- Joined
- May 18, 1997
- Messages
- 54,427
Who's got the oldest Steam account here?

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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..
Still playing Hunt? Just about the only game I make time to play anymore other then trying to finish Witcher 3 lol.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..
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.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.