yeah at the time you were forced into it. the won servers were shut down and most peoples computers werent good enough to play CS and have this clunky software running in the background at the same time. it worked but alt-tabbing back then was a gong show and you definitely had the performance hit.

i played CS daily then so the first day was a shit show and I dont think I got much time in that day. mostly just trying to get connected...the servers were overloaded.

I still remember that meme with the Valve gear fucking a guy in the ass. Steam was not well received.

Same thing here. I didn't want another program just to manage my programs. I could do that without Steam. Of course now it's pretty awesome, but it was fairly redundant when it released.

I too got hl2 free my graphics card, it was some kind of special edition that had like better cooling or something. It came in a special case too.

Unfortunately there was something wrong with it, don't remember what. But I went back to the store and they didn't had a replacement for it.

But for 50 bucks extra I could get a other, better card. They paid 50 themselves as a customer service thing, very nice that was!

I ended up flashing the card to unlock it to a higher tier card, never had any problems with it. So it was a truly great experience for me when hl2 launched.

The good old days.

Wow, same here. I gave up June 30, 2011.

I pirated almost any game that required it, only ended up signing up in 2018 I don't remember why at the time but I don't think it was to buy games since I didn't buy any until almost a year after creating the account.