Steam Turns 18 YO Today - Rolled Out: Sept. 12 2003

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
Staff member
Joined
May 18, 1997
Messages
54,427
Who's got the oldest Steam account here?

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I'll check when I get home. Don't know if I was a 'Charter Member', but it's got to be close.
Insert gratuitous 'HL3 Confirmed?' joke here.
edit: Not nearly as old as I thought. Guess I'm a loser :(
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I'm a 17 year account holder as well. I know I had an earlier account but I forgot the password/username so I had to make a new one.
 
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Bit of a holdout. I liked my games on disc, and it looks like COD:MW2 needing me to register on Steam got me my account.
 
Wow, I thought it was longer than that. I'll have to check my account when I get home. I know I avoided Steam since I kept thinking what if they go belly up...how do I get my games then. Eventually I caved for multiplayer.
 
Ditto.

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I was a little late to the party, not downloading Steam right away.

I ran a few high profile Counter-Strike servers back then, but preferred the old WON method of authentication.

I don't remember actually creating a Steam account until I pre-ordered the Half-Life 2 / Counter-Strike: Source bundle.

Doesn't seem to have impacted my account age much though.
 
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I hated it when they turned-off Won.net (as someone else created a duplicate of my HL1 cdkey, and registered it with Steam first). And they would charge you 10 bucks to correct this shit, plus mail it into Valve (not worth it, given how little I played CS 1.6 in 2003)

I waited until HL2 + CS Source launched before I bothered with Steam (so Nov 2004 is my born-on date)
 
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I ended up creating an account in order to get certain add-ons for the original Half-Life disks. I don't recall the details, but I remember being annoyed by it at the time.
That email ended up going kaput and so I created a new account back in March of 2004.
 
Dec 6th 2003

i thought I was ealier because I was in the testing thing before the live launch...

I just recall me roommates and I trying to play Day of Defeat and absolutely hating Steam so bad because it made the games nearly impossible to play when it first launched with terrible load times and it murdered our pings.
 
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I don't remember what game got me to create an account. Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is the first game I recall playing on Steam, but that came out a few months after I created an account.
 
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Seems so long ago. Pretty sure I will have the half-life 2 box and disks around somewhere.
 
Member since December 23, 2004.

From Half Life 2. I played the demo for a while on Steam if I recall.
 
Mine is 16 in 2 days. Sept 15, 2005

I wanna say it was HL2 but that was released a year before... I also recall resisting installing it as long as I could until something eventually required it
 
December 2005 I bought Half-Life 2 retail from someone.. they ended up giving me their whole steam account... and that's how I got steam.
 
FrgMstr said:
Yeah, I had an account before this one too, don't remember the name. Had something to do with HardOCP and the CS servers we were running..
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It was somewhere around version CS 1.3 where Steam became a requirement for Counter-Strike. There were a lot of people that refused to use Steam and continued to play the old versions.

CS and Half-Life 2 requiring it got a lot of people using Steam.

No one wanted to use Steam before that because it was inconvenient and kind of just sucked. Instead of simply clicking an icon and launching your games, you had to open up steam and then launch your game. Instead of simply joining a server from within Counter-Strike you had to go to do it through the Steam interface.
It was buggy. It would tab you out when there were notifications and mess up your game.
You were forced to download steam updates then download game updates. Which was a big problem back then because internet speeds were slower and a lot of people were still on dial-up. If you bought a game on Steam the download time was an actual problem for people.
It didn't have nearly as many features as it does now and the features it did have sucked and were done better by other programs.

I didn't know anyone that actually liked Steam when it was new. They used it because it was the only way to play the games they wanted to.
 
I had an account back in 2003 to play CS 1.6, but I dumped it and created a new one when HL2 came out. Been using it ever since. I don't even remember what the original account was anymore. Probably something even more cringey and edgy than that profile pic I haven't changed since going through my LaVey Satanism phase.

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FrgMstr said:
Yeah, I had an account before this one too, don't remember the name. Had something to do with HardOCP and the CS servers we were running..
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Still playing Hunt? Just about the only game I make time to play anymore other then trying to finish Witcher 3 lol.
 
sharknice said:
It was somewhere around version CS 1.3 where Steam became a requirement for Counter-Strike. There were a lot of people that refused to use Steam and continued to play the old versions.

CS and Half-Life 2 requiring it got a lot of people using Steam.

No one wanted to use Steam before that because it was inconvenient and kind of just sucked. Instead of simply clicking an icon and launching your games, you had to open up steam and then launch your game. Instead of simply joining a server from within Counter-Strike you had to go to do it through the Steam interface.
It was buggy. It would tab you out when there were notifications and mess up your game.
You were forced to download steam updates then download game updates. Which was a big problem back then because internet speeds were slower and a lot of people were still on dial-up. If you bought a game on Steam the download time was an actual problem for people.
It didn't have nearly as many features as it does now and the features it did have sucked and were done better by other programs.

I didn't know anyone that actually liked Steam when it was new. They used it because it was the only way to play the games they wanted to.
Click to expand...
Steam wasn't released until 2 years after CS 1.3 came out. 1.6 was the first version that required Steam, which came out in June 2003. The community was definitely split, but the majority of players were still playing 1.3 or 1.5.
 
I'll have my 18 year badge here in ~4 months. CS 1.6 is what forced me to download it after quite a long time of 1.4(at least, I was really young) and 1.5.
 
Joined December 11, 2004. I know I had the Orange Box and installed those games direct from DVD several times. Held off from joining for awhile.
 
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