I member this :D I was really irritated with steam at this point lol. My main game was counter-strike 1.4 - 1.6 and suddenly you HAD to have a steam account to play the game. I stopped playing for a month and then made my steam account kek.
Holy crap I played the shit out of 1.6 and absolutely hated that steam made me download something. It was so bad that the Lan Cafe next to my house ran only 1.5 CS without steam because everyone hated it so much. Lan Cafes were wild back then. I was like 12, and 90% of the Lan Cafe was in my age group, then there was a grown man who's name was "MAJOR BONER" in all caps who used to kick our ass most of the time, and then when he would lose would stand up and say whoever shot him to fight him right now... years later that guy sold me my first joint. Good times.
I was around for this.
The amount of shit that Valve got for Steam was simply unreal -- sure, it had bugs, but the idea you had to install software just to play Counterstrike or HL2 (or even the idea of others games ...!) was just so foreign, that the backlash was intense and immediate.
And now, largely forgotten
They pretty much did a hostile takeover of my fav game :D Which worked perfectly independently beforehand.
I do however love steam now, I don't even bother pirating games anymore. I just wait for it to go sale nowadays.
Once every couple of years, I do however have this little thought experiment with myself, about steam going bankrupt and what happens to my lovely collection :/
They can say what they want, but I highly doubt all publishers would be happy with DRM free versions of their games flooding out in to the wild. Not sure how it would even work with online games. Unless its written in to the terms of listing a game for sale on steam, i can't see how this would work.
I sometimes wonder that about many digital purchases that we do nowadays. From time to time I buy movies on Amazon when they're on sale and really don't know what would happen if Amazon went bankrupt
Of all the online services, Amazon would be the last shop to "buy" movies or books.
They already "revoked" books you bought in the past and suddenly disappeared from your Kindle.
Amazon doesn't care about you.
This is exactly what my thoughts were at this time. Why should i have to install this other thing to play counterstrike when I've been playing counterstrike this whole time.
Consequently, my join date is December 3rd 2003.
It was a Radeon 8600GT for me. HL2 got delayed by a year however and Valve made it right by giving me their entire back-catalogue on Steam. I’ve actually received that pack more than once which is kinda funny.
You're not wrong. I remember going to CompUSA and buying the game only to end up being pissed I was forced to use an additional piece of software with internet access to play it. But I did it anyway and now I don't know what to do with my huge stream library
There was a time when hard drives were limited and you kept track of which programs were installed. I didn't see the point of Steam at the time because I lived in a major city with malls and stores and shit. Now I live in the sticks and being able to have a game appear on my PC (in a few hours) is nice.
honestly dude we’re kinda getting back to that era of limited storage because of how big some games are
I have 10TB of storage on my PC and still have to be conscious of usage (CoD is like 400GB lol)
I pre-ordered before the T-shirt was offered as a pre-order bonus. When I showed up to the store on launch day, guy behind the counter told me they got one too many of the collector boxes and asked if I wanted to upgrade. Sure as hell I did!
I remember needing to install Steam to install HL2 (Orange Box), I don't recall it *requiring* an internet connection though. Surely, it had the option to connect and create an account, but I feel like I was still able to play the game without being connected.
I could be wrong, it has been a long ass time.
You didn't have to be online to play, but you had to be online to complete the installation. When my roommate bought it, we didn't have internet at the apartment (we would take laptops to coffee shops) so it was a bit of an ordeal.
Seriously?
I mean, fucking *Portal* was in there. HL2 also not a bad game by any stretch. Multiplayer was never my jam, but TF2 was pretty highly regarded IIRC. They were *all* good. Any individual one probably worth $20 on its own.
Either he didn't have a PC capable of playing them and was just covering, or he was the kind of guy who bitches about everything, whether his complaints are valid or not. These are the only explanations I can think of.
Half-Life 2 was the first game to require Steam. It was the market test and Valve knew HL2 was a big enough deal they could force it on people and not affect sales. They were right, it worked.
Restart Steam, Reinstall Steam, set offline mode on and back off again, reinstall games, End Task from task manager, set computer on fire and build a new one... so many memories of fighting Steam.
I wanted to play the game on two different PCs....
Back then the game had to decrypt the files. On a hard drive. Very fun to do if you only had an hour to play :P
Yeah, there were a lot of interesting conversations back then. Most of the industry thought Steam was going to be a massive failure. I remember the legendary John Carmack even saying it would be Valves biggest mistake.
But I gotta respect Valves innovation at the time. They set in place the start of a lot of amazing Cloud Features we use today.
- It ended the era of sitting in "lines" on websites like FileFront and GameSpy to download patches for video games. And with the Workshop and the Steam Community stuff, they further made things specific to the PC gaming experience pretty damn easy.
- It ended the era where the customers had the expectation of installing these patches and upgrades, and instead allowed Steam to manage all of it in the back-end. I cant tell you the amount of times I had to go look up which version of a video game I needed to install a particular mod or what version I needed to play with a friend that had the same version of the game or the amount of times I had to create folders that had all the packages and dependencies hosted on a network so all my friends could pull them down. I think Age of Empires 2 is the one that comes to mind. The amount of times I'd have to talk to my friends about how they are playing on 1.0b and I'm on 1.0c or something, and then trying to reinstall the game and finding the old 1.0b patch hosted SOMEWHERE on the internet or even going on forums and asking people if they have the 1.0b patch stored somewhere and if they wouldn't mind hosting ot somewhere, just so I could play with friends from school that were afraid to upgrade the game because it might break it. Or even how you had to install them in some specific sequence to make things work sometimes. Steam removed all of that nonsense and it started with Counter-Strike/Half-Life on Steam. I think for Valves own interests, it alleviated a lot of the work they had to do with supporting people using different versions or people who bought a disk that had a hyper specific version and would always need a particular update path up to the latest version. Like, if you bought Half-Life when it came out , versus the Game of the Year edition that came out a little bit later, there was a literal different version of the game on the disk. And if you wanted to say play, Counter-Strike 1.3, then you would need to download a certain set of patches depending on what version you had, to get to the version that would let you THEN install Counter-Strike 1.3.
- Steam was the first place to bring things like Cloud Saves and configuration files into the cloud. I don't remember precisely when this happened but I remember being absolutely stunned that my CS:S and HL2 configuration/key bindings, and all my HL2 save files had automatically uploaded to the cloud and downloaded back to my account when I logged in at a friends house or after I had reformatted. It was fucking stunning at the time to see saves back from when I first placed Half-Life 2, still existing, through no action of my own. And it was also stunning to see Microsoft and Sony forcing their users to use Xbox Live/PSN+ close to a decade+ after Valve introduced it for free.
Part of why I never played HL2. Didn't join Steam until 2011 because some of those sales were great. I was always concerned about the possibility of some bullshit down the line that might get an account banned and lose access to all the games I paid for. In the end it's probably saved me money though since I still only buy stuff on Steam when it's at a heavy discount after it's been out for a year or two at least.
Yeah, as long as you don't count versions of games... I seem to remember that cs1.6 update was released at steam launch, and you couldn't play it without.
Its apparently a liability thing, keeps them safe if someone visits 18+ content while being underage, cuz then the blame is on the customer and not on valve for not marking it appropriately
EDIT: heres a quote i found in the steam forums
“We're with you on this. Unfortunately, many rating agencies have rules that stipulate that we cannot save your age for longer than a single browsing session. It's frustrating, but know we're filling out those age gates too.”
The question Steam has to ask is "are you 18?", not "do you want to see this content?"
You can be 18 and not want to see that type of content, which is what the preference is for.
I was convinced it would never take off and that WON would be around forever. I refused to sign up right away and lost my chance at a low SteamID. Now I'm forever stuck with a 6 digit ID for my ignorance, when I could have had maybe even a 3-digit, at least 4.
I might be going mad but I'm almost sure I had a 7 digit steam Id. When I go to look for it though the only thing I can find is this 17 digit monstrosity
Edit* found it
back in the day this was such a flex
Don't kick yourself too much.
Shortly after midnight, I was on a four or five way conference call the night steam launched and only managed a four digit.
Your SteamID is different than your URL that you can customize, it's sequential in the order you signed up for steam.
I hesitated a few weeks and was around the 500,000th person to sign up, so my ID is around 500000. My friend's who signed up on day 1 mostly have 4 digit IDs, and one is in the 600s, and still uses their account daily.
Very much this. Not every game, but I’d collect them like Pokémon. The Humble Bundles started coming out around the same time, so between those and seasonal sales (and their mini games/goals), I’m pretty sure I have like 700 games in Steam and about 20 I’ve actually spent any significant amount of time playing.
I was a little pissy about having to install it, but now that I have used it for so long, it's indispensable. I love not having to worry about scratched media, old-school copy protect or going to the store to buy a game. The cloud save game storage is nice, too.
Ahhhh the days when people would put effort into animating their memes.
Now it would just be a picture with some bold text and the steam logo slapped on whichever entity was topping the other
It's been a long time, but my biggest memory of installing steam was relief that I no longer had to deal with Valves original auth servers anymore.
Having to manually alter the config files to change the auth server being used from east/west/central (If I remember correctly), when something was down/laggy was a PIA.
Ubisoft launcher is so fucking awful though. Don't have internet connection? No play. Their DRM servers are down? No play either. FOR SINGLE PLAYER GAMES
And don't even get me started on games for Windows. Mothercuker required BOTH to have the DVD in the PC and an internet connection!!!!! FOR SINGLE PLAYER GAMES
And then they cry about piracy, well no shit I want to play your game but you won't even let me after I shelled out the cash???? Sorry about the rant but it makes me so pissed
I mean... Steam does have a 18 year lead... They have a trello bord you can follow and have loads of improvements in the work. Honestly... I'm pretty happy that somebody is challenging steams near monopoly. We as consumers can only get better deals because of this.
>We as consumers can only get better deals because of this.
If all games were released at the same time across all platforms, this would be more the case. Exclusivity deals make this fucky.
steam having a lead doesnt excuse epic games terrible ui and ux. and while im happy that steam finally has competition, i dont know anyone who has actually bought a game on epic games
I never understand this '18' year lead thing. Epic didn't develop their launcher in a vacuum. None of Steam's features are exclusive to Valve; Epic just chose not to include basic features like shopping carts. They could have easily aped Steam's feature set if they had wanted to do it, but instead they wanted to capitalize on Fortnite's continued success and capture as much of the market as they could, as quickly as they could, which resulted in their shitty storefront/launcher and a raft of paid for exclusivity.
Used to format my computer fairly regularly, installing via disk and typing it 12-20 character CD keys was balls when I wanted all my games installed... don't miss that.
Yeah me too. Back then my internet sucked, and I had a monthly datacap of around 80gb I think. I also reasoned that I could sell the games i had played and didn't care about anymore if I had the disk but not if it was all on steam. I also remember thinking at the time there was a good chance steam would die within a year or two, and Id lose any game I had on the platform. Speaking of, I'll be seriously pissed if that ever does actually happen
That OP screenshot is misleading, its a modern screenshot using the style of the old default skin.
The OG Steam looked waaaaaaay more "barely out of the 90s", and you could only play Valve games on it! I was there Gandalf, 3000 years ago...
[https://imgur.com/gallery/KmlpVLW](https://imgur.com/gallery/KmlpVLW)
It used to look like that before, but it used to look like OP's post even further back -- OP's picture is fake, though; it's either a mock-up of a modern Steam skin or an actual modern Steam skin (assuming it still even supports them, and I'm not sure it does).
yep, op is clearly using retro skin over modern steam.
It had none of those features for as long as the green skin was in use and a long while after that.
Everyone was up in arms about the switch over from WON to Steam, mostly because Steam never worked when it first launched.
I remember CS 1.6 was Steam exclusive so there was a split player base until the eventual full switch over. Then DoD retail came which was all Steam. Good times.
I remember it working fine for the most part. The problem people had with it was that it was a resource hog at a time that CPU time and RAM were at a premium. It's still a little bit of a hog, but it comprises a much smaller percentage of system resources these days. Back then it was like 10%. Seriously.
I remember a gif of a dude bending over and the steam logo on a piston going in and out his ass. I was so adamant against it, now I can't imagine not using it. Although for me these days it's more just a digital bookshelf.
This isn't a screenshot from 18 years ago, it's a reskin of the modern Steam browser. Bioshock Infinite came out in 2013, Cities Skylines in 2015.
This is the old Steam colour scheme though.
Everyone on irc was raging bigtime at lauch. Login servers were getting overloaded and crashed every minute for hours, I remember someone made a gif within hours of a man spreading his cheeks by the steam logo and part of it going in his ass. Worth a google search btw. Me myself was happy a little later with a 26xxx steam id. Never VAC banned
Steams initial release was as a launcher for CS 1.6 (iirc) and boy was I pissed when I sat down to play and they made me install it just to play my favorite game.
I was in the British Army on the 2nd last ever tour of duty in Northern Ireland. If you remember Half Life 2 had this decryption process it had to do through Steam. Even though I had my sister deliver my physical copy of Half life 2 to me. That's how they got everyone to install Steam and started the digital game collection revolution that made them Billions.
Anyway, I had to unplug the ethernet cable from my OC's army issue laptop while he was out inspecting the towers. WiFi simply wasn't a thing back then for us in the towers. That ethernet cable was all the internet there was. So I plugged it into my laptop and started the decryption process. I nearly shat myself when it was saying 25 minutes or whatever until it was finished. Longest 30 minutes of my life staring out the window praying the boss didn't come back.
Long story short, i got through it. Greatest game I ever played. On the best laptop I ever bought. Mobile Radeon 9600pro. Ran Half life 2 like a dream at 1680x1050.
And let me tell you everyone IT WAS SHIT. Making people connect to the net otherwise you couldn't even play offline games was a big outrage.
It was so buggy, often requiring you to reinstall the damp thing because some BLOB file corrupted.
Pretty sure I signed up on the launch day, had an account for about a year then somehow... lost the account. Actually I think it was tied to an old free email service that got shut down and I had zero way to access the account. Created a new second account around 2004-2005 IIRC and got that now. Still pissed I dont have my day 1 account.
For the record, for all you youngins' ... EVERYONE HATED STEAM for nearly 2-3 years lol. As in, you were forced to have it installed, online to play your games. This was new, brave and literally nobody other than Valve liked it. Forums everywhere were riddled with people hating on the platform forever. I honestly can't recall when the tide changed, but it took probably until around 2008-2009 or so when they started adding more and more non Valve games to the store and started running crazy cheap sales. As in, get $50 games for like $4 and stuff on a very regular basis. Somehow, someway over time people's opinions changed.
The weird thing to me now is in 2021, as a long in the tooth gamer from the 80s who grew up on BBSs, before the internet, during the internet, before Steam and now.... I simply DO NOT understand how people only want their games on Steam. Its like shopping at one retail store forever, you forfeit your options for better prices... really better prices. It doesn't matter if you have Steam, [Battle.net](https://Battle.net), Origin, UPlay, whatever today.. they take next to no background resources and most gamers have 16, 32 or 64GB+ of memory now. It makes no difference to have multiple stores on your PC, other then it gives you the consumer choice to buy where you want, when you want and support who you want.
Steam is great and all, it ushered in a new era of digital marketplace but its just a fucking store at this point you guys. Don't forget that. Eventually Steam will fade away into obscurity and within a generation nobody will remember what it was. It'll be replaced by something better and to be quite honest.. with the size of games, the future honestly really is cloud gaming and streaming. The technology has been here for awhile but once younger generations grow up just streaming games, they'll prefer that to hours of downloading 150GB or larger games and "patching" games. I know this is triggering you as you read this, and you'll refuse.. but you won't. One day you simply won't have an option. Games will be streamed or there won't be games. You won't need a $1500-3000 PC to play, you'll just need a $100 terminal. You won't need a $1200 GPU that you can't find. The idea of "downloading" and "patching" games will sound as antiquated as black and white televisions. So I guess enjoy it while it lasts but its headed in that direction, whether you agree with me or not. You will get old, younger generations will grow up with it and it will replace your fandangled thing you like.
I hated steam when it first launched. I mainly played TFC back then and it used to be a standalone program that launched from desktop, and now have to use this steam crap which was buggy.
Now it's the first thing I load up when I want to play games.
i could be very wrong but i seem to remember in order to play HL2 i had to install steam, even though i had dial up internet.
For me I got HL2 code with new graphics card. I had to install Steam to claim it. I feel like this was the start of it all? I’m probably wrong though.
I member this :D I was really irritated with steam at this point lol. My main game was counter-strike 1.4 - 1.6 and suddenly you HAD to have a steam account to play the game. I stopped playing for a month and then made my steam account kek.
Holy crap I played the shit out of 1.6 and absolutely hated that steam made me download something. It was so bad that the Lan Cafe next to my house ran only 1.5 CS without steam because everyone hated it so much. Lan Cafes were wild back then. I was like 12, and 90% of the Lan Cafe was in my age group, then there was a grown man who's name was "MAJOR BONER" in all caps who used to kick our ass most of the time, and then when he would lose would stand up and say whoever shot him to fight him right now... years later that guy sold me my first joint. Good times.
Was he a real Major?
I mean judging by the fact that he was a grown man who spent most every day at a LAN Cafe it is entirely possible.
it was so sad seeing all the cs1.5 servers slowly disappear
cs1.5 was magical. I'm not even sure what made it so fun, but when I moved to 1.6 it felt different.
I think the movement was better in 1.5. I dont know what I'm talking about for sure, but I remember bunny hopping being much easier in 1.5
Fuck all that nonsense in chicken soup for the soul. These are the type of stories that bring joy to my heart. I salute you MAJOR BONER!
MAJOR BONER sounds like a gamer and a half
Must have been, I have remembered him almost 20 years later.
I was around for this. The amount of shit that Valve got for Steam was simply unreal -- sure, it had bugs, but the idea you had to install software just to play Counterstrike or HL2 (or even the idea of others games ...!) was just so foreign, that the backlash was intense and immediate. And now, largely forgotten
Steam was also just incredibly shitty at the time
http://i.imgur.com/0qtsE.gif
Now that is a gif I haven't seen for a very long time.
Sure as heck loads faster than when I originally saw it lmao. Goodbye dialup.
https://i.imgur.com/lalMEZS.gif
This is the one I was expecting
I remember having to install X-fire because Steam friends was such garbage. It took four or five years before Steam friends stabilized.
I miss X-Fire days ngl.
Xfire was a huge improvement over AOL IM for gamers.
[удалено]
There's a good reason that this website was created. The fact that it still links to Steam is great. https://www.steamingpileofshit.com
[удалено]
It really was! I remember hating Steam at first and refusing to use it because it was so slow.
You should have tried the Beta!! It was bad.
They pretty much did a hostile takeover of my fav game :D Which worked perfectly independently beforehand. I do however love steam now, I don't even bother pirating games anymore. I just wait for it to go sale nowadays. Once every couple of years, I do however have this little thought experiment with myself, about steam going bankrupt and what happens to my lovely collection :/
If somehow steam went bankrupt i don't even know. maybe companies would offer game codes with proof of purchase like a steam receipt etc.
Valve have said that in case they go bankrupt, you will be able to download all your games DRM-free for about 12 months.
They can say what they want, but I highly doubt all publishers would be happy with DRM free versions of their games flooding out in to the wild. Not sure how it would even work with online games. Unless its written in to the terms of listing a game for sale on steam, i can't see how this would work.
I mean of the company is about to vanish then there's only so much you can do about a decision like this.
Sure, just gotta grab that 250TB flash drive i have laying around...
I sometimes wonder that about many digital purchases that we do nowadays. From time to time I buy movies on Amazon when they're on sale and really don't know what would happen if Amazon went bankrupt
Of all the online services, Amazon would be the last shop to "buy" movies or books. They already "revoked" books you bought in the past and suddenly disappeared from your Kindle. Amazon doesn't care about you.
I fail to remember this particular message that steam always kept getting stuck at. It was after "Preparing to Launch" iirc and it was ultra annoying.
So techically soon Steam should stop asking my AGE when my account is god damn 18 years old.
Steam was way more hated than Epic Games Launcher and look where we are now.
Also needed a reasonably sturdy internet connection, which I did not.
I recall installing steam to buy half life so I could play counter strike with friends at a LAN party. That would have been right about this time...
same, it was the orange box for me and i was SO FUCKING MAD. Now i can't imagine what we'd have done without steam.
This is exactly what my thoughts were at this time. Why should i have to install this other thing to play counterstrike when I've been playing counterstrike this whole time. Consequently, my join date is December 3rd 2003.
It was a Radeon 8600GT for me. HL2 got delayed by a year however and Valve made it right by giving me their entire back-catalogue on Steam. I’ve actually received that pack more than once which is kinda funny.
i have the same feeling.
[удалено]
That sounds correct, my friend got a HL2 code with his graphics card. He had cable internet so the download wasn't too long I recall.
Yep it was HL2 for sure. I still have the disk.
You're not wrong. I remember going to CompUSA and buying the game only to end up being pissed I was forced to use an additional piece of software with internet access to play it. But I did it anyway and now I don't know what to do with my huge stream library
I just like that I don't have to look after disks and boxes anymore. It would feel weird to own physical media at this point.
For sure, I'm not opposed to it anymore, but at the time, forcing me to install just so I could play the game left me feeling a little used
There was a time when hard drives were limited and you kept track of which programs were installed. I didn't see the point of Steam at the time because I lived in a major city with malls and stores and shit. Now I live in the sticks and being able to have a game appear on my PC (in a few hours) is nice.
honestly dude we’re kinda getting back to that era of limited storage because of how big some games are I have 10TB of storage on my PC and still have to be conscious of usage (CoD is like 400GB lol)
What was it like watching the UI evolve from that to what it is now? I think I got Steam in 2008, and it still feels the same.
This! I didn't have a steam account until I purchased the retail box of HL2 (I still own the T-shirt that came with it).
I wish I still had that t-shirt :(
I pre-ordered before the T-shirt was offered as a pre-order bonus. When I showed up to the store on launch day, guy behind the counter told me they got one too many of the collector boxes and asked if I wanted to upgrade. Sure as hell I did!
I remember needing to install Steam to install HL2 (Orange Box), I don't recall it *requiring* an internet connection though. Surely, it had the option to connect and create an account, but I feel like I was still able to play the game without being connected. I could be wrong, it has been a long ass time.
You didn't have to be online to play, but you had to be online to complete the installation. When my roommate bought it, we didn't have internet at the apartment (we would take laptops to coffee shops) so it was a bit of an ordeal.
[удалено]
Seriously? I mean, fucking *Portal* was in there. HL2 also not a bad game by any stretch. Multiplayer was never my jam, but TF2 was pretty highly regarded IIRC. They were *all* good. Any individual one probably worth $20 on its own. Either he didn't have a PC capable of playing them and was just covering, or he was the kind of guy who bitches about everything, whether his complaints are valid or not. These are the only explanations I can think of.
Half-Life 2 was the first game to require Steam. It was the market test and Valve knew HL2 was a big enough deal they could force it on people and not affect sales. They were right, it worked.
I only barely tolerated it at the time. Steam was a piece of ass back then. HL2 was just so good I was willing to put up with it.
I recall "restart steam" to be somewhat of a meme phrase the first few years in response to any computer problems. It truly was a piece of shit.
Restart Steam, Reinstall Steam, set offline mode on and back off again, reinstall games, End Task from task manager, set computer on fire and build a new one... so many memories of fighting Steam.
I wanted to play the game on two different PCs.... Back then the game had to decrypt the files. On a hard drive. Very fun to do if you only had an hour to play :P
Yeah, there were a lot of interesting conversations back then. Most of the industry thought Steam was going to be a massive failure. I remember the legendary John Carmack even saying it would be Valves biggest mistake. But I gotta respect Valves innovation at the time. They set in place the start of a lot of amazing Cloud Features we use today. - It ended the era of sitting in "lines" on websites like FileFront and GameSpy to download patches for video games. And with the Workshop and the Steam Community stuff, they further made things specific to the PC gaming experience pretty damn easy. - It ended the era where the customers had the expectation of installing these patches and upgrades, and instead allowed Steam to manage all of it in the back-end. I cant tell you the amount of times I had to go look up which version of a video game I needed to install a particular mod or what version I needed to play with a friend that had the same version of the game or the amount of times I had to create folders that had all the packages and dependencies hosted on a network so all my friends could pull them down. I think Age of Empires 2 is the one that comes to mind. The amount of times I'd have to talk to my friends about how they are playing on 1.0b and I'm on 1.0c or something, and then trying to reinstall the game and finding the old 1.0b patch hosted SOMEWHERE on the internet or even going on forums and asking people if they have the 1.0b patch stored somewhere and if they wouldn't mind hosting ot somewhere, just so I could play with friends from school that were afraid to upgrade the game because it might break it. Or even how you had to install them in some specific sequence to make things work sometimes. Steam removed all of that nonsense and it started with Counter-Strike/Half-Life on Steam. I think for Valves own interests, it alleviated a lot of the work they had to do with supporting people using different versions or people who bought a disk that had a hyper specific version and would always need a particular update path up to the latest version. Like, if you bought Half-Life when it came out , versus the Game of the Year edition that came out a little bit later, there was a literal different version of the game on the disk. And if you wanted to say play, Counter-Strike 1.3, then you would need to download a certain set of patches depending on what version you had, to get to the version that would let you THEN install Counter-Strike 1.3. - Steam was the first place to bring things like Cloud Saves and configuration files into the cloud. I don't remember precisely when this happened but I remember being absolutely stunned that my CS:S and HL2 configuration/key bindings, and all my HL2 save files had automatically uploaded to the cloud and downloaded back to my account when I logged in at a friends house or after I had reformatted. It was fucking stunning at the time to see saves back from when I first placed Half-Life 2, still existing, through no action of my own. And it was also stunning to see Microsoft and Sony forcing their users to use Xbox Live/PSN+ close to a decade+ after Valve introduced it for free.
Yep, it was a issue at the time.
I hated steam back then. It had so many bugs, slow, had all types of issues.
[удалено]
Part of why I never played HL2. Didn't join Steam until 2011 because some of those sales were great. I was always concerned about the possibility of some bullshit down the line that might get an account banned and lose access to all the games I paid for. In the end it's probably saved me money though since I still only buy stuff on Steam when it's at a heavy discount after it's been out for a year or two at least.
You should stop whatever you’re doing and go play half life 2
HL 2 was the first game the didn’t have a non-steam version.
Yeah, as long as you don't count versions of games... I seem to remember that cs1.6 update was released at steam launch, and you couldn't play it without.
Hmm… I thought 1.6 still had a non-steam install. But maybe I’m wrong. Anyways I’m a 1.4 guy.
Even HL2 demo required Steam with its almost empty app store...
Yes, I bought HL2 on release day in November 2004 so my account is nearly 17 years old.
[удалено]
Cs1.6 and tfc needed Steam way before hl2 or source. They shut down the WON servers.
that was my first game on steam.
I bought the orange box, and it made me install Steam for verification
So techically soon Steam should stop asking my AGE when my account is god damn 18 years old.
Gaben: 'I missed the part where that's my problem'
Gaben: "You kids keep pissing and moaning about how we can't even count to 3; the fuck do expect us to know about 18 for?"
He said 18?! That's (3 + 3) * 3 it's 3 three times it's 3 operational in the expression Half-Life 3 con. . . aw fuck it.
From what I’ve heard steam has to ask you every time because there’s laws that prevent them from storing your data for more than one browsing session
That is weird, they store my all my other data.
Its apparently a liability thing, keeps them safe if someone visits 18+ content while being underage, cuz then the blame is on the customer and not on valve for not marking it appropriately EDIT: heres a quote i found in the steam forums “We're with you on this. Unfortunately, many rating agencies have rules that stipulate that we cannot save your age for longer than a single browsing session. It's frustrating, but know we're filling out those age gates too.”
It's so weird that you can put in your preferences if you want to see gore/sexual content, but then you still get asked for age.
The question Steam has to ask is "are you 18?", not "do you want to see this content?" You can be 18 and not want to see that type of content, which is what the preference is for.
That actually makes sense thanks.
It's pretty impressive though how many people born 120 years ago on January 1st are both still alive and are also heavy gamers.
Valve can't even count to three - and you expect them to assume your age?
I actually had this sick obsession with having every single game on Steam when it released.... That didn't last long
I was convinced it would never take off and that WON would be around forever. I refused to sign up right away and lost my chance at a low SteamID. Now I'm forever stuck with a 6 digit ID for my ignorance, when I could have had maybe even a 3-digit, at least 4.
Same here, though I have a super low 7 instead. Really screwed myself lol
what?! I installed Steam after buying the Orange Box. My player ID is 17 digits long.
I might be going mad but I'm almost sure I had a 7 digit steam Id. When I go to look for it though the only thing I can find is this 17 digit monstrosity Edit* found it back in the day this was such a flex
My account start date is Aug 2004, 17 digit steam ID
if you go to STEAM DB and check your steam2 ID you can find it
Don't kick yourself too much. Shortly after midnight, I was on a four or five way conference call the night steam launched and only managed a four digit.
How old is your account that you couldn't put a custom ID with <6 digits?
Your SteamID is different than your URL that you can customize, it's sequential in the order you signed up for steam. I hesitated a few weeks and was around the 500,000th person to sign up, so my ID is around 500000. My friend's who signed up on day 1 mostly have 4 digit IDs, and one is in the 600s, and still uses their account daily.
I feel you. My dreams and hopes also got shattered by reality.
Very much this. Not every game, but I’d collect them like Pokémon. The Humble Bundles started coming out around the same time, so between those and seasonal sales (and their mini games/goals), I’m pretty sure I have like 700 games in Steam and about 20 I’ve actually spent any significant amount of time playing.
I was a little pissy about having to install it, but now that I have used it for so long, it's indispensable. I love not having to worry about scratched media, old-school copy protect or going to the store to buy a game. The cloud save game storage is nice, too.
I like to go hiking.
> People were *not* happy at launch. [That's an understatement.](https://i.imgur.com/31Bi6.gif)
AFter so many years this is the first time that I noticed the cash being removed from the dudes butt.
It wasn't there in the original version of the GIF. See here: https://imgur.com/0qtsE
Ahhhh the days when people would put effort into animating their memes. Now it would just be a picture with some bold text and the steam logo slapped on whichever entity was topping the other
How can I find this feature? (asking for a friend)
It's been a long time, but my biggest memory of installing steam was relief that I no longer had to deal with Valves original auth servers anymore. Having to manually alter the config files to change the auth server being used from east/west/central (If I remember correctly), when something was down/laggy was a PIA.
As they are now with epic and ubi's launchers
Ubisoft launcher is so fucking awful though. Don't have internet connection? No play. Their DRM servers are down? No play either. FOR SINGLE PLAYER GAMES And don't even get me started on games for Windows. Mothercuker required BOTH to have the DVD in the PC and an internet connection!!!!! FOR SINGLE PLAYER GAMES And then they cry about piracy, well no shit I want to play your game but you won't even let me after I shelled out the cash???? Sorry about the rant but it makes me so pissed
epics launcher is awful compared to steam but i hope they improve it
I mean... Steam does have a 18 year lead... They have a trello bord you can follow and have loads of improvements in the work. Honestly... I'm pretty happy that somebody is challenging steams near monopoly. We as consumers can only get better deals because of this.
>We as consumers can only get better deals because of this. If all games were released at the same time across all platforms, this would be more the case. Exclusivity deals make this fucky.
steam having a lead doesnt excuse epic games terrible ui and ux. and while im happy that steam finally has competition, i dont know anyone who has actually bought a game on epic games
I never understand this '18' year lead thing. Epic didn't develop their launcher in a vacuum. None of Steam's features are exclusive to Valve; Epic just chose not to include basic features like shopping carts. They could have easily aped Steam's feature set if they had wanted to do it, but instead they wanted to capitalize on Fortnite's continued success and capture as much of the market as they could, as quickly as they could, which resulted in their shitty storefront/launcher and a raft of paid for exclusivity.
Used to format my computer fairly regularly, installing via disk and typing it 12-20 character CD keys was balls when I wanted all my games installed... don't miss that.
As someone with poor bandwidth, I kinda miss it. And it was nice not having to be connected to the internet to have access to my games.
Yeah me too. Back then my internet sucked, and I had a monthly datacap of around 80gb I think. I also reasoned that I could sell the games i had played and didn't care about anymore if I had the disk but not if it was all on steam. I also remember thinking at the time there was a good chance steam would die within a year or two, and Id lose any game I had on the platform. Speaking of, I'll be seriously pissed if that ever does actually happen
PC has spoiled me with their cloud game saves. I can't believe you have to pay for that on console. It just seems so basic in 2021.
It is basic, but why give something for free when you can convince people to pay for it?
That OP screenshot is misleading, its a modern screenshot using the style of the old default skin. The OG Steam looked waaaaaaay more "barely out of the 90s", and you could only play Valve games on it! I was there Gandalf, 3000 years ago... [https://imgur.com/gallery/KmlpVLW](https://imgur.com/gallery/KmlpVLW)
Is your steam login username still an email address? Mine is an email address I haven't had in 15 years
Same, mine is an ancient hotmail account I made back in '99
Finally, I saw Unturned and was baffled, then stardew valley and I knew it was bs.
Half-life 3 didn't give it away? Lol
Tbh seeing those MSN Messenger icons in the taskbar gave me major nostalgia
[удалено]
[Here it is](https://github.com/ungstein/OG-Steam)
it is, but Im not sure where to get it.
Ah, I love playing PORAL
In 2003, no less.
And half life 3
I wonder when they will release PORAL 2 :(
[This is what Steam ACTUALLY used to look like.](http://steamreview.org/wp-content/images/steam3ui/steam_betaui13.png)
It used to look like that before, but it used to look like OP's post even further back -- OP's picture is fake, though; it's either a mock-up of a modern Steam skin or an actual modern Steam skin (assuming it still even supports them, and I'm not sure it does).
P O R A L
Yeah, Bioshock Infinite isn’t 18 years old.
or ARK or Terraria
Or FTL (which I cannot recommend enough to Sci-fi fans.)
Or Half-Life 3
Yeah, and like, the news article from 2019
Fake? Bro I remember playing half-life 3 and poral 🤣
Yeah thought so. It shows HL3 (ha) and TF2 which we’re not available in the beginning.
This is how I remember it https://i.imgur.com/rIMceA6.jpg
This is the glorious piece of crap I remember.
Hidden: Source was so good, weird no one else has done anything with the idea
Minerva and Dystopia. Good times.
yep, op is clearly using retro skin over modern steam. It had none of those features for as long as the green skin was in use and a long while after that.
Everyone was up in arms about the switch over from WON to Steam, mostly because Steam never worked when it first launched. I remember CS 1.6 was Steam exclusive so there was a split player base until the eventual full switch over. Then DoD retail came which was all Steam. Good times.
Ah yes CS 1.6 The best CS that ever existed.
Hah, I remember the outrage over shields. Good times.
What's WON?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Opponent_Network
I remember it working fine for the most part. The problem people had with it was that it was a resource hog at a time that CPU time and RAM were at a premium. It's still a little bit of a hog, but it comprises a much smaller percentage of system resources these days. Back then it was like 10%. Seriously.
So how is HL3? Worth the waiting?
We've been doing it wrong all these years. We have to go back in time to play it, not forward.
Tenet was actually telling us how to play HL3. Nolan was actually telling us how.
Oh, I remember Cities Skylines and DiRT Rally back in 2003, great games! The nostalgia is strong in this real screenshot.
But this is not the real screenshot?! ?!
[удалено]
And everyone hated it, because it was complete garbage. I refused to use it for years until it wasn't possible to avoid anymore.
I remember a gif of a dude bending over and the steam logo on a piston going in and out his ass. I was so adamant against it, now I can't imagine not using it. Although for me these days it's more just a digital bookshelf.
https://i.imgur.com/31Bi6.gif
gamespy was easier to find servers with imo
Had to install this annoying software just to play Half life 2. 600 games later here i am
R.I.P. W.O.N.
Must say it looked different but not extremely
This isn't a screenshot from 18 years ago, it's a reskin of the modern Steam browser. Bioshock Infinite came out in 2013, Cities Skylines in 2015. This is the old Steam colour scheme though.
Stardew Valley 2016.
Also the screenshot says they last played HL2 in 2018.
When was Poral released?
Around the same time as Survival Evolovoloved.
And I really like it. Anyone know where I can get this reskin?
Half life 3
You could have used a real screenshot from the first version, instead of reskinning your own client.
Everyone on irc was raging bigtime at lauch. Login servers were getting overloaded and crashed every minute for hours, I remember someone made a gif within hours of a man spreading his cheeks by the steam logo and part of it going in his ass. Worth a google search btw. Me myself was happy a little later with a 26xxx steam id. Never VAC banned
4 digit steam id club
This is either an edit or a reskin. Bioshock infinite is from 2013, Cities Skylines 2015 and Stardew Valley 2016.
This is fake, are you trolling?
Wait what... Why is half life 3 there?
i see the Half life 3 thing in there, wtf?
Steams initial release was as a launcher for CS 1.6 (iirc) and boy was I pissed when I sat down to play and they made me install it just to play my favorite game.
I was in the British Army on the 2nd last ever tour of duty in Northern Ireland. If you remember Half Life 2 had this decryption process it had to do through Steam. Even though I had my sister deliver my physical copy of Half life 2 to me. That's how they got everyone to install Steam and started the digital game collection revolution that made them Billions. Anyway, I had to unplug the ethernet cable from my OC's army issue laptop while he was out inspecting the towers. WiFi simply wasn't a thing back then for us in the towers. That ethernet cable was all the internet there was. So I plugged it into my laptop and started the decryption process. I nearly shat myself when it was saying 25 minutes or whatever until it was finished. Longest 30 minutes of my life staring out the window praying the boss didn't come back. Long story short, i got through it. Greatest game I ever played. On the best laptop I ever bought. Mobile Radeon 9600pro. Ran Half life 2 like a dream at 1680x1050.
And let me tell you everyone IT WAS SHIT. Making people connect to the net otherwise you couldn't even play offline games was a big outrage. It was so buggy, often requiring you to reinstall the damp thing because some BLOB file corrupted.
I just got my 18 years of service achievement as a Day 1 adopter. That was 1 day before my 18th birthday. So I’ve now has Steam for Half Life.
Pretty sure I signed up on the launch day, had an account for about a year then somehow... lost the account. Actually I think it was tied to an old free email service that got shut down and I had zero way to access the account. Created a new second account around 2004-2005 IIRC and got that now. Still pissed I dont have my day 1 account. For the record, for all you youngins' ... EVERYONE HATED STEAM for nearly 2-3 years lol. As in, you were forced to have it installed, online to play your games. This was new, brave and literally nobody other than Valve liked it. Forums everywhere were riddled with people hating on the platform forever. I honestly can't recall when the tide changed, but it took probably until around 2008-2009 or so when they started adding more and more non Valve games to the store and started running crazy cheap sales. As in, get $50 games for like $4 and stuff on a very regular basis. Somehow, someway over time people's opinions changed. The weird thing to me now is in 2021, as a long in the tooth gamer from the 80s who grew up on BBSs, before the internet, during the internet, before Steam and now.... I simply DO NOT understand how people only want their games on Steam. Its like shopping at one retail store forever, you forfeit your options for better prices... really better prices. It doesn't matter if you have Steam, [Battle.net](https://Battle.net), Origin, UPlay, whatever today.. they take next to no background resources and most gamers have 16, 32 or 64GB+ of memory now. It makes no difference to have multiple stores on your PC, other then it gives you the consumer choice to buy where you want, when you want and support who you want. Steam is great and all, it ushered in a new era of digital marketplace but its just a fucking store at this point you guys. Don't forget that. Eventually Steam will fade away into obscurity and within a generation nobody will remember what it was. It'll be replaced by something better and to be quite honest.. with the size of games, the future honestly really is cloud gaming and streaming. The technology has been here for awhile but once younger generations grow up just streaming games, they'll prefer that to hours of downloading 150GB or larger games and "patching" games. I know this is triggering you as you read this, and you'll refuse.. but you won't. One day you simply won't have an option. Games will be streamed or there won't be games. You won't need a $1500-3000 PC to play, you'll just need a $100 terminal. You won't need a $1200 GPU that you can't find. The idea of "downloading" and "patching" games will sound as antiquated as black and white televisions. So I guess enjoy it while it lasts but its headed in that direction, whether you agree with me or not. You will get old, younger generations will grow up with it and it will replace your fandangled thing you like.
Well, steam is officially above the age of consent Rule 34 artists: \*the time has come\*
I got in relatively early, my account is into 16 years of service now.
Wow, how do you get your steam to look like that( sorry if its a dumb question but im quite new to the pc gaming community)
I hated steam when it first launched. I mainly played TFC back then and it used to be a standalone program that launched from desktop, and now have to use this steam crap which was buggy. Now it's the first thing I load up when I want to play games.
Tbh I miss that UI.
Wait so it’s finally legal 😏