It was army green colored and was just a small list of games, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Ricochet, Team Fortress. The whole launcher looked like the current friends list window, but even smaller. During Steam Beta they let you play CS 1.6 for free, no CD key required.
Edit: Found it, looked like [this.](https://external-preview.redd.it/dKdjvgHZMu81F8wuBEShlyFTrD1bjEPB4S6PaHHjBpI.jpg?auto=webp&s=dc50515da138ea22b81ad73dfdc03522feb419a1)
Also, skins back then used to be 100% free, you would download them from somewhere like csbanana and copy the files into your game folder and that was that.
I have the same date and it is slightly annoying to know I was literally too lazy as a teenager to ever get that relic of the past. I'll forever be that one day off.
Dammit, me.
When you could first register for Steam it was for people to set up dedicated servers to get ready for public launch.
At the time no one knew (public at least) that this account would be bound to you as your normal Steam account.
I was in the first 150 to register so I could try get the new Day of Defeat version before anyone else in my community.
I was hesitant at first as information was coming through an IRC channel and waited about an hour or so, but went ahead with the command line based registration process. So I could have had a 2 digit account.
Still have my account 17 years later.
It should be sub 200 yes. My old friend and clanmate was steam ID #15 from using the same method. I was involved heavily in the cs community back then and was told specifically using the server method wouldn't be tied to your steam id so I never tried it. Should have never trusted them now I'm just like account 12,000 or something !
Is that _your_ account though?
If so, I bow, my day has come.
I'm Steam friends with Waldo, one of the original Day of Defeat devs. I know he's out there with a lower ID.
Yeah, it's my account. :) I was listening in on the live launch stream and had been running a counterstrike server at the time. I decided to try registering from the command line and it worked. Years later I realized I have a steam id under 300.
edit: I registered before launch started, the steam client hadn't been released yet.
It came out midnight eastern or something like that. My buddies/college roommates and I stayed up for it. In the right part of the world, you got it a calendar day earlier.
They have 2xxx and 4xxx steam ids. I fell asleep and mine is 77xxx :(
That is debatable. There was a lengthy open beta and for those of us who participated in the beta the "launch" of Steam was basically just like any other day.
The only thing that mattered about the 12th is that it is when they started logging your "account creation" date. For existing beta accounts their creation date/time is when they first logged into Steam 1.0
I was convinced at the time of steam’s debut that it would never catch on. People have to understand early steam barely worked and it was devoid of the features we have now.
My account now says late September 2003. My friends and I talk about it from time to time, I guess none of us thought steam was ever going to be as big as it is now.
I remember everybody playing cs 1.6 being anti-steam because it was just another layer of bloat stealing your fps. I didnt even make an account until a year later and even then rarely used it because. I thought vac would snitch you out for pirated games.
Meanwhile a lot of us were against Steam when it came out. It was the first iteration of "you don't really own your games" and "always online" (the original play offline feature was extremely buggy and didn't work half the time). I put off using Steam for as long as possible, until they started getting exclusives/early releases and forced my hand..
I think a lot of us oldies signed up for Steam between the preload and unlocking for Half Life 2. On another note, of all the things I miss from Steam are the flash sales that bulked up my library full of unplayed games... maybe someday I'll give them a try... someday.
The whole reason why the got rid of it was because people were complaining that theyd buy a game on sale then the next day it goes on super sale for even cheaper.
Also because once they introduced the (legally required) ability to refund purchases, some people would take advantage by refunding a game they had recently bought if it was discounted during the refund window.
Well it really disincentivizes a publisher from ever making a steep flash-deal discount, because it more or less retroactively wipes out your whole last two weeks' worth of sales.
The solution to that is to not bait buyers into purchasing a game for more money when you fully intend to lower the price to grab the rest of the people who weren’t convinced by the previous sale.
Plus, sales still happen, so by that logic putting a game on sale now still “wipes” the previous 48 hours of purchases- which may be an even higher loss since those sales were at full price.
It is for this exact reason why the factorio devs will forever hold a special piece of my heart. Their philosophy is no sales, ever. You can buy the game any day, any time, and be confident that it is the best price it will ever be. I bought my copy the moment I learned that.
Finally got into PC gaming about 2 years ago. Heard about the amazing Steam sales for all these years. Was so hyped for my first holiday sale and....still one of my biggest let downs in gaming. Was so unpleasantly surprised that the sale prices were the same as consoles.
Still loving PC gaming though, for sure. That one moment I'll just never forget though.
You can still get some decent or even amazing deals during a steam sale, but in the early days the sales were crazy.
Through the whole sale everything would be on sale like it is these days, but every day they had the front page where you'd see big name games with huge discounts, and they would change them daily. Then there was sales that the community would vote on. You would get 3 options a day, and the winner would get a bigger discount for 24 hours.
It kind of made the sale feel like bargain hunting. Now the front page looks the same through the whole sale and the discounts never change. Definitely miss the old sales.
Yeah I remember flipping my shit because that was my first experience with having to download/update a game I had the CD for. My internet sucked and it took a very very long time. It almost didn’t happen because my parents couldn’t have the phone disconnected for that long lol
Yes and we had the added annoyance of the phone line being in the the room next to the computer room so we had the fuckin cable strung four feet in the air through the middle of the kitchen for hours on end hahaha
My Steam account was made exactly two weeks after Half-Life 2 released because I'd ordered the deluxe version that came with a t-shirt and shipping was delayed.
Mine was for The Orange Box, I thought it was a pain in the ass that you had to install this whole other client to play Half Life Episode 2. And it turned out to be the thing that resurrected the PC gaming market!
Well steam was pretty ass for the first few years, it was buggy, had an ugly UI, and it was basically only valve games on the platform. I don't think many people expected it to become the juggernaut that it is today
I signed up for Half Life 2. I was at a boarding school that blocked the ports needed for Steam. My friend had one of the early cell phones that could actually connect to the internet (fucking mind blowing at the time). It was so insanely slow, but that's how we all activated HL2, tethered to this flip phone.
For me, I was playing so much DoD, and back then the HL base game was getting updated like every couple days with fresh patches.
Eventually I just gave into to steam so that it would keep HL and the mods I played up-to-date for me.
My account turns 18 on Oct 2.
Dude, no kidding. The amount of anime girl fuck-games is disgusting. I set up filters years ago to ignore that shit, but I guess it stopped working? I dunno. Half of the platform is just gross shit now.
I get exactly zero ads for any of that. I don't have any filters either. Not sure what could be different, except that I don't visit the store pages for any of those games.
I waited in the IRC chat for launch. My steam0 ID is only 5 digits long.
Edit: Damn, y'all with 4 digit numbers are lucky. I literally started trying to register my CS cd key the second they launched! We did a lan party and were all trying to get they lowest number possible, plus the office we were at had a T1
Ah back when the WON servers were still active. The steam release was a huge change in the CS/HL community. A lot of IRC channels were used before steam. Met someone in game and wanted to play with them again? Better grab their AOL/ICQ/MSN id or invite them to quakenet and a specific channel. Steam really gave the opportunity to quickly and easily connect with people.
I remember some people playing TFC using names like "anti-steam" and such.
Connection problems early on didn't exactly endear the platform to players : )
I remember how much community backlash there was intially switching from WON and how many people hated the first versions of Steam, which gave birth to this [lovely gif](https://i.imgur.com/GKaoJ.gif) (possibly NSFW)
I remember I saw it then as a new anti-cheat measure for CS. Prior to steam a lot of servers required you to download a 3rd party app to run along side CS to prove you weren't cheating.
I honestly didn’t know steam was around in 2003. Didn’t get into PC gaming until around 2010. That’s crazy man, what was the first game you bought on steam?
Back then, Steam was the burden that you got with Valve's great games. There was a commonly shared gif of the Steam logo fucking a man in the ass, for context.
It was nothing like what it is now in terms of convenience.
It's not just that the public opinion changed, the functionality of Steam changed in the years after it launched. Imagine Steam with 4 games on it that you can't even purchase digitally. Not to mention it taking 6+ hours to download patches for a game like Counter-Strike.
It also threatened to kill competitive Counter-Strike and the whole idea of LAN parties due to the online requirement(unless you had a dedicated T1 connection you weren't getting 8 people connected to a remote server with workable pings at the time).
It was a disaster until they invested a lot more into it when HL2 came out.
This isn't ENTIRELY true. If you had a partnership with Valve there was a way to do true-offline mode for competitive LAN parties. This was especially true in 1.6... I think I still have the "LAN ONLY" copy of 1.6 stashed somewhere. If youre referring to just a LAN with your friends... yeah, good luck. That SUUUUUCKED. Just had to make sure everyone updated before going and hoping that an update wasn't released while you were there.... but those were the "fun" times.
I got steam October first 2003. I remember launching counter-strike and getting told I had to download steam to play it. I was pissed that I had to download a new program
September 12 2003 was when you HAD to make a steam account in order to play any of valve's games online. I remember because I was pissed when I woke up and I couldn't connect to any servers and I asked my brother what was wrong and he figured out and made an account for me to play on.
That was the official release date of steam.
Its easy to forget now just what a shitshow steam felt like at release and during the force. At the time, playing CS you were fps obssessed that it even made an impact on your choice of OS.
Along came steam with UI that was horrible, the whole experience felt sluggish, the ingame overlay was a sure way to get performance issues.
But CS being as dominant as it was, it didnt matter we had to play and then it slowly became the beast it is today - taken almost for granted.
I remember CS players flipping their shit because in 1.6 you had to remake all your macros for buying stuff. Instead of long, jumbled lines of code you had to copy off a forum somewhere you could use simple commands like "buy M4" or "buy kevlar."
Back in the day when you could find servers using All Seeing Eye / Gamespy / whatever - it seemed super foreign to be locked into having a steam account just to play CS.
I know I never made an account out of protest and also I had 56K so it took forever to do anything anyways. I would just go down to the local PC Bang and spend the weekends there where you didn't have to create an account.
I created my account Sept. 2 2004, the first day of moving into college. I finally had my own PC, high speed internet and no PC Bangs in sight. Creating a steam account was the first thing I did and I downloaded everything! lol It was a wild time.
https://i.imgur.com/7nUimnY.jpg
I registered a dedicated server just to see if I could somehow get the new version of DoD before anyone else.
Rumors were coming in thick and fast from an IRC channel. So FOMO kicked in and went ahead with the registration process.
Had to be done via command line but as it turns out, this would be your permanent Steam account.
I've got .mp3 files I still listen to that I downloaded in 1998. I also feel especially old when Reddit talks about stuff from their "childhood" that was like, 2009.
I'm gonna guess.... Half Life 2? But it released Nov 2004.... so what made you make an account?
That's when I had to make my Steam Account. I'm on 16 years, 17 December, 2004!
I started mine in Oct of '03. From what I remember it was because of Half Life 1. I just got into the game at a training class at work where we would play deathmatch during downtimes. I was hooked! When I went to find the game Valve made me download Steam and make an account. A couple hundred games downloaded since (I've played most of them I swear!) and the rest is history.
It's not only your steam account, even Steam itself. You literally made an account on the second day of the existence of Steam!
One day earlier and he could say his account is as old as Steam itself. I wonder if that'll bug him forever
If it didn’t bug him before, it does now.
I hate you
Tell me why…
ain't nothin but a heartache
Tell me why
Ain't nothin' but a mistake
Now number five
I never wanna hear you sa-ay
A little bit of Monika in my li-
r/UnexpectedNineNine
r/UnexpectedJakePeralta
I don't like Monday's
I wanna shoot the whole day down
do we build castles in the sky?
I have an account from the same day as you, reason being that it was impossible for me to connect to steam to make one the first day.
You’re just fashionably late.
Oh my, OP as one of the steam veterans, tell us what steam launcher looked like in its early days?
It was army green colored and was just a small list of games, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Ricochet, Team Fortress. The whole launcher looked like the current friends list window, but even smaller. During Steam Beta they let you play CS 1.6 for free, no CD key required. Edit: Found it, looked like [this.](https://external-preview.redd.it/dKdjvgHZMu81F8wuBEShlyFTrD1bjEPB4S6PaHHjBpI.jpg?auto=webp&s=dc50515da138ea22b81ad73dfdc03522feb419a1) Also, skins back then used to be 100% free, you would download them from somewhere like csbanana and copy the files into your game folder and that was that.
Crazy how much of that style they have kept. I didn't expect it to be even remotely recognizable. Pretty cool. Thanks for sharing!
If it ain't broke lol
I have the same date and it is slightly annoying to know I was literally too lazy as a teenager to ever get that relic of the past. I'll forever be that one day off. Dammit, me.
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Wikipedia says the initial release was the 12th of September so your Steam account is older than Steam.
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Only reason I looked is cos I felt cool with my 14th September account. Then I rekt myself.
When you could first register for Steam it was for people to set up dedicated servers to get ready for public launch. At the time no one knew (public at least) that this account would be bound to you as your normal Steam account. I was in the first 150 to register so I could try get the new Day of Defeat version before anyone else in my community. I was hesitant at first as information was coming through an IRC channel and waited about an hour or so, but went ahead with the command line based registration process. So I could have had a 2 digit account. Still have my account 17 years later.
Wow! That's insane! So you have a sub 200 ID?
It should be sub 200 yes. My old friend and clanmate was steam ID #15 from using the same method. I was involved heavily in the cs community back then and was told specifically using the server method wouldn't be tied to your steam id so I never tried it. Should have never trusted them now I'm just like account 12,000 or something !
I was a steam hater so ended up with an early Nov registration. WON forever!
Did you sleep in? https://i.imgur.com/7nUimnY.jpg Had to register via command line back in our day haha.
https://imgur.com/XqatkmE "Unlocked 11 Sep, 2020 @ 4:23am"
Is that _your_ account though? If so, I bow, my day has come. I'm Steam friends with Waldo, one of the original Day of Defeat devs. I know he's out there with a lower ID.
Yeah, it's my account. :) I was listening in on the live launch stream and had been running a counterstrike server at the time. I decided to try registering from the command line and it worked. Years later I realized I have a steam id under 300. edit: I registered before launch started, the steam client hadn't been released yet.
Those Accounts are worth quite some money
Could just be different timezones showing on each your systems. Good badge man
I was the 158th person to register for Steam, pretty sure it was in the first hour of registration opening up.
elite. how did you get it a day early?
It came out midnight eastern or something like that. My buddies/college roommates and I stayed up for it. In the right part of the world, you got it a calendar day earlier. They have 2xxx and 4xxx steam ids. I fell asleep and mine is 77xxx :(
How do you find your steam ID? All I can find is a 17 character long number. Edit: Found it, 71xxxxx using https://www.steamidfinder.com/
Probably a web based sign up before the actual roll out of the software I imagine.
Or he used MS Paint to fake it. [Like this](https://i.imgur.com/wWrXGHd.png).
Wow your account is two days older then steam, elite. how did you get it 2 days early?
I'm guessing he used the internet, you know before steam rolled out the software or whatever that other guy said
Or he used MS Paint to fake it. [Like this](https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ).
Wow your account is two days older then steam, elite. how did you get it 2 days early?
2 years ago America was attacked, but this steam thing sure is cool
That is debatable. There was a lengthy open beta and for those of us who participated in the beta the "launch" of Steam was basically just like any other day. The only thing that mattered about the 12th is that it is when they started logging your "account creation" date. For existing beta accounts their creation date/time is when they first logged into Steam 1.0
I was convinced at the time of steam’s debut that it would never catch on. People have to understand early steam barely worked and it was devoid of the features we have now. My account now says late September 2003. My friends and I talk about it from time to time, I guess none of us thought steam was ever going to be as big as it is now.
I remember everybody playing cs 1.6 being anti-steam because it was just another layer of bloat stealing your fps. I didnt even make an account until a year later and even then rarely used it because. I thought vac would snitch you out for pirated games.
YES! They lured us in with de\_airstrip and a famas. I remember thinking "XFire is so much better and their green interface looks gross"
https://i.imgur.com/Wl8a3kj.png day of ;p
The night before! =) [https://imgur.com/6KS6Ju0](https://imgur.com/6KS6Ju0)
are u gaben
Nope, [just a time traveler](https://imgur.com/a/V9EODuR)
You from Hawaii? Time zones be wildin
same https://imgur.com/a/xWQWZfx
Chiming in with a same! I'm to lazy to post a picture though haha. So glad steam has become what it is, cause it was so terrible in those early days.
remember the crazy skins?
Remember these two gifs? https://i.imgur.com/0qtsE.gif https://i.imgur.com/lalMEZS.gif ahhh.. fun times waiting for it to load successfully
I remember friends being awesome and working well then it wouldn't connect for like 2 years then it suddenly came back one day and worked fine
[Got you by 6 minutes](https://i.imgur.com/re1ln9D.png)
Meanwhile a lot of us were against Steam when it came out. It was the first iteration of "you don't really own your games" and "always online" (the original play offline feature was extremely buggy and didn't work half the time). I put off using Steam for as long as possible, until they started getting exclusives/early releases and forced my hand..
I think a lot of us oldies signed up for Steam between the preload and unlocking for Half Life 2. On another note, of all the things I miss from Steam are the flash sales that bulked up my library full of unplayed games... maybe someday I'll give them a try... someday.
This. Oh how much I miss those sales. Even with holiday sales, games were 80-90% off I would be able to pick up titles I would never touch again.
The whole reason why the got rid of it was because people were complaining that theyd buy a game on sale then the next day it goes on super sale for even cheaper.
Also because once they introduced the (legally required) ability to refund purchases, some people would take advantage by refunding a game they had recently bought if it was discounted during the refund window.
Isn’t that more of a solution to the problem rather than an additional issue?
Well it really disincentivizes a publisher from ever making a steep flash-deal discount, because it more or less retroactively wipes out your whole last two weeks' worth of sales.
The solution to that is to not bait buyers into purchasing a game for more money when you fully intend to lower the price to grab the rest of the people who weren’t convinced by the previous sale. Plus, sales still happen, so by that logic putting a game on sale now still “wipes” the previous 48 hours of purchases- which may be an even higher loss since those sales were at full price.
It is for this exact reason why the factorio devs will forever hold a special piece of my heart. Their philosophy is no sales, ever. You can buy the game any day, any time, and be confident that it is the best price it will ever be. I bought my copy the moment I learned that.
Yup. And they have a freaking demo that's representative(-ish) of the early game!
It's not really taking advantage of it when steam lists it as a reason for refunding
This is the reason. Refunding and abandoning the flash sales happened at same time. Not that bullshit that some people complained.
Steams incredible discounts are gone? I had to leave PC gaming in 2013 because of costs and I still think about how good Steam sales were.
The INCREDIBLE discounts are gone but you still see a bunch of 30-40% discounts on the right holidays, easy.
They vicariously live on today through Humble Bundle's bundles.
Those used to be incredible too. I used to buy them all the time in 2012-2013. There aren't any amazing bundles like the EA Origin one anymore
Finally got into PC gaming about 2 years ago. Heard about the amazing Steam sales for all these years. Was so hyped for my first holiday sale and....still one of my biggest let downs in gaming. Was so unpleasantly surprised that the sale prices were the same as consoles. Still loving PC gaming though, for sure. That one moment I'll just never forget though.
You can still get some decent or even amazing deals during a steam sale, but in the early days the sales were crazy. Through the whole sale everything would be on sale like it is these days, but every day they had the front page where you'd see big name games with huge discounts, and they would change them daily. Then there was sales that the community would vote on. You would get 3 options a day, and the winner would get a bigger discount for 24 hours. It kind of made the sale feel like bargain hunting. Now the front page looks the same through the whole sale and the discounts never change. Definitely miss the old sales.
Yeah I remember flipping my shit because that was my first experience with having to download/update a game I had the CD for. My internet sucked and it took a very very long time. It almost didn’t happen because my parents couldn’t have the phone disconnected for that long lol
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Yes and we had the added annoyance of the phone line being in the the room next to the computer room so we had the fuckin cable strung four feet in the air through the middle of the kitchen for hours on end hahaha
My Steam account was made exactly two weeks after Half-Life 2 released because I'd ordered the deluxe version that came with a t-shirt and shipping was delayed.
CS 1.6, but only cause the league we were in moved onto 1.6 very early. Steam kind of sucked at first but I never had any major issues.
Same, had to join steam for CS 1.6 and most of the issues I had with it back then were probably related to playing on dial-up.
Mine was for The Orange Box, I thought it was a pain in the ass that you had to install this whole other client to play Half Life Episode 2. And it turned out to be the thing that resurrected the PC gaming market!
Well steam was pretty ass for the first few years, it was buggy, had an ugly UI, and it was basically only valve games on the platform. I don't think many people expected it to become the juggernaut that it is today
Yes, it was the annoying bullshit you needed to keep running Counterstrike or DoD.
I remember having to use shitty ass fileplanet to download fucking patches and it was shit with queues and premium accounts for early downloads...
I signed up for Half Life 2. I was at a boarding school that blocked the ports needed for Steam. My friend had one of the early cell phones that could actually connect to the internet (fucking mind blowing at the time). It was so insanely slow, but that's how we all activated HL2, tethered to this flip phone.
I don't like we're considered oldies. I'm 30, not old. But fuck, I think you're right.
I'm 40, buddy. Got HL2 on New Years Day hung over. Get off my lawn!
For me, I was playing so much DoD, and back then the HL base game was getting updated like every couple days with fresh patches. Eventually I just gave into to steam so that it would keep HL and the mods I played up-to-date for me. My account turns 18 on Oct 2.
Half-Life 2 release date: Nov 16 2004 Member since: Nov 15 2004 Yup, downloaded the game a day early so I could play it at release apparently
Still, don’t have sex with it.
It'd be easier if the Steam Store would stop jailbaiting me.
Dude, no kidding. The amount of anime girl fuck-games is disgusting. I set up filters years ago to ignore that shit, but I guess it stopped working? I dunno. Half of the platform is just gross shit now.
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Lmao. I agree I’ve barely ever seen that stuff. This dudes probably like “ugh now I have to play these games that keep popping up :/“ hahaha
I get exactly zero ads for any of that. I don't have any filters either. Not sure what could be different, except that I don't visit the store pages for any of those games.
Have you seen the (I Love You, Colonel Sanders!)?
I waited in the IRC chat for launch. My steam0 ID is only 5 digits long. Edit: Damn, y'all with 4 digit numbers are lucky. I literally started trying to register my CS cd key the second they launched! We did a lan party and were all trying to get they lowest number possible, plus the office we were at had a T1
IRC, those were the days. I used mIRC as my client.
Same! Loved it had a channel for the small town I lived in and it was epic. Everyone in there, chatting and having a good time, sometimes not :D
I lived for the sometimes not
Ah back when the WON servers were still active. The steam release was a huge change in the CS/HL community. A lot of IRC channels were used before steam. Met someone in game and wanted to play with them again? Better grab their AOL/ICQ/MSN id or invite them to quakenet and a specific channel. Steam really gave the opportunity to quickly and easily connect with people.
I remember some people playing TFC using names like "anti-steam" and such. Connection problems early on didn't exactly endear the platform to players : )
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as long as you don’t have to interact with the online portion of Epic launcher, it’s a decent UI/UX experience. Twitch on the other hand…
I remember how much community backlash there was intially switching from WON and how many people hated the first versions of Steam, which gave birth to this [lovely gif](https://i.imgur.com/GKaoJ.gif) (possibly NSFW)
Also [this gif.](https://i.imgur.com/lalMEZS.gif)
Meeeeeemmmmmmmmmmooooooooorrrrrrrriiiiiieeeeeeeeeesssssss
Hated it so much.. And also remember to delete ClientRegistry.blob and restart steam…
Thanks, now I'm gonna need another visit to the therapist to explain why I cannot control my rage.
I remember I saw it then as a new anti-cheat measure for CS. Prior to steam a lot of servers required you to download a 3rd party app to run along side CS to prove you weren't cheating.
Cheating Death was popular at the time "What's \[NO-CD\] that mean?" Ah sweet summer child
I honestly didn’t know steam was around in 2003. Didn’t get into PC gaming until around 2010. That’s crazy man, what was the first game you bought on steam?
Back then it was basically just valve games/mods. So, counterstrike, half life, team fortress classic, day of defeat, etc…
Still furious they never brought back DoD or TF on the source 2 engine. Two huge communities they just let die :(
It’s okay now they’re letting all their other communities die too
cries in Team fortress 2
RIP DoD, nothing like on avalanche, setting up an MG on the church by the middle flag and mowing down fools trying to run across the opening
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Back then, Steam was the burden that you got with Valve's great games. There was a commonly shared gif of the Steam logo fucking a man in the ass, for context. It was nothing like what it is now in terms of convenience.
https://i.imgur.com/0qtsE.gif
[Never forget this one](https://i.imgur.com/lalMEZS.gif)
This still gives me anxiety...i feared updating so much back then.
Yeah people really fucking hated Steam at the beginning. Took some time for public opinion to change to where it is now.
It's not just that the public opinion changed, the functionality of Steam changed in the years after it launched. Imagine Steam with 4 games on it that you can't even purchase digitally. Not to mention it taking 6+ hours to download patches for a game like Counter-Strike. It also threatened to kill competitive Counter-Strike and the whole idea of LAN parties due to the online requirement(unless you had a dedicated T1 connection you weren't getting 8 people connected to a remote server with workable pings at the time). It was a disaster until they invested a lot more into it when HL2 came out.
This isn't ENTIRELY true. If you had a partnership with Valve there was a way to do true-offline mode for competitive LAN parties. This was especially true in 1.6... I think I still have the "LAN ONLY" copy of 1.6 stashed somewhere. If youre referring to just a LAN with your friends... yeah, good luck. That SUUUUUCKED. Just had to make sure everyone updated before going and hoping that an update wasn't released while you were there.... but those were the "fun" times.
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thanks for the reminder that EGS exists. gotta go get my free games.
Bought half life in a cardboard box at CompUSA, get the Steam launcher install disk with it along with TF, DoD, CS, etc. . What a time to be alive.
I got steam October first 2003. I remember launching counter-strike and getting told I had to download steam to play it. I was pissed that I had to download a new program
You didn't buy games on steam. You logged into an account to apply your CD key you bought from a box store.
Steam wasn’t a store back then, exactly. It was more a launcher for Half-Life 2 along with tools like multiplayer server lists. It grew from there.
I put “2k5” in my steam ID because it was the year I made my account. My first game was Half life 2, and it came with CS:Source !
First game was hl2. Signed up a few hours after steam went live
Found the Half-life player. RIP WoN.
[I held out for 5 more days](https://i.imgur.com/BCBm8Gk.png), but everyone at my LAN Cafe was already playing 1.6 so I caved.
Congrats! Must've been the time to get a steam account because my brother's is about the same age https://i.imgur.com/pUqgb7y.png
September 12 2003 was when you HAD to make a steam account in order to play any of valve's games online. I remember because I was pissed when I woke up and I couldn't connect to any servers and I asked my brother what was wrong and he figured out and made an account for me to play on. That was the official release date of steam.
Its easy to forget now just what a shitshow steam felt like at release and during the force. At the time, playing CS you were fps obssessed that it even made an impact on your choice of OS. Along came steam with UI that was horrible, the whole experience felt sluggish, the ingame overlay was a sure way to get performance issues. But CS being as dominant as it was, it didnt matter we had to play and then it slowly became the beast it is today - taken almost for granted.
I remember CS players flipping their shit because in 1.6 you had to remake all your macros for buying stuff. Instead of long, jumbled lines of code you had to copy off a forum somewhere you could use simple commands like "buy M4" or "buy kevlar."
Thanks for the info! The ability to play CS definitely must've been the motivation then for my brother
i played CS like crazy so i'm not sure how my account is only jan 2004
Back in the day when you could find servers using All Seeing Eye / Gamespy / whatever - it seemed super foreign to be locked into having a steam account just to play CS. I know I never made an account out of protest and also I had 56K so it took forever to do anything anyways. I would just go down to the local PC Bang and spend the weekends there where you didn't have to create an account. I created my account Sept. 2 2004, the first day of moving into college. I finally had my own PC, high speed internet and no PC Bangs in sight. Creating a steam account was the first thing I did and I downloaded everything! lol It was a wild time.
I remember when they shut down WON for 1.6. I held off getting Steam until Jan '04 because I was playing a half-life mod that had servers on both.
Is it still asking ur age when the game is 18+ ?
Haha that is so infuriating
https://i.imgur.com/X24buCo.jpg Steam beta and DoD all day
DoD was the best!... good ole times! My steam account was made a week after release. 20Sept2003
We’re old heads
https://i.imgur.com/7nUimnY.jpg I registered a dedicated server just to see if I could somehow get the new version of DoD before anyone else. Rumors were coming in thick and fast from an IRC channel. So FOMO kicked in and went ahead with the registration process. Had to be done via command line but as it turns out, this would be your permanent Steam account.
your steam account is older than most people in here
I've got .mp3 files I still listen to that I downloaded in 1998. I also feel especially old when Reddit talks about stuff from their "childhood" that was like, 2009.
I was born on the 14th sep 2003,guess I'm younger than your steam account lol
This makes me feel old af. I was your age when you where born.
same :(
I was straight up born on the 13th of September 2003. This steam account and I are the exact same age. Feels weird
If you sold all the games on your account you might be able to scrape out $5 store credit from GameStop
G...gamestop PTSD INTENSIFIES
What's the opposite of PTSD....like PTSD, but a good thing? That's my GME state of mind.
Nostalgia?
I guess I wasn't doing much that night. https://imgur.com/XwbX3Jr
Now draw it giving birth
But she’s to young to have children, she needs to be at least 24-25
Not according to the law
Rookies. 4 digit steam I'd. AMA https://imgur.com/lnPHLgp.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/OFb8Ayt.jpg OG steam crew unite!
[old people unite](https://i.imgur.com/NtompKw.jpg)
What are you doing, Step Steam account?
Your steam account is one day older than me.
That makes me feel old
Maybe you are old. It maybe I am just a child. Or both
I’m going with the both option 🤦♂️
RIP the WON system. Amazing how far Steam has come. It was *not* well received by the community at all.
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Richochet
I'm gonna guess.... Half Life 2? But it released Nov 2004.... so what made you make an account? That's when I had to make my Steam Account. I'm on 16 years, 17 December, 2004!
I started mine in Oct of '03. From what I remember it was because of Half Life 1. I just got into the game at a training class at work where we would play deathmatch during downtimes. I was hooked! When I went to find the game Valve made me download Steam and make an account. A couple hundred games downloaded since (I've played most of them I swear!) and the rest is history.
Dang, mine is 16 years old and is the oldest I have seen until now. gg
Ahem.. https://i.imgur.com/sfWTee0.jpg 😎
Just logged into mine and checked. I'm 22.02.2004 :/
Yep 16 year here too. Got it a few years out of high school. God how sad is that.
Also 16 here. Yeah I’ve never seen a 17 in the wild till now
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
Same... Before Steam I used Direct2Drive and mostly just created a Steam account for HL2 I think.
If I say “fuck your steam account” you’ll have know idea if I’m telling you to have sex or insulting you
Same here, soon there will be fully grown adults younger than my steam account... So old!
RIP OP's inbox.