Well I mean, you can go and find an old version of the Steam client and Steam installs just fine on XP, but then you have to log in. And guess what? Steam doesn't 'support' Windows XP anymore. Practically all of my Windows XP era games are in my Steam library. And I was young with a disposable income. We all had broadband by then, so could download a game overnight. Games like FEAR, STALKER, absolutely heaps of other games started releasing. Steam got known for crazy sales early on. This is when the ugly face of DRM raised up and made itself known to me. So I got myself an era appropriate beastly Geforce 6800 GT, and got to work. I spent some time thinking for a use case, and retro being a thing now, researched the hardware/software used during it's era, turns out Windows XP was the way to go. Through a friend, an old computer from 2003 falls into my lap. Anyway, I sucked it up when they introduced friends lists, because I could spam memes to friends as I head shot them in-game, and all was well.įast forward to today. I wasn't really interested in Steam at first, I was focused on performance and didn't want it 'hogging all my memory' because I had to keep it open to play. Anyway, amongst other things, on the discs came Counter-Strike: Source, and Steam.

I bought the Gordon box art, in case you were wondering. I bought Half-Life 2 near enough to release day.

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