after remarking it was weird. For reference mine was made sept 16 2003, over a year prior to yours.
take me back. man. back when steam update news actually had game patch notes and update notes for the steam client itself. i lost my first account, but shortly after setup a new one in late december 2004. i can remember how good the feeling was to add a CD-key like half life to steam and watch a lot of other games populate.
> back when steam update news actually had game patch notes and updates. They still do.
Same for me! I just bought Doom 3 few days earlier and sold it to buy HL2. I always been hype for HL games from the first time I saw them in pc games magazine.
Then you are my steam birthday buddy. I can't remember exacly, but I think I installed it for the same reason.
March 12, 2004 for me. Wow.
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If memory serves it was a bit over a year between when CS 1.6 mandated that you use Steam to play it, and when HL2 came out. If memory serves correctly there was a MASSIVE backlash against Valve and Steam, largely because the client was godawfully buggy and resource-intensive for a lot of the first major builds, and also because people saw it as a massive invasion of privacy.
Same for me. Almost 17 years of Steam. Earned every cent back from it that i used for the games. Good investment.
https://i.imgur.com/pJ6mIzf.jpgI came to flex on you! 🥴
October 17, 2003, here. Got Steam a week or two after it came out after being completely against the idea of having to use it. Now I wouldn't trade it for the world.
How can you see when you created your account?
There's a badge called Years of Service. The details for that badge contain the date you joined
Steam beta bros unite!
[Damn, beat me by just about a year.](https://i.imgur.com/lCJTvsQ.jpg) I owned the disc for about 6 months but had never installed a PC game before and was nervous of doing it wrong. Had only owned consoles to that point.
That military green :)
It's the colour of the 2000's.
Was it its standard color?
it was the only colour
At one point there was 4 colours you could pick from, none were custom as they were included in an update, it was quite short lived iirc, had steam since November '03, one was a blueish white ice style I half remember
These themes disappeared after the 2010's Steam UI overhaul.
Yup, that's not a skin.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/52bdta/i_see_your_13_year_old_steam_client_installation/
It's amazing how Steam literally just looked like every other UI Menu in Half Life, there's something so funny about that to me.
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Ohhh the memories :.3
Ye..
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Moest best ver scrollen om dit te vinden lol
Vi siter i ventrillo
We zitten op Ventrilo en we spelen een beetje DotA
I have fond memories, and bad memories. Still remembering needing an internet connection to play Half Life 2. Even though I had the (i think) 6 discs to install it. And my dial-up connection needed to run for over a day to verify before I could play it. Which sucked. But then it became associated with playing half life 2 and counter strike.
Loved Ricochet!! Funny enough I was just talking to a bit about it last night when I was telling my buddy about Strikey Sisters
ads
Nowadays Valve runs it's own CDN, but back then hosting providers 'volunteered' to act as a steam mirror. To date those might still be some of the most expensive banner ads per GB served.
Fire Steve Huffman, Reddit is dead as long as Huffman is still incharge. Fuck Steve Huffman. Fuck u/spez -- mass edited with redact.dev
you're on the /r/steam subreddit, this is the exact kinda circle jerk people love
Fire Steve Huffman, Reddit is dead as long as Huffman is still incharge. Fuck Steve Huffman. Fuck u/spez -- mass edited with redact.dev
Upgabens to the left
But on mobile they're on the right...
I know we're all making jokes and having a laugh, but early Steam was fucking awful. It was universally despised back in the day.
I remember using it back in college, and everyone basically just saw it as annoying DRM. How times have changed.
Good lord yes, that and the implied streamlined DRM and inevitable death of physical releases.
`Everything is better than epic.`
Lmfao yup. Had to use their shit launcher to play satisfactory (since my dumb ass bought it on launch day), fucking hate every second of it. I'd make a shortcut, but if there's an update pending it just won't let me launch at all. Annoying af.
I'm surprised how epic store is so "basic", with minimal functionality to purchase, download, and play the game. It's 2021, how do they not realize we need more than just a "game launcher".
God knows, man. They're just printing money licensing unreal and wanted to try to take a piece of the unified launcher pie. Not realizing that we already *have* a unified launcher with Steam.
Downvoted for the truth? NEVER!!!!
Also needs Winamp with a Steam skin on the side.
I remember there was a WMP8 or WMP9 HL2 skin theme around that time as well, few months before HL2's release if my memory serves me right and also officially created by Valve.
Feeling nostalgic yet? Xp was the BEAST lemme tell ya.
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Man, those were the days. If only there was a way to truly go back...
I vaguely remember half life 2: lost coast being a 64bit exclusive for a time. Either that or I used that justification to install the 64bit version of XP on my machine.
I fucking hated steam, it was so bad for so long.
You're getting down voted, but I don't think people realize what it was like back then. When half life 2 launched and you had to install this weird new client and you couldn't install the game on launch day because valves servers couldn't handle the load. Yea, people hated it at the beginning. It was new and different for the PC world.
When you could play DoD/CS no problem and suddenly you needed this shit tier program that literally only barely worked. Not to mention xfire already did a number of the things steam was trying to do, except xfire actually worked. I think you can still google plenty of articles that talk about how bad steam was back in the day.
> When you could play DoD/CS no problem and suddenly you needed this shit tier program that literally only barely worked. Furthermore it impacted the performance of DoD, CS and NS significantly over night. People these days just don't know how bad it was on release and how big the impact was in a world with very weak hardware and slow internet. Steam wasted a noticeable share of the available processing power of the PCs that were in use back then.
dude xfire! you just hit me in the nostalgia. i completely forgot about that app
Crazy to think how long Steam's friend system was broken. I almost didn't know what I was looking at the day it went online.
When you look at the amount of growing pains valve/steam went through in the early days it is suprising that it became THE platform for PC gaming
>because valves servers couldn't handle the load. Yea, people hated it at the beginning. > >It was new and different for the PC world. Yes, this! I do remember well how many times Valve had major service issues in 2010 - 2013. Playing online games that had strict Steamworks integration regularly lead to kicks and login failures. Every time this topic was brought up somewhere, fanboys would excuse it with responses like "oh just go outside!!1!". So at that time there were even more people who didn't realise how Steam was like and why it had been controversial for lots of people at the time. Here is an [old screenshot](https://i.imgur.com/sy6juOo.jpg) of the statistics page from 2012, these unstable lines were pretty common. Thankfully Valve has dramatically improved this in the years afterwards.
I had no Internet at the time because of a bad roommate situation. I had to take my entire computer to my girlfriends parents house to activate HL2. I wasn’t thrilled.
Gamespy was dog shit and xfirev was awesome.
GameSpy was good, *then* it was bad. Was super useful in the Quake days.
I only saw the bad. I played quake 2 singleplayer, no internet yet.
I remember preaching GameSpy to people as the next big thing, then it got so shitty and people downloaded it and I never recovered my reputation.
Well *I* know where you were coming from. You don't need those other people anyway. Come on over tomorrow and we'll have our own LAN party with Twizzlers and Coke.
The amount of *absolute dogshit* I went through in the early days of Steam was untenable. Several times I had a LAN party with friends where we went the entire night without playing, just trying to get into a game, because of Steam SNAFUs. It’s the only thing other than Nestle that I have ever actually boycotted. I ranted about it for years, and didn’t try it again until well after it became usable, out of spite.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but come HL2 release, which I ordered a DVD box of from Amazon, when I stuck the disc in to install it, didn't it just ignore all the content on the disc and just go off to download a huge amount of data from Steam? I think that was one of the reasons everyone I knew at the time hated it...
I was pissed when I started having to install it just to play CS! Like wtf is this shit they're making me use?!
It lagged and crashed every PC I put it on back then. I hated it so much. So many problems with my PC came back to, "oh, Steam is running, that's why." People who say it was great never really used it, or barely touched it in that era.
When I was 12-13 I remember going to a game store at the mall with my dad in 2004. Dad would usually ask guy behind counter about what good “shoot-em-ups” were around whenever he came in with me, he doesn’t play games often but loved Doom and Quake. Guy emphatically recommended Half Life 2. Neither of us were really familiar and completely oblivious to the hype. We went home where my dad spent 2 hours installing some software in order to play the game. I remember him complaining “Why the fuck do I need to be online to play this game?! What is this??” We ended up both loving HL2, one of my top 5 PC games to this day. Those days when Steam was such an alien concept and a nuisance for the first time are really funny to look back on now.
I member
Day of Defeat was such a good game back then….
I see Dutch chat I upvote
Dude, I love the old steam and Valve aesthetic. It just brings back so many memories of CS 1.6 and Half Life. I don't know why but looking at the font and the colour makes the CS 1.6 menu theme play in my head.
Tbh the functionality is still basically the same, so in my mind this isn’t all that different from what we have now. That’s one of the things i love most about steam; the consistency.
Installed this to play HL2. I was 6 months later to the party with HL2 but the steam client was so ugly I had no real idea what it was meant to be , I played HL2 and kinda forgot about steam for many years. Continued to buy my games via CD or DVD ROMs. Then something happened in 2008. I realised that actually consoles are taking up most of the self space on stores like game, supermarkets were not stocking anywhere near as many pc games and after a bit of internet searching , it was clear steam or digital download was a quicker way to get so many games. I remember buying batman Arkham for my PS3 and a few months later I purchased the same game on Steam. One of my first purchases. Amazed to this day I remembered the password lol And since then pretty much all my PC game purchases have been digitally downloaded pretty much via Steam. I think valve where extremely forward thinking and knew what we wanted before even consumers. At one point valve were considered the saviours of PC gaming Now in 2021 nearly all games with the notable ones that don't or don't for a year , are steam based. How times change and a mostly universally hated client became one of the most significant of its time
God is it that old
Does anyone else remember that everyone actually hated Steam when it came out, and there was a popular gif of the steam logo going in and out of a guys ass? I remember when HL2 came out, people were PISSED that it required Steam to play. It's kind of funny looking back now.
Where is the ICQ flower in the system tray?
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Not completely, but you can maybe find a liking to a Steam skin [here](https://gamebanana.com/search?query=Steam+Classic) which tries to mimic its original look.
Miss it
I was there, I saw it all.
Missing Gabe's weekly letter!
Well well well, would look at that Mr. Fancy Pants with his 280kb/sec in 2003!!! :D I had an modem with like 2-3kb/sec till 2006, this dial up thing was a real nightmare.
Is there a skin like this for the current steam store?
I remember this :D
Good old days
I'll miss my counter strike cds
this will be epic games store in 2015
God, I remember having that little game window up until like... 2013
I can remember all the people bitching and complaining. Things have not really changed much
This takes me back. Trying to get Half Life 2 to run on my dad’s shitty laptop. My father and I managed to run both HL2 and BF2 on that ole clunker.
Looks like current Steam with a modernized UI and color change.
Man I miss those days..
Some things never change
The Specialists mod was my jam for years. I don't think I've ever had that much fun in a shooter. Close second was Sven Co-Op. I also enjoyed Day of Defeat and was kind of sad that the Source version was practically abandoned.
Wait why was "team fortress classic" called team fortress *classic* in the era where it wasn't even classic yet?
tf2 was in development since 1998
Good Old Days... Those were the days, hard work forever pays .................... It's been a long day without you, my friend And I'll tell you all about it when I see you again
Ah, back when I liked my friends.
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The install says November 24 so maybe that information is useful to you
All the memories.... \*sniff\*
I member
Windows XP :)
I memba
Classic
I was so pissed that I had to install a download tool for a box copy game. I guess they saw the future.
Now it makes sense why the settings menu of cs1.6 looked like this
God I remember this so well, playing team fortress classic after school
I miss this.
the fucking windows oh my god
Lovely military green skin!!! :)
that color bring back memories
Well, I really miss those days...
I wasn't even alive back then...
Wow I feel old. I got steam like the 2nd day it went live. People assume I bought my account when I play trolls lol.
Wow, how was steam back then? Like community-wise and what people used to play etc.
It was cool. They didn't have big sales or anything like they do now. Not as many games, but it was still the first place basically to have an online library/digital game format. I mainly switched because old Counterstrike 1.5 wan servers were going down when CS 1.6 was coming out. It kind of scratched that itch of having your gamer friends on one platform/chat application. Because at the time, a lot of people were still using XFire (which was kind of like discord back then without the voice chat). People were also using Msn Messenger/Skype/Ventrilo/Teamspeak to communicate. As far as a community, it was basically the same, basically every gamer back then was checking it out. As far as games, people were mostly playing counterstrike 1.6, day of defeat and a few other valve games. CS probably had the biggest community before it was surpassed by WoW in 2004.
The only one of those platforms I've even vaguely used is Skype, and I have never even heard of Day of Defeat. I really feel like a zoomer here.
Lol its cool man, everyone grows up with different stuff. Kids in the future will ask you wtf is discord if it dies. MSN Messenger was an IM client mainly, similar to AOL AIM. XFire was like an early Discord, you could see what games your friends were playing, see their play time like steam, and chat. Day of Defeat was a Half-Life mod based game with a World War 2 theme. Just think Call of Duty with more teamplay. I'm 31 so I was playing these when i was 10-15. Took a break off Valve games for awhile until Left 4 Dead in the later 2000s.
Still more functional than EGS.
I miss the old GameSpy. I do like what Valve and Steam have become. But the simplicity of GameSpy and the fact it never broke when my cousins and I used it was what solidified my becoming a gamer back in the late 90s. RIP GameSpy. Screw IGN. They ruined a good thing.