Im born early 90’s, my first introduction to the Half-Life universe was Half-Life 2. This was maybe 2003-2004? A friend of mine invited a few of us over because his dad had been to England and picked up a gaming magazine.
None of us were fluent in english, but the magazine came with a CD with video clips and trailers from the latest E3. I remember us sitting around his family computer, watching trailer after trailer for random games, but then… Then something else started playing.
It was clips from Half-Life 2. Gordon in a seaside house along the coastline, under assault from several combine barging in. I remember vividly the sound the combine running made, Gordon running upstairs, finding shotgun shells… It was so incredibly intense! I had never experienced anything like it.
Here I am, 30+ years old, and a die hard Half-Life fan.
I’ve been looking for it over the years, but been unable to find it. I’m starting to think it mightve been a disc with different gameplay clips, not necessarily connected to E3.
I vaguely remember some driving down the coast line, then being attacked by those energy/magnet balls, then the house raid.
Still looking 😅
Going by your description it must be early gameplay footage from Half Life 2 Lost Coast, basically a tech demo which has you going up to a light house and includes behind the scenes commentary by Valve programmers that you can activate by clicking on text bubbles at regular intervals. One of the new features showcased was a new graphic feature called HDR, 'High Dynamic Range', a staple in modern games ever since. Here's a link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_2:_Lost_Coast
Do you know if early gameplay included driving and the magnetic balls following you? Played Lost Coast a few times and its not (at least not in current form,) the video I saw back then.
There aren't any driving segments in Lost Coast, but the magnetic balls do make an appearance at the lighthouse. I must admit I haven't seen the video you refer to though so I may be wrong and it's actual (early) HL2 footage and not the Lost Coast level/ techdemo.
Demo cd! Not actually half life, but the first level of Half-Life Uplink.
Remember when game magazines came with CDs that contains a lot of demos? I miss those days
PC Gamer magazine had a game in which you could walk around the office, see everyone's desks, and a few minigames. But in the middle of the room was a big machine that let you play demos of all the games they reviewed that month.
While I was messing around with the game files for the pirated version of CS 1.6 when I was a kid, I somehow stumbled upon it and decided to see what it was actually about. Because the game files were modified to just allow CS to run properly, the game simply wouldn't progress past the section where Barney escorts you out of the tram at the beginning as he never spawned in the game.
Later on, I bought the retail version of HL and that was my proper exposure to this beautiful gem for the first time. Good memories were obviously made with me and my friend sharing the same computer with me controlling and him shooting.
Same! I was about to initiate my first download of my life and i pirated CS 1.6 on the Uptodown site, somehow i was able to install and lauched CS with joy, in the same day i started half life but got stuck at the lab section, days later i saw a video of AssopraFitas about half life and after i was able to complete half life, i love to see how alive half life (hehe) is after all that time.
(Sry for messing up the grammar)
For me when I played pirated CS 1.6, IIRC, I needed open Half-Life and choose change game option. When trying to play HL game wouldn't load neither tutorial nor main game. One day somehow found HL doesn't have maps and I found singleplayer maps.
When I was a kid I liked portal, and started watching "lore theory" stuff which obviously began talking about half life as well, so I started looking more about half life, thinking at first it was pretty much another puzzle game like portal, just in black mesa, but then I watched a walkthrough by bolloxed and really started to learn about it.
I was really interested in playing Portal about 7 years ago and found out it was set in the same universe as a series called Half-Life that ended on some massive cliffhanger back in 2007. I got the Orange Box on the Xbox 360 eventually, played Portal and loved it. I thought to myself, “well this collection has these Half-Life games on it too, may as well play them” and played Half-Life 2 and loved that too.
We bought a new desktop in the late 90s and Gateway at the time was giving package deals for games. Half-life was one of the games that came with it. I got two copies and all have the disks today.
Freaked out 10 year old me when I played it the first time and encountered the zombies
I was playing Counter Strike 1.6 on a cyber cafe, and a friend tells me "hey go to counter strike libraries and open Half Life, let's play some" i didn't understand what it was until i grow up but i can say that i had a really good time in deathmatch, i miss those days and if you are wondering im just 20 years old
last year in summer there were the summer sales and i randomly looked for cheap games and noticed that many games were at 1€, so i added some like portal and l4d to my shopping cart and then i saw half-life.
i didnt know anything about it but something clicked and i randomly decided to add it in the cart
there was something so intriguing about it that i cant explain, after a while i looked for some information about it and discovered that it was in the same universe as portal.
i already knew portal since i was kid but I didnt really know anything else.
the same day i opened it and i was so fucking fascinated about the whole game.
the game itself was so refreshing and i immediately fell in love with it.
it was so fun playing for the first time
(not really since i ragequitted many times from those annoying soldiers and took a me a MONTH)
and the ending left me craving for more.
at some point when i was almost ending hl1 i went to gamestop and bought a gift card and when i returned home i bought hl2 at full price and downloaded immediately.
same day after finishing hl1, I opened hl2 and i was flabbergasted on how fun and good the game was.
(hl2 is my fav game atm and will most likely remain my fav oat, maybe ep2 is better idk i love them both)
after I finished hl2 there were the autumn sales and i decided to buy the expansions and the episodes,
played the expansions and then came back for the episodes.
ep2 is most probably the best game in the whole series for many reasons: it looks really good, the music is also really well fuckin made and in general the game is very fun
but that ending..
when i finished ep2 i started crying realizing that i wont ever experience this type of emotions anymore and that i wont see a proper ending to the series itself
btw sorry for all this yapping and my bad english just wanted to tell my story about how i discovered it lol
I first cared about it when the first game went free, then I put off playing it till the winter sale, when the rest of the games were really cheap and played all the half life games in one long marathon.
I heard about it and got it mixed up with another game called half-dead. I was wanting to get team fortress 2, but because I don’t have a pc, I got the orange box, which came with half life 2. What happened next was me, for the first time in a while, sitting down and playing the game start to the end of ep 2, without stopping to play another game. It was the only thing I did. I was hooked.
somewhere around 2022 I played Portal and saw that Aperture was competing with Black Mesa, then I looked up what that was, that's how found out Half Life and Portal were in the same universe then I watched some lore videos and HL:VRAI and I was HOOKED on Half-Life, its been my favorite game series since (Except for Earthbound)
I was there, 3000 years ago. A friend has just bought it from Fred Meyer and installed it. When I went over to check it out, I was blown away by how immersive and realistic it was. To this day I still love the series and expansion packs. I wish like hell I could see more of the half life universe and hope HL3 is worth the wait
Im a bit younger in the half life crowd probably. My first exposure to the series probably came late 2000's/2010 when my aunt showed me Half Life 1 and 2 on her laptop and let me play them with her. I never beat the game back then obviously, but it stuck around in my head. She also exposed me to steam in general, allowing me to use her account to play some of her games. That's also how I was introduced to portal, however I took off on my own from there. Beat and played both portal games on my own, discovered TF2 and Counter Strike, eventually and made my own steam account and have had it since. I did end up beating both games and played a little bit of Blue Shift (I own all of them, just never got around to playing the expansions through.) I probably would have still discovered steam eventually, but that exposure brough me to valve games much sooner, and I'm glad I got to play tf2 during its "glory days", since I feel bad for the people who discover games late when they're past their prime.
TL;DR my aunt got me into playing half life, which introduced me to steam as well and all the other valve titles.
IRC chat back in 1998. I mowed lawns, got the money I needed to buy the game. Then it would crash on my dad's pc on the train. I could run it at my mom's house though. So on weekends I was like a little Half-Life crackhead.
In 2008 I was bored on a military base. I went to the BX/PX (like an on base Walmart) and was looking around. In the game section I found one of the HL2 games. I picked it up and started playing it on my laptop. It has been my favorite game series since.
I knew about portal for years -> my friend said I would like GLaDOS as a villain -> I got portal -> loved it -> greater valve community -> half life -> learning -> getting the game during the 25th anniversary -> playing it for the first time now -> I'm on surface tension
Played Portal 2 on my 360 when i was little. Around the time I started using Steam I had heard of HL and the Portal games taking place in the same universe, so i ended up buying the whole half life valve collection thing on steam on either my B-day or christmas. Not a fan of most shooters so it did take a while for me to buy it, but Half-life is one of my absolute fav games ever right up there with Mario Galaxy and Minecraft. Valve did a phenominal job with Half-life.
Portal was my first bigger video game. I played it when I was in my late teens already, and it was around 2014.
I loved it, and looking up material about its greater universe of course brought up Half-Life. I even remember being a bit annoyed at how big of a deal Half-Life 2 seemed to be on the internet. I thought a dumb shooter couldn't hold a candle to a puzzle game like Portal, lol.
But curiosity and the wish to understand Portal's world better won, and I played HL1. It was a hot, beautiful summer week but I just sat in front of my Windows 8 laptop and binged through that shit. It was nice.
I think I'd heard about it on and off for years, primarily from the ever present "half life 3 conspiracy" jokes but I didn't fully give the games a shot until this year and fell in love like many here.
Though I did try half life 1 for the first time in February 2022 but ran low on ammo literally 3 rooms away from the final boss and put the game down then forgot about it until this past month.
I probably discovered half life 2 actually by my cousin playing a pirated version and i thought it was the coolest shit i’ve seen up to that point, i actually remember being scared of the beginning part of episode 2 with the zombies in the cave (i was 7 dont blame me) so i have huge nostalgia for source games for that reason but especially episode 2
I wanted to play an M rated game as a wee lad, 10 years old, so my dad, who researches everything, saw that Half life 2 had outstanding reviews and purchased that from gamestop for my first M rated game. Can't remember when I played the first half life tbh.
2004 Albania, a childhood best friend and me are looking at pirated copies of games to rent in a game store. He gets really excited after seeing a new game on the shelf. I don't know much about games, I barely read the title in English, but I trust him.
We run to my father's office after paying roughly $2 for the pirated copy. There he had an expensive beast of a pc, 64mb of ram, pixel shader 2, it was the shit.
We install the game, wait for the long loading screen to pass. G-man's face appeared on screen, a 20 years long obsession started at that exact moment.
I had an installer for counter strike that one friend give me I play a lot and I installed it on the pc of a neighbor, but for some reason it don't create a shortcut so I look into the files and found an exe so I open it an it was half life, imagine my face when I realize that I got another game
It's 2003 and I saw the Half-Life 2 trailer. I knew my computer wasn't gonna be able to run it but I immediately fell in love with the game. So I reckoned if there is a Half-Life 2 then there has to be a 1. I purchased the first game for 6 dollars on ebay and it was a great experience.
It's 2003 and I saw the Half-Life 2 trailer. I knew my computer wasn't gonna be able to run it but I immediately fell in love with the game. So I reckoned if there is a Half-Life 2 then there has to be a 1. I purchased the first game for 6 dollars on ebay and it was a great experience.
heard about it bc of portal and the hl2e2 demo on xbox 360 and then got the orange box from a used bookstore and fell ill shortly after and played the shit out of half life 2 and fell in love
Back around 2002 I went to EB Games after school, was browsing around for a PC game(s) that would hopefully interest me and came across the platinum collection. Ended up getting instantly hooked.
I was bored at the start of the pandemic and wanted to play some new games do I played Portal. I then learned about Half-Life, tried 1, got stuck in a staircase in Office Complex and couldn't figure out how to noclip out of it and switched to Black Mesa
Back when I was a stupid lil kid I kept watching l4d videos with Minecraft mods and that slowly snowballed into me learning about this franchise but never played it, now I got both games and I like them a lot
I watched that [first person shooter](https://youtu.be/VGaTBZ51YDM?si=y2eoFyULpsdslhB2) video I saw Half Life and something about the graphics to it made me fall in love with it.
Uplink demo on a magazine disc.
Knew I wanted HL and just had to save paper round money for it.
Got opposing force and blue shift.
Read everything I could on it all.
Wanted to make my own levels but never did.
Radium site where people uploaded levels was a great resource.
Fond memories of that game.
I was about 9 or 10 in 2003-04, and my cousins played CS 1.5, they gave me a cd with Half-Life Uplink and I loved it, I kind of became fascinated by the game, how real it was, you could break stuff and there were bullet holes in the walls…
I played Half-Life 1 in june 2008 after starting playing CS 1.6, and in my 14 birthday in October that year my dad bought me Half-Life 2, i still remember that morning.
First it was lego stop motion and Gmod videos on Youtube, then I played a pirated version of Half-Life Day One and Uplink as a way to actually try playing it. Eventually I got a copy of the Orange Box for Xbox360 before finally getting a gaming PC and a steam account and the rest is history.
As a kid my dad randomly bought a game called “Orange box” for our ps3 and me and my baby bro just kept constantly playing the hl episodes. It only had hl2 in it though so we never got to play hl1.
Garry's mod when i was in 4th grade, around 2013ish
Had no clue what half-life was so i just assumed stuff like headcrabs were FROM garry's mod. And i saw the eli's lab scene and wondered about a garry's mod story mode that i couldn't find.
Eventually i figured out that half-life 2 existed.
1998. Dad was a big nerd for computers once. God, I miss my childhood. :[
I remember being scared of the game. I thought it was scary. Much like Quake 2 as well.
Game Informer gave HL2 a good score in 2004, but it was a PC exclusive so I didn't really care. Portal memes blew up all over the internet in 2007-2008, and I started watching Garry's Mod videos around 2009. I got The Orange Box for $20 and played HL2 on my garbage $400 Compaq laptop at 15 FPS after installing it over two weeks using my Vietnamese neighbor's unsecured wi-fi. It's been one of my favorite games ever since.
Pirated cd from a friend’s step cousin. Imagine discovering HL2 as a 10 year old when the only fps references were like James Bond, or GTA games which where very polygonal.
I discovered it through an android gaming channel. It showed how to get the game running on an android tablet with the help of Dosbox. I tried it and it didn't work. About a year later the game got properly ported to Android via xash and I was able to play the game. I was in middle school
I was a junior in high school and my friend told me about it at lunch in the cafeteria. I went to the mall that weekend and picked it up. On the way home I felt like a little kid reading the manual.
It feels like my first game even though it was not. It was really the first fun game that I really truly enjoyed on the PC
In 2016 I was bored after replaying the Rat level in C.S 1.6 and decided to mess with its files in my brother's laptop. After opening, executing and even excluding things, I stumbled upon black and orange icon (and its green and blue counterparts) so I decided to open it. Dude, the realization that there was a **WHOLE** other game inside C.S was mind blowing >!for a kid who did not even had internet conection.!<
But because I simply decided to delete some files the game was forever stuck in french. All the voice acting, menu and credits was in french, but it never bothered me and I managed to play, love and mod Half-Life.
My brother borrowed a copy of the orange box for the xbox 360 from his friend around ~2013. He didn't let me play half life or Tf2 because they had swears in them. A few years later when I had my own computer, I bought half life 2. Then like 2 years later, I bought the valve complete bundle.
Saw a little fanmade trailer for the Black Mesa mod, back when you could download it and play it for free.. loved it so much, I wanted more, and played Half-Life 1, Half-Life 1 and its episodes, and eventually re-played Black Mesa a few times over, especially after the Early Access Steam release.
So yea. Black Mesa brought me to Half-Life. no regrets, its a great game.
I was 12 years old. It was back in the fall of 2001. My uncle came for a visit with a couple of burnt CDs containing cracked games. One of them happened to be Half-Life. I knew about Half-Life beforehand but hadn't tried it out yet. I was captivated from the start, totally blown away.
The following Christmas my parents gave me (as requested :P) the Half-Life: Generation bundle (along with Max Payne!) and I got into Opposing Force and Blue Shift as well. These games, Half-Life in particular, have been my favorite, most replayed games ever since.
My dad worked for CNet, which owned and was in the same building as GameSpot at the time. He would bring home extra copies of games from the GameSpot staff, most of which I was too young and stupid to understand, Half-Life was one of them.
I was 9 when he brought Half-Life home. I did fare better than when I was 6 trying to figure out MechWarrior 2, or 8 trying to read a 200 page Jane’s Combat Simulator manual.
Found it from HLVRAI, I was really late with it,only began playing any HL game last year starting with HL2, then I stopped and did a new playthrough as I never finished, then played Black Mesa
I remember a friend of my brothers playing the section with the hidden soldiers in gun departments (just the gun model looking down) and it felt... very memorable watching this part of the game. Maybe 1999?
Sometime later, someone else I knew was playing TFC online, and then I was sold, I needed that game!
I think it was 2013-2014 (I was 6-7 years old). I was already a fan of the Portal series. At one point back then my father gave Half-Life 2 a try. I remember getting slightly startled by an old man on the screen saying "Rise and shine", but it didn't scare me as much as the metrocops did. I remember Barney, the citizens, a crowbar, some sewage pipes, and barnacles. Neither of my parents made it past Route Kanal. Fast-forward to 2022, when I decided to play Garry's Mod, and it didn't take long for me to discover that Garry's Mod was built upon Half-Life 2. A couple months later, I decided to play Half-Life 2 myself. One thing lead to another, and now I've played the entire franchise (including Half-Life: Alyx, and several fangames).
one of the first xbox360 games i got was the orange box, i played half-life 2 on it and after watching a whole bunch of youtube videos about it i went and bought half life for the ps2 since my family pic wasn't good enough to run the game
I found a Half-Life CD in a bin at the back of a charity shop. I then immediately became interested because of the picture of the bullsquids on the back of the case, so I tried it on my computer and was hooked from then on. No kidding! Those places throw out perfectly good things sometimes.
I loved playing CS 1.6 with my dad when i was a kid, he told me that CS was just a mod for another game, the original was called Half Life, but when i first gave it a try i was to scare to continue, so years later i tried again and now it's in my top 3 favorite games of all times
I vaguely knew about it for a year or two but finally played it just last year
I have now played all of the valve half life's
Minus alyx, source, and decay
It was the reversal of it. I had Counter Strike 1.1 (the mod) installed on my grandparents computer, not even 1.6 really. I was messing around with the PC unknowingly stumble upon the OG Half-Life. Can say that I was surprised to discover 2 games instead of 1
I got an Nvidia Shield Portable years ago for Christmas and Half Life 2 was one of two tech demo titles available for it through Nvidia's store page, the other being Portal. Up until that point I had only played TF2 and Minecraft on my craptop, I had never experienced a game with so much story telling so it was an eye opener for me. I ended up buying HL, HL2 and the following episodes on Steam later, Black Mesa years after that, and enjoyed them all thoroughly.
I discovered Half-Life through Portal.
I am (relatively) young, and as a kid, I discovered the Portal games, but through references, perchance I found Half-Life and loved it.
One of my (if not) my favourite franchises of all time.
First time seeing it in some pirated copies of Counter Strike in the Chinese internet (Dcoo). My first legit experience with Half Life was Half Life 2 Deathmatch from the CS:S multiplayer bundle.
PlayStation Magazine Demo Disc 57 did a feature on Half-Life for PS2. As soon as I watched it I knew I had to play this game so I rented it.
From then on, Half-Life is my favorite series of all time. Fun fact, that demo disk contains the PS2 version of the uplink demo!
First, I discovered the Source engine by getting Garry's Mod when I got my first personal laptop which I've always wanted to play when I saw Venturiantale's GMod videos in elementary.
After playing GMod for a while, I realized I need other Source games for some add-ons. So I got Team Fortress 2, which I thought I was never gonna play, & then I played it, & it is now my most played Steam Game.
Then I played Portal 2 (yes I played Portal 2 before Portal 1 srry), & I loved the story in that.
And finally, when I was playing Community 2Fort, one guy told me about Half-Life. I was curious about it & decided to ask more. He said to play Black Mesa first (again, srry) & when I played it, **I WAS HOOKED**
Half-Life is now in my top 10 fandoms of all time.
(Oh, & L4D came later. I love it too)
I watched gmod and sfm videos without knowing the origin of the characters, one day I saw a video about hl and in the thumb there was a gman. I clicked on the video to find out where these characters came from and more about the universe of the franchise. I took advantage when half-life was free and waited for the orange box got a discount and bought it for me and my friends. I currently have all the games except alyx, I finished the first game and I'm almost done with the second
I went to some kind of computer and electronics show at McCormick place in Chicago. I think state of the art at the time was Doom, Duke3D, and Quake.
At this show I saw a bunch of cars, I saw (I think) Zelda on the CD-I, and I saw a demo of Half Life that showed off the scripted scenes and flocking behavior.
It was In 2019 when I first played Sven Co-Op. I was in 8th grade, if I recall correctly. Got Half-Life in 2020 during the steam summer sale. It’s remained one of my favorite games since then.
I got into it from playing Counter Strike Source, then discovered GMod and then eventually Half Life 2. Granted I had NO idea what was going on in HL2 but I did read up on the first Half Life and got caught up with the story. Funny enough I never played the first Half Life game but I did recently buy and beat Black Mesa
Played a half life rp game on Roblox when I was like 11 and didn’t know what it was for but really liked it. I have a drawing I did then including a primitive bullsquid lmao i gotta find it
2008 I was stuck with a GPUless PC.. so started to look for older games that could play on my pc... somehow I already heard about Half-Life 2.. but then also saw a bunch of "Top games" lists.. and 2 titles were always ending up in the top 10.. Deus Ex and Half-Life.. so I started with HL... the funny story doesn't end here... first I was running in the tram like a maniac.. (trained on faster starting shooters :D ) to the extent that i thought it was crap and deleted it LMAO...
but decided to check Half-Life 2 anyways because it was already on my PC.. after immediately liking the grip of the controls.. i stopped... (\~10 minutes in) and went back to Half-Life 1, this time just listening to the announcer and the rest is history...
also that year I played: Deus Ex ; System Shock 2 ; Neuro Hunter ; Soul Reaver 2 ; WarHammer 40kDoW ; so a bunch of classics... was blown away by all of them.. but for me there was something extra special about Half-Life {growing up on Science-Fiction like Sheckley & Asimov there was a similar light humorous yet witty and intelligent vibe about the game..}
Hi there, ProfessorDoge0487! Your account is currently too new or doesn't have enough positive karma to participate in discussions in /r/HalfLife - this is a method of combating spam. If this was done in error, please message the mods. Sorry for the inconvenience!
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/HalfLife) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I discovered Half-Life after playing Portal.
I learned about Portal after playing The Talos Principle.
I learned about the Talos Principle after playing Forever Lost (Glitch Games)
Heard about Forever Lost after playing Telescope Hill and Beyond Time.
Found Telescope Hill after playing Waking Mars.
…and so on…
I was born in 2001 and we were kinda poor growing up. We didn't have the latest game consoles so I played on an old computer and my dad had installed some old shooter games like Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and Half-Life.
I really liked Quake 3 when I was about 5 but I didn't really understand Half-Life yet. It wasn't until I got a bit older (around age 10) when I actually started to enjoy Half-Life. I don't think I ever finished the singleplayer until I was about 13 but I still played it a lot and also played deathmatch a lot.
My brother had installed Counter-Strike 1.6 on a PC we had just bought. I was messing around with it one day when I saw the legendary lambda icon. The rest is history. It became my favorite game so much so I tried to write fanfic about it as well. That's the only game I've ever tried doing such a thing. I used to draw lambda symbols in random places in school.
Played Portal and Gmod first. Realized I needed files from a game called HL2 in order to get my textures in Gmod to work. I had heard of the game before but never gave it much thought. Oh and I also played left4dead and cs prior to actually playing half life 1 or 2.
It's been probably 15 years since I first played half life, but I honestly think it's the best fps of all time.
Step 1: play gmod step 2 : " gmod is a mod of half life 2 " step 3 : watch half life and g mod memes step 4: try to play half life 1 and 2 trough gmod ( failure) step 5: buy the entire half life shit on the 25h birtday step 5 : binge game the entire franchise
Demo CD that I’m fairly sure my dad got in a PC magazine just before release.
We were obsessed, we still are! We often quote lines from the game and talk about the best levels etc. it’s our thing!
2020. Hlvrai. I'd already been a portal and tf2 fan for years by that point and watching gmod videos, but hlvrai made me look into Half-Life and now I'm so obsessed with it that I've been playing everything half life related.
I had heart about Team Fortress 2 and thought it looked cool, so I got the orange box on the 360. it came with HL2 so I played it and enjoyed it. Years later when I got into PC gaming instead, I played HL1
First introduction was half-life blueshift in 2003, my dad had got some dodgy copy from a friend at work.
It was years before I discovered the other games in the series and was amazing that they all took place in the same universe
Maybe around 2003-05, I played with friends in some internet cafe CS 1.6 a lot, at some point I discovered that it's actually a mod to some game Half-Life and I decided to check it out. I found the weapon design and sounds weird at first, not very realistic (pistol goes pew-pew-pew, I still find it a little weird to be honest), but in general I found this game much more fun. Nice range of weapons (laser you can fly with, egon, ROCKETS), and instant respawn after death to play again and not waiting until the round ends (this alone was a breakthrough for me). We never knew about custom servers, plugins etc, it was classic 1.6 so there's that. Later I checked out the single player but I was struggling where to go so I think I never finished it back then. So many years later and I still play half-life, almost daily, I have 4400+ hours in HLDM, and 560+ hours in HL2DM. These days I play HL2DM mostly, but I tend to switch back and forth. I completed single-player lots of times as well, and even HL Alyx (although not a fan of VR at all so I used NoVR mod), waiting patiently for HL3).
For me, I think it was around 2021 and I was just looking at Steam and browsing along the storefront when I saw that Half-life was in my recommended options. I just thought, "If I liked Counter-Strike 1.6, why wouldn't I like this." I also heard good things about it so I decided to get it. Another reason I decided to get it was because it was the Steam summer sale and I had $20 in my pocket. (Quick side note: it was also my first steam summer sale and they were not kidding about having the best deals) I downloaded the game and got stuck for 20 minutes trying to find the suit. Anyway, what followed were frustrations, a couple of glitches here and there, and a couple of mild heart attacks induced by those fucking headcrabs hiding in the vents. Definitely recommending that game to everyone I know despite those things.
I loved portal so I decided to look into Valve titles. I knew about half life's existence but didn't know what it was about. Later I stumbled across the Valve Complete Bundle for like $19 AUD and I downloaded portal and half life. My favourite games are still probably Portal 2 and Half Life 2, with the addition of Hollow Knight and Undertale (including DELTARUNE)
A few years ago. I told my cousin Half Life sounded cool after getting addicted to Team fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead.
There was a massive Half Life Steam Sale and the whole series was like $12. He bought it for me and I immediately beat HL and it's expansions. I didn't beat HL2 until about 4 months ago. All the episodes as well in one giant marathon because the gameplay was so good and i had to see how it ended.
It's one of my favorite game series of all Time. I like it more than the games I grew up with like Halo and Minecraft. Nothing I've played is like it, no other game at all. AIf I explained why this response would be multiple college essays in length. But I don't need to you know why it's so good, ESPECIALLY HL2, and the episodes. Also, MODS are the icing on the greatest and frostiest cake ever made.
HL:A was part of why I got a VR headset. And it's great too, and actual AAA quality VR game that isn't just a sandbox or half finished or looks like ass. And genuine quality experience in VR, hard to come by tbh.
Developer commentary is also my favorite thing Valve ever did. I love learning about design and what better way than not only hearing developers talk about it but also seeing it alongside the dialogue in the game. One of the best game design resources out there.
Man I love Half Life, and Valve, and the Source engine, and the community as well. Best community out there hands down.
Big brother launched the game on our familial Windows 98 PC along with Diablo 2. I was in love with laboratories and scientific stuff I then joined the Sector C team and pressed "that" button...
Found it in the folder of a pirated copy of Counter Strike around 2015. But unfortunately, only Black Mesa inbound was working. Barney didn't want to come open the fucking tram door.
Sometime later, I did pirate manage to pirate it, but I was quivering (see what I did there?) in my pants. I got to the big open sewer section where we first met the bullsquid, and for some weird reason, I did not know where to go. It's almost as if the ladder there was missing because I was in that area but didn't know where to go.
Oh yeah, fun fact: I was born a week and a day after Half-Life 2, so I guess I could consider it my birth game.
Me and my cousing in around 2007 discovered that our CS 1.6 (pirated) had another game with them. It was Half-life. Great memories of us finishing the game, late nights on one CRT monitor. When I played HL2, I was amazed by how immersive it is.
My dad used to play a lot of games back in the day and was also subscribed to a gaming magazine (Computer Bild or something like that), which included a demo disc.
I loved it immediately and also always remembered the Lamarr escaping scene xd
i downloaded gmod when i was like 11 and my dad thought i was playing half life 2 (a mature game!!!!🤯) and explained to me what it is
my interest sparked and with my newfound power i bought half life 2 and played it through with him thinking i was playing gmod
look where that led me
i just saw a video callet 101 facts about half life by a youtuber called 101 facts when the video went to hl2 i got really intrigued so i bought the game very cheeply and started playing... that was back in 2020 and since then ive never gona back and im actually really glad i play it at my age 20 at the time because it made me appriciate it even more the fact that a 16 year old game was made better than most modern titles and yes now i am very much a half life 2 crackhead
Classic 90s/early 2000s story: in 4th grade, a friend handed me over a CD with pirated copys of Half-Life, Counter Strike, Ricochet, Team Fortress & Unreal Tournament.
I'm in love with first person shooters since then. But it took me a second playthrough of Half-Life to fully understand how important this game was. My child brain couldn't comprehend that at first lol
I had an xbox 360 back in the day during it's release and in my country it was very difficult to find xbox games so one day I went to my local game shop hoping to find some games and luckily they had the orange box for really cheap, picked it up and played half life 2 first and just a few weeks ago I completed the first game!
French gaming channel on satellite had the Orange box footage back in 2007.
But I might have discovered it beforehand with Half life deathmatch in the internet cafe. People didn't even know it had single player, all people were flabergasted when I started it.
I got into Portal 2 via my friends recommandation two years ago, and started to get into the lore. There it was mentionned that the story is parallel to the event of Half life, where this mysterious Black Mesa was the center of attention. I thought a few months later thatvI ought to give it a try. Since then I’ve fallen in love with the saga, like with no other game franchise before
PC Gamer Game of the Year awards issue in March 1998. I convinced my parents to use their airline miles to get me a subscription.
Then I needed to have it
I first played Half-Life 2 through Garry's mod roughly in 2021-22 (I didnt have any money to buy it) Got to WDGTR and bought the game. It's so diffrent playing it through GMod.
I discovered it from a YouTube video a long time ago. When I finally got a pc in 2022 for Christmas, I decided to buy it on sale and play it. Great game!
demo disk for PS2 games with the first few levels til maybe the helicopter fight? Then played the PS2 version then the PC version + blueshift and opposing force
'05 here. discovered what it was because of sfm and gmod content on youtube. didn't actually play it until 8th grade cus I got the orange box for the 360
Back when I was a kid, about 8 years old, there was gaming club, close to us. PC, Playstation, that sort of things. And there, on PC, one the favorites in our community was Counter-Strike. I pushed a space in the main menu, by accident, and it went into New Game, that of Half-Life. The game was broken, because I had to go back HL, instead of trying to start a new game from CS (it was a bug, actually, this menu item was supposed to be inaccessible). Half an hour of poking around - and there we are, I am playing Half-Life. Later, once I got my first PC - it was the first game I played and mastered, too to bottom (wasn’t a fan of CS back in the day).
I had an issue of Game Informer that had an accompanying demo disc for various games covered in the magazine. It was a demo for We Don't Go to Ravenholm, and I was absolutely terrified but incredibly intrigued by the gameplay, sfx, and atmosphere.
Team Fortress 2. Used to watch those animations when I was a kid so I got the game but sadly got bored from it. It just wasn't my type of game. So I was curious to try something by VALVe, that is Half-Life.
I had a conversation with a discord friend of mine last year, realised the only games I played were strategy games and I wanted to branch out, he recommended the Half Life Series. I bought the valve pack for $9.00 and Finished Half Life 1 In September last year, and I finished Episode 2 last month.
Want to Get all the achievements for 2 and the episodes and then play some mods.
I have played just about every game by Valve, but I never played Half-Life until 2021 when I was given a Windows XP Desktop tower... All I can say is thank God the Internet Archive is a thing, because I'm not sure I would have ever been able to try it if I just tried to look for the original CD.
About a year later, I copied those files to my 3DS and Oculus Quest 2, and that just made me more determined to beat the game. Hopefully one day I'll get to play hl2 in VR as well...
My dad got it for me, think it was in 2000 because it came with opposing force in a black box Ah the joys of gaming on integrated graphics at 640x480
Im born early 90’s, my first introduction to the Half-Life universe was Half-Life 2. This was maybe 2003-2004? A friend of mine invited a few of us over because his dad had been to England and picked up a gaming magazine. None of us were fluent in english, but the magazine came with a CD with video clips and trailers from the latest E3. I remember us sitting around his family computer, watching trailer after trailer for random games, but then… Then something else started playing. It was clips from Half-Life 2. Gordon in a seaside house along the coastline, under assault from several combine barging in. I remember vividly the sound the combine running made, Gordon running upstairs, finding shotgun shells… It was so incredibly intense! I had never experienced anything like it. Here I am, 30+ years old, and a die hard Half-Life fan.
Do you know if I can find this trailer online somewhere? It sounds cool and I’m curious what it looks like
I’ve been looking for it over the years, but been unable to find it. I’m starting to think it mightve been a disc with different gameplay clips, not necessarily connected to E3. I vaguely remember some driving down the coast line, then being attacked by those energy/magnet balls, then the house raid. Still looking 😅
Going by your description it must be early gameplay footage from Half Life 2 Lost Coast, basically a tech demo which has you going up to a light house and includes behind the scenes commentary by Valve programmers that you can activate by clicking on text bubbles at regular intervals. One of the new features showcased was a new graphic feature called HDR, 'High Dynamic Range', a staple in modern games ever since. Here's a link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_2:_Lost_Coast
Do you know if early gameplay included driving and the magnetic balls following you? Played Lost Coast a few times and its not (at least not in current form,) the video I saw back then.
There aren't any driving segments in Lost Coast, but the magnetic balls do make an appearance at the lighthouse. I must admit I haven't seen the video you refer to though so I may be wrong and it's actual (early) HL2 footage and not the Lost Coast level/ techdemo.
Demo cd! Not actually half life, but the first level of Half-Life Uplink. Remember when game magazines came with CDs that contains a lot of demos? I miss those days
Same here!!! PlayStation Magazine Demo Disc 57!
PC Gamer magazine had a game in which you could walk around the office, see everyone's desks, and a few minigames. But in the middle of the room was a big machine that let you play demos of all the games they reviewed that month.
Me too. It was the Ravenholm level came on a cd.
Ravenholm is Half Life 2, the Uplink demo takes place in Black Mesa during the events of Half Life 1.
While I was messing around with the game files for the pirated version of CS 1.6 when I was a kid, I somehow stumbled upon it and decided to see what it was actually about. Because the game files were modified to just allow CS to run properly, the game simply wouldn't progress past the section where Barney escorts you out of the tram at the beginning as he never spawned in the game. Later on, I bought the retail version of HL and that was my proper exposure to this beautiful gem for the first time. Good memories were obviously made with me and my friend sharing the same computer with me controlling and him shooting.
Same! I was about to initiate my first download of my life and i pirated CS 1.6 on the Uptodown site, somehow i was able to install and lauched CS with joy, in the same day i started half life but got stuck at the lab section, days later i saw a video of AssopraFitas about half life and after i was able to complete half life, i love to see how alive half life (hehe) is after all that time. (Sry for messing up the grammar)
For me when I played pirated CS 1.6, IIRC, I needed open Half-Life and choose change game option. When trying to play HL game wouldn't load neither tutorial nor main game. One day somehow found HL doesn't have maps and I found singleplayer maps.
When I was a kid I liked portal, and started watching "lore theory" stuff which obviously began talking about half life as well, so I started looking more about half life, thinking at first it was pretty much another puzzle game like portal, just in black mesa, but then I watched a walkthrough by bolloxed and really started to learn about it.
Same here, played the half life games fairly recently.
More or less same thing for me, except it was 2 years ago
My friends forced me to go play the original back in 2021. Now I’m more obsessed with it than them
I was really interested in playing Portal about 7 years ago and found out it was set in the same universe as a series called Half-Life that ended on some massive cliffhanger back in 2007. I got the Orange Box on the Xbox 360 eventually, played Portal and loved it. I thought to myself, “well this collection has these Half-Life games on it too, may as well play them” and played Half-Life 2 and loved that too.
Tf2.
My brothers and father were playing lan on our home network, I was too young to play any good but I vividly remember spraying logo's around
I guess probably through the series Gmod Idiot box
We bought a new desktop in the late 90s and Gateway at the time was giving package deals for games. Half-life was one of the games that came with it. I got two copies and all have the disks today. Freaked out 10 year old me when I played it the first time and encountered the zombies
I was playing Counter Strike 1.6 on a cyber cafe, and a friend tells me "hey go to counter strike libraries and open Half Life, let's play some" i didn't understand what it was until i grow up but i can say that i had a really good time in deathmatch, i miss those days and if you are wondering im just 20 years old
last year in summer there were the summer sales and i randomly looked for cheap games and noticed that many games were at 1€, so i added some like portal and l4d to my shopping cart and then i saw half-life. i didnt know anything about it but something clicked and i randomly decided to add it in the cart there was something so intriguing about it that i cant explain, after a while i looked for some information about it and discovered that it was in the same universe as portal. i already knew portal since i was kid but I didnt really know anything else. the same day i opened it and i was so fucking fascinated about the whole game. the game itself was so refreshing and i immediately fell in love with it. it was so fun playing for the first time (not really since i ragequitted many times from those annoying soldiers and took a me a MONTH) and the ending left me craving for more. at some point when i was almost ending hl1 i went to gamestop and bought a gift card and when i returned home i bought hl2 at full price and downloaded immediately. same day after finishing hl1, I opened hl2 and i was flabbergasted on how fun and good the game was. (hl2 is my fav game atm and will most likely remain my fav oat, maybe ep2 is better idk i love them both) after I finished hl2 there were the autumn sales and i decided to buy the expansions and the episodes, played the expansions and then came back for the episodes. ep2 is most probably the best game in the whole series for many reasons: it looks really good, the music is also really well fuckin made and in general the game is very fun but that ending.. when i finished ep2 i started crying realizing that i wont ever experience this type of emotions anymore and that i wont see a proper ending to the series itself btw sorry for all this yapping and my bad english just wanted to tell my story about how i discovered it lol
I find it kinda wholesome how this game captivates old and new players alike. I was fairly late to the party, too, and fell in love with it.
I first cared about it when the first game went free, then I put off playing it till the winter sale, when the rest of the games were really cheap and played all the half life games in one long marathon.
When I got orange box for tf2 and just randomly played it now I love it
I heard about it and got it mixed up with another game called half-dead. I was wanting to get team fortress 2, but because I don’t have a pc, I got the orange box, which came with half life 2. What happened next was me, for the first time in a while, sitting down and playing the game start to the end of ep 2, without stopping to play another game. It was the only thing I did. I was hooked.
somewhere around 2022 I played Portal and saw that Aperture was competing with Black Mesa, then I looked up what that was, that's how found out Half Life and Portal were in the same universe then I watched some lore videos and HL:VRAI and I was HOOKED on Half-Life, its been my favorite game series since (Except for Earthbound)
Half-life decay demo
I was there, 3000 years ago. A friend has just bought it from Fred Meyer and installed it. When I went over to check it out, I was blown away by how immersive and realistic it was. To this day I still love the series and expansion packs. I wish like hell I could see more of the half life universe and hope HL3 is worth the wait
Im a bit younger in the half life crowd probably. My first exposure to the series probably came late 2000's/2010 when my aunt showed me Half Life 1 and 2 on her laptop and let me play them with her. I never beat the game back then obviously, but it stuck around in my head. She also exposed me to steam in general, allowing me to use her account to play some of her games. That's also how I was introduced to portal, however I took off on my own from there. Beat and played both portal games on my own, discovered TF2 and Counter Strike, eventually and made my own steam account and have had it since. I did end up beating both games and played a little bit of Blue Shift (I own all of them, just never got around to playing the expansions through.) I probably would have still discovered steam eventually, but that exposure brough me to valve games much sooner, and I'm glad I got to play tf2 during its "glory days", since I feel bad for the people who discover games late when they're past their prime. TL;DR my aunt got me into playing half life, which introduced me to steam as well and all the other valve titles.
IRC chat back in 1998. I mowed lawns, got the money I needed to buy the game. Then it would crash on my dad's pc on the train. I could run it at my mom's house though. So on weekends I was like a little Half-Life crackhead.
In 2008 I was bored on a military base. I went to the BX/PX (like an on base Walmart) and was looking around. In the game section I found one of the HL2 games. I picked it up and started playing it on my laptop. It has been my favorite game series since.
I knew about portal for years -> my friend said I would like GLaDOS as a villain -> I got portal -> loved it -> greater valve community -> half life -> learning -> getting the game during the 25th anniversary -> playing it for the first time now -> I'm on surface tension
the time it was free two months ago..
Welcome, welcome citizen
Played Portal 2 on my 360 when i was little. Around the time I started using Steam I had heard of HL and the Portal games taking place in the same universe, so i ended up buying the whole half life valve collection thing on steam on either my B-day or christmas. Not a fan of most shooters so it did take a while for me to buy it, but Half-life is one of my absolute fav games ever right up there with Mario Galaxy and Minecraft. Valve did a phenominal job with Half-life.
Skibidi toilet.
Portal was my first bigger video game. I played it when I was in my late teens already, and it was around 2014. I loved it, and looking up material about its greater universe of course brought up Half-Life. I even remember being a bit annoyed at how big of a deal Half-Life 2 seemed to be on the internet. I thought a dumb shooter couldn't hold a candle to a puzzle game like Portal, lol. But curiosity and the wish to understand Portal's world better won, and I played HL1. It was a hot, beautiful summer week but I just sat in front of my Windows 8 laptop and binged through that shit. It was nice.
I got it in the orange box
I watched my dad play Opposing Force and was technically the first one I played.
I think I'd heard about it on and off for years, primarily from the ever present "half life 3 conspiracy" jokes but I didn't fully give the games a shot until this year and fell in love like many here. Though I did try half life 1 for the first time in February 2022 but ran low on ammo literally 3 rooms away from the final boss and put the game down then forgot about it until this past month.
I probably discovered half life 2 actually by my cousin playing a pirated version and i thought it was the coolest shit i’ve seen up to that point, i actually remember being scared of the beginning part of episode 2 with the zombies in the cave (i was 7 dont blame me) so i have huge nostalgia for source games for that reason but especially episode 2
Uplink
I wanted to play an M rated game as a wee lad, 10 years old, so my dad, who researches everything, saw that Half life 2 had outstanding reviews and purchased that from gamestop for my first M rated game. Can't remember when I played the first half life tbh.
Dentist office back when the game was released had a copy of PC gamer, and I saw the article on it. It was the coolest looking game I had ever seen.
In 2008, my cousin gave me a pirated copy of counter strike, that came with half life.
2004 Albania, a childhood best friend and me are looking at pirated copies of games to rent in a game store. He gets really excited after seeing a new game on the shelf. I don't know much about games, I barely read the title in English, but I trust him. We run to my father's office after paying roughly $2 for the pirated copy. There he had an expensive beast of a pc, 64mb of ram, pixel shader 2, it was the shit. We install the game, wait for the long loading screen to pass. G-man's face appeared on screen, a 20 years long obsession started at that exact moment.
I knew about Half Life but never got into it until a friend got me the game in 2022. I’m still really thankful
watched gmod stuff when i was like 8
Quarter-Life: Halfway to Destruction
Pirated copy of gmod in 2010
I had an installer for counter strike that one friend give me I play a lot and I installed it on the pc of a neighbor, but for some reason it don't create a shortcut so I look into the files and found an exe so I open it an it was half life, imagine my face when I realize that I got another game
Read a review in PC Gamer and bought it for my first PC.
Portal
It's 2003 and I saw the Half-Life 2 trailer. I knew my computer wasn't gonna be able to run it but I immediately fell in love with the game. So I reckoned if there is a Half-Life 2 then there has to be a 1. I purchased the first game for 6 dollars on ebay and it was a great experience.
It's 2003 and I saw the Half-Life 2 trailer. I knew my computer wasn't gonna be able to run it but I immediately fell in love with the game. So I reckoned if there is a Half-Life 2 then there has to be a 1. I purchased the first game for 6 dollars on ebay and it was a great experience.
heard about it bc of portal and the hl2e2 demo on xbox 360 and then got the orange box from a used bookstore and fell ill shortly after and played the shit out of half life 2 and fell in love
Orange Box; I think one of my sisters got it to play Portal on 360
Because of crack life mod
Because of crack life mod
played a shit ton of gmod ever since i was a kid, decided "hey i love this game, i should try the original" n i loved them
I think it came from discovering Portal. My sis never played either but told me about both of them and i got interested.
Back around 2002 I went to EB Games after school, was browsing around for a PC game(s) that would hopefully interest me and came across the platinum collection. Ended up getting instantly hooked.
I randomly had half life 2 and played it and loved it
last november when it was free
I was bored at the start of the pandemic and wanted to play some new games do I played Portal. I then learned about Half-Life, tried 1, got stuck in a staircase in Office Complex and couldn't figure out how to noclip out of it and switched to Black Mesa
On cheats on g4tv
Back when I was a stupid lil kid I kept watching l4d videos with Minecraft mods and that slowly snowballed into me learning about this franchise but never played it, now I got both games and I like them a lot
I watched that [first person shooter](https://youtu.be/VGaTBZ51YDM?si=y2eoFyULpsdslhB2) video I saw Half Life and something about the graphics to it made me fall in love with it.
Uplink demo on a magazine disc. Knew I wanted HL and just had to save paper round money for it. Got opposing force and blue shift. Read everything I could on it all. Wanted to make my own levels but never did. Radium site where people uploaded levels was a great resource. Fond memories of that game.
my dad but i don't remeber clearly how
I was about 9 or 10 in 2003-04, and my cousins played CS 1.5, they gave me a cd with Half-Life Uplink and I loved it, I kind of became fascinated by the game, how real it was, you could break stuff and there were bullet holes in the walls… I played Half-Life 1 in june 2008 after starting playing CS 1.6, and in my 14 birthday in October that year my dad bought me Half-Life 2, i still remember that morning.
School friends back in 2001
First it was lego stop motion and Gmod videos on Youtube, then I played a pirated version of Half-Life Day One and Uplink as a way to actually try playing it. Eventually I got a copy of the Orange Box for Xbox360 before finally getting a gaming PC and a steam account and the rest is history.
I was there before HL1 came out, breathlessly watching the development and marketing and eventual release. It was mind blowing.
The Orange Box on Xbox 360 after playing Portal 2 and wanting to play the first one.
As a kid my dad randomly bought a game called “Orange box” for our ps3 and me and my baby bro just kept constantly playing the hl episodes. It only had hl2 in it though so we never got to play hl1.
Maybe like 2013? I was watching some video that was like "cool creepy video game secrets" and it was the zombie screaming
Garry's mod when i was in 4th grade, around 2013ish Had no clue what half-life was so i just assumed stuff like headcrabs were FROM garry's mod. And i saw the eli's lab scene and wondered about a garry's mod story mode that i couldn't find. Eventually i figured out that half-life 2 existed.
1998. Dad was a big nerd for computers once. God, I miss my childhood. :[ I remember being scared of the game. I thought it was scary. Much like Quake 2 as well.
Game Informer gave HL2 a good score in 2004, but it was a PC exclusive so I didn't really care. Portal memes blew up all over the internet in 2007-2008, and I started watching Garry's Mod videos around 2009. I got The Orange Box for $20 and played HL2 on my garbage $400 Compaq laptop at 15 FPS after installing it over two weeks using my Vietnamese neighbor's unsecured wi-fi. It's been one of my favorite games ever since.
Definitely *not* pirating the game on my school computer, I found it to be so good that I actually just bought it on steam to support valve
Pirated cd from a friend’s step cousin. Imagine discovering HL2 as a 10 year old when the only fps references were like James Bond, or GTA games which where very polygonal.
I discovered it through an android gaming channel. It showed how to get the game running on an android tablet with the help of Dosbox. I tried it and it didn't work. About a year later the game got properly ported to Android via xash and I was able to play the game. I was in middle school
I was a junior in high school and my friend told me about it at lunch in the cafeteria. I went to the mall that weekend and picked it up. On the way home I felt like a little kid reading the manual. It feels like my first game even though it was not. It was really the first fun game that I really truly enjoyed on the PC
I played Portal 2 many years ago, and I wanted to see what other games had been made by Valve. I wasn’t disappointed.
In 2016 I was bored after replaying the Rat level in C.S 1.6 and decided to mess with its files in my brother's laptop. After opening, executing and even excluding things, I stumbled upon black and orange icon (and its green and blue counterparts) so I decided to open it. Dude, the realization that there was a **WHOLE** other game inside C.S was mind blowing >!for a kid who did not even had internet conection.!< But because I simply decided to delete some files the game was forever stuck in french. All the voice acting, menu and credits was in french, but it never bothered me and I managed to play, love and mod Half-Life.
My brother borrowed a copy of the orange box for the xbox 360 from his friend around ~2013. He didn't let me play half life or Tf2 because they had swears in them. A few years later when I had my own computer, I bought half life 2. Then like 2 years later, I bought the valve complete bundle.
Saw a little fanmade trailer for the Black Mesa mod, back when you could download it and play it for free.. loved it so much, I wanted more, and played Half-Life 1, Half-Life 1 and its episodes, and eventually re-played Black Mesa a few times over, especially after the Early Access Steam release. So yea. Black Mesa brought me to Half-Life. no regrets, its a great game.
Lifelong railfan, and when I watched AmtrakGuy365’s video called “The Trains of Half Life”, I got interested.
I was 12 years old. It was back in the fall of 2001. My uncle came for a visit with a couple of burnt CDs containing cracked games. One of them happened to be Half-Life. I knew about Half-Life beforehand but hadn't tried it out yet. I was captivated from the start, totally blown away. The following Christmas my parents gave me (as requested :P) the Half-Life: Generation bundle (along with Max Payne!) and I got into Opposing Force and Blue Shift as well. These games, Half-Life in particular, have been my favorite, most replayed games ever since.
My dad worked for CNet, which owned and was in the same building as GameSpot at the time. He would bring home extra copies of games from the GameSpot staff, most of which I was too young and stupid to understand, Half-Life was one of them. I was 9 when he brought Half-Life home. I did fare better than when I was 6 trying to figure out MechWarrior 2, or 8 trying to read a 200 page Jane’s Combat Simulator manual.
Found it from HLVRAI, I was really late with it,only began playing any HL game last year starting with HL2, then I stopped and did a new playthrough as I never finished, then played Black Mesa
I saw the Half Life 2 Linkin Park machinima.
I remember a friend of my brothers playing the section with the hidden soldiers in gun departments (just the gun model looking down) and it felt... very memorable watching this part of the game. Maybe 1999? Sometime later, someone else I knew was playing TFC online, and then I was sold, I needed that game!
I think it was 2013-2014 (I was 6-7 years old). I was already a fan of the Portal series. At one point back then my father gave Half-Life 2 a try. I remember getting slightly startled by an old man on the screen saying "Rise and shine", but it didn't scare me as much as the metrocops did. I remember Barney, the citizens, a crowbar, some sewage pipes, and barnacles. Neither of my parents made it past Route Kanal. Fast-forward to 2022, when I decided to play Garry's Mod, and it didn't take long for me to discover that Garry's Mod was built upon Half-Life 2. A couple months later, I decided to play Half-Life 2 myself. One thing lead to another, and now I've played the entire franchise (including Half-Life: Alyx, and several fangames).
one of the first xbox360 games i got was the orange box, i played half-life 2 on it and after watching a whole bunch of youtube videos about it i went and bought half life for the ps2 since my family pic wasn't good enough to run the game
I found a Half-Life CD in a bin at the back of a charity shop. I then immediately became interested because of the picture of the bullsquids on the back of the case, so I tried it on my computer and was hooked from then on. No kidding! Those places throw out perfectly good things sometimes.
I loved playing CS 1.6 with my dad when i was a kid, he told me that CS was just a mod for another game, the original was called Half Life, but when i first gave it a try i was to scare to continue, so years later i tried again and now it's in my top 3 favorite games of all times
me pop bought it in 1998
Tbh it was browsing YouTube back in the day and finding Freeman's Mind on Machinima. Been obsessed with Half Life ever since
Watching a Brazilian duo of Minecraft Youtubers (TazerCraft) playing HL2 Coop.
I vaguely knew about it for a year or two but finally played it just last year I have now played all of the valve half life's Minus alyx, source, and decay
i discovered half life 2 from gmod. from there, i played half life 1 and fell in love with it
It was the reversal of it. I had Counter Strike 1.1 (the mod) installed on my grandparents computer, not even 1.6 really. I was messing around with the PC unknowingly stumble upon the OG Half-Life. Can say that I was surprised to discover 2 games instead of 1
Lego dimensions > portal > orange box > half life 2 It’s so weird to me that a Lego game is what got me into the fps genre
I was the same age, my Dad was super into tech and was gaming as long as I can remember. Got me my own PC and the rest is history.
I got an Nvidia Shield Portable years ago for Christmas and Half Life 2 was one of two tech demo titles available for it through Nvidia's store page, the other being Portal. Up until that point I had only played TF2 and Minecraft on my craptop, I had never experienced a game with so much story telling so it was an eye opener for me. I ended up buying HL, HL2 and the following episodes on Steam later, Black Mesa years after that, and enjoyed them all thoroughly.
I discovered Half-Life through Portal. I am (relatively) young, and as a kid, I discovered the Portal games, but through references, perchance I found Half-Life and loved it. One of my (if not) my favourite franchises of all time.
I saw gmod gameplay on the Hobo Bros youtube channel, played gmod and portal later on, and then finally got the half-life collection
First time seeing it in some pirated copies of Counter Strike in the Chinese internet (Dcoo). My first legit experience with Half Life was Half Life 2 Deathmatch from the CS:S multiplayer bundle.
My dad used to play it and I'd watch it as a kid. Good times.
PlayStation Magazine Demo Disc 57 did a feature on Half-Life for PS2. As soon as I watched it I knew I had to play this game so I rented it. From then on, Half-Life is my favorite series of all time. Fun fact, that demo disk contains the PS2 version of the uplink demo!
A lore video
dpc lexi whispered cd keys in my ear
First, I discovered the Source engine by getting Garry's Mod when I got my first personal laptop which I've always wanted to play when I saw Venturiantale's GMod videos in elementary. After playing GMod for a while, I realized I need other Source games for some add-ons. So I got Team Fortress 2, which I thought I was never gonna play, & then I played it, & it is now my most played Steam Game. Then I played Portal 2 (yes I played Portal 2 before Portal 1 srry), & I loved the story in that. And finally, when I was playing Community 2Fort, one guy told me about Half-Life. I was curious about it & decided to ask more. He said to play Black Mesa first (again, srry) & when I played it, **I WAS HOOKED** Half-Life is now in my top 10 fandoms of all time. (Oh, & L4D came later. I love it too)
I watched gmod and sfm videos without knowing the origin of the characters, one day I saw a video about hl and in the thumb there was a gman. I clicked on the video to find out where these characters came from and more about the universe of the franchise. I took advantage when half-life was free and waited for the orange box got a discount and bought it for me and my friends. I currently have all the games except alyx, I finished the first game and I'm almost done with the second
I went to some kind of computer and electronics show at McCormick place in Chicago. I think state of the art at the time was Doom, Duke3D, and Quake. At this show I saw a bunch of cars, I saw (I think) Zelda on the CD-I, and I saw a demo of Half Life that showed off the scripted scenes and flocking behavior.
It was In 2019 when I first played Sven Co-Op. I was in 8th grade, if I recall correctly. Got Half-Life in 2020 during the steam summer sale. It’s remained one of my favorite games since then.
I got into it from playing Counter Strike Source, then discovered GMod and then eventually Half Life 2. Granted I had NO idea what was going on in HL2 but I did read up on the first Half Life and got caught up with the story. Funny enough I never played the first Half Life game but I did recently buy and beat Black Mesa
Half life 3 confirmed memes
My friend showed me HL2 around 2013 or so. Very fun
random guy at a place i used to do karate in told me about it☠
Three of us crowded around a PC monitor taking turns: one watching, one on the mouse and one on the keyboard. Combat was usually chaotic.
Played a half life rp game on Roblox when I was like 11 and didn’t know what it was for but really liked it. I have a drawing I did then including a primitive bullsquid lmao i gotta find it
2008 I was stuck with a GPUless PC.. so started to look for older games that could play on my pc... somehow I already heard about Half-Life 2.. but then also saw a bunch of "Top games" lists.. and 2 titles were always ending up in the top 10.. Deus Ex and Half-Life.. so I started with HL... the funny story doesn't end here... first I was running in the tram like a maniac.. (trained on faster starting shooters :D ) to the extent that i thought it was crap and deleted it LMAO... but decided to check Half-Life 2 anyways because it was already on my PC.. after immediately liking the grip of the controls.. i stopped... (\~10 minutes in) and went back to Half-Life 1, this time just listening to the announcer and the rest is history... also that year I played: Deus Ex ; System Shock 2 ; Neuro Hunter ; Soul Reaver 2 ; WarHammer 40kDoW ; so a bunch of classics... was blown away by all of them.. but for me there was something extra special about Half-Life {growing up on Science-Fiction like Sheckley & Asimov there was a similar light humorous yet witty and intelligent vibe about the game..}
[удалено]
Hi there, ProfessorDoge0487! Your account is currently too new or doesn't have enough positive karma to participate in discussions in /r/HalfLife - this is a method of combating spam. If this was done in error, please message the mods. Sorry for the inconvenience! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/HalfLife) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I got gmod in 2019, and I got a valve bundle in 2022 with lots of source and goldsrc games, which got me into half life
I discovered Half-Life after playing Portal. I learned about Portal after playing The Talos Principle. I learned about the Talos Principle after playing Forever Lost (Glitch Games) Heard about Forever Lost after playing Telescope Hill and Beyond Time. Found Telescope Hill after playing Waking Mars. …and so on…
Black mesa was on sale
When I was 7 My dad was like "hey wanna see a cool game?" Almost shat my pants playing it god damn it
I was born in 2001 and we were kinda poor growing up. We didn't have the latest game consoles so I played on an old computer and my dad had installed some old shooter games like Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and Half-Life. I really liked Quake 3 when I was about 5 but I didn't really understand Half-Life yet. It wasn't until I got a bit older (around age 10) when I actually started to enjoy Half-Life. I don't think I ever finished the singleplayer until I was about 13 but I still played it a lot and also played deathmatch a lot.
My first gaming pc 2014, dad gave my some of his old pc game cds and half life was the first game I played.
My brother had installed Counter-Strike 1.6 on a PC we had just bought. I was messing around with it one day when I saw the legendary lambda icon. The rest is history. It became my favorite game so much so I tried to write fanfic about it as well. That's the only game I've ever tried doing such a thing. I used to draw lambda symbols in random places in school.
Played Portal and Gmod first. Realized I needed files from a game called HL2 in order to get my textures in Gmod to work. I had heard of the game before but never gave it much thought. Oh and I also played left4dead and cs prior to actually playing half life 1 or 2. It's been probably 15 years since I first played half life, but I honestly think it's the best fps of all time.
Step 1: play gmod step 2 : " gmod is a mod of half life 2 " step 3 : watch half life and g mod memes step 4: try to play half life 1 and 2 trough gmod ( failure) step 5: buy the entire half life shit on the 25h birtday step 5 : binge game the entire franchise
Half life 2 demo And then I played the orange box on Xbox 360
Demo CD that I’m fairly sure my dad got in a PC magazine just before release. We were obsessed, we still are! We often quote lines from the game and talk about the best levels etc. it’s our thing!
Probably around 2012~ish with the orange box on Xbox 360. Loved all the games ever since.
2020. Hlvrai. I'd already been a portal and tf2 fan for years by that point and watching gmod videos, but hlvrai made me look into Half-Life and now I'm so obsessed with it that I've been playing everything half life related.
I had heart about Team Fortress 2 and thought it looked cool, so I got the orange box on the 360. it came with HL2 so I played it and enjoyed it. Years later when I got into PC gaming instead, I played HL1
First introduction was half-life blueshift in 2003, my dad had got some dodgy copy from a friend at work. It was years before I discovered the other games in the series and was amazing that they all took place in the same universe
Maybe around 2003-05, I played with friends in some internet cafe CS 1.6 a lot, at some point I discovered that it's actually a mod to some game Half-Life and I decided to check it out. I found the weapon design and sounds weird at first, not very realistic (pistol goes pew-pew-pew, I still find it a little weird to be honest), but in general I found this game much more fun. Nice range of weapons (laser you can fly with, egon, ROCKETS), and instant respawn after death to play again and not waiting until the round ends (this alone was a breakthrough for me). We never knew about custom servers, plugins etc, it was classic 1.6 so there's that. Later I checked out the single player but I was struggling where to go so I think I never finished it back then. So many years later and I still play half-life, almost daily, I have 4400+ hours in HLDM, and 560+ hours in HL2DM. These days I play HL2DM mostly, but I tend to switch back and forth. I completed single-player lots of times as well, and even HL Alyx (although not a fan of VR at all so I used NoVR mod), waiting patiently for HL3).
cs 1,1
For me, I think it was around 2021 and I was just looking at Steam and browsing along the storefront when I saw that Half-life was in my recommended options. I just thought, "If I liked Counter-Strike 1.6, why wouldn't I like this." I also heard good things about it so I decided to get it. Another reason I decided to get it was because it was the Steam summer sale and I had $20 in my pocket. (Quick side note: it was also my first steam summer sale and they were not kidding about having the best deals) I downloaded the game and got stuck for 20 minutes trying to find the suit. Anyway, what followed were frustrations, a couple of glitches here and there, and a couple of mild heart attacks induced by those fucking headcrabs hiding in the vents. Definitely recommending that game to everyone I know despite those things.
I loved portal so I decided to look into Valve titles. I knew about half life's existence but didn't know what it was about. Later I stumbled across the Valve Complete Bundle for like $19 AUD and I downloaded portal and half life. My favourite games are still probably Portal 2 and Half Life 2, with the addition of Hollow Knight and Undertale (including DELTARUNE)
Bought Orange Box on Steam for portal, stayed for HL2.
A few years ago. I told my cousin Half Life sounded cool after getting addicted to Team fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead. There was a massive Half Life Steam Sale and the whole series was like $12. He bought it for me and I immediately beat HL and it's expansions. I didn't beat HL2 until about 4 months ago. All the episodes as well in one giant marathon because the gameplay was so good and i had to see how it ended. It's one of my favorite game series of all Time. I like it more than the games I grew up with like Halo and Minecraft. Nothing I've played is like it, no other game at all. AIf I explained why this response would be multiple college essays in length. But I don't need to you know why it's so good, ESPECIALLY HL2, and the episodes. Also, MODS are the icing on the greatest and frostiest cake ever made. HL:A was part of why I got a VR headset. And it's great too, and actual AAA quality VR game that isn't just a sandbox or half finished or looks like ass. And genuine quality experience in VR, hard to come by tbh. Developer commentary is also my favorite thing Valve ever did. I love learning about design and what better way than not only hearing developers talk about it but also seeing it alongside the dialogue in the game. One of the best game design resources out there. Man I love Half Life, and Valve, and the Source engine, and the community as well. Best community out there hands down.
It was like a dollar on sale for all HL games, so I thought why not? Best decision I've made yet.
Big brother launched the game on our familial Windows 98 PC along with Diablo 2. I was in love with laboratories and scientific stuff I then joined the Sector C team and pressed "that" button...
Found hl1 disk in my dads game collection
Me and my dad played half life 2 together then I now own all the games and am finally playing black mesa
Best games for 2gb ram low end pc!
Found it in the folder of a pirated copy of Counter Strike around 2015. But unfortunately, only Black Mesa inbound was working. Barney didn't want to come open the fucking tram door. Sometime later, I did pirate manage to pirate it, but I was quivering (see what I did there?) in my pants. I got to the big open sewer section where we first met the bullsquid, and for some weird reason, I did not know where to go. It's almost as if the ladder there was missing because I was in that area but didn't know where to go. Oh yeah, fun fact: I was born a week and a day after Half-Life 2, so I guess I could consider it my birth game.
Me and my cousing in around 2007 discovered that our CS 1.6 (pirated) had another game with them. It was Half-life. Great memories of us finishing the game, late nights on one CRT monitor. When I played HL2, I was amazed by how immersive it is.
My brothers orange box on the xbox 360
My dad used to play a lot of games back in the day and was also subscribed to a gaming magazine (Computer Bild or something like that), which included a demo disc. I loved it immediately and also always remembered the Lamarr escaping scene xd
i downloaded gmod when i was like 11 and my dad thought i was playing half life 2 (a mature game!!!!🤯) and explained to me what it is my interest sparked and with my newfound power i bought half life 2 and played it through with him thinking i was playing gmod look where that led me
Late 2016. Had spare money from buying TF2 backpack expansion. HL2 on sale. Saw lots of meme about it. Decided, why not?
i just saw a video callet 101 facts about half life by a youtuber called 101 facts when the video went to hl2 i got really intrigued so i bought the game very cheeply and started playing... that was back in 2020 and since then ive never gona back and im actually really glad i play it at my age 20 at the time because it made me appriciate it even more the fact that a 16 year old game was made better than most modern titles and yes now i am very much a half life 2 crackhead
Classic 90s/early 2000s story: in 4th grade, a friend handed me over a CD with pirated copys of Half-Life, Counter Strike, Ricochet, Team Fortress & Unreal Tournament. I'm in love with first person shooters since then. But it took me a second playthrough of Half-Life to fully understand how important this game was. My child brain couldn't comprehend that at first lol
PC gamer magazine, I believe. Half Life was one of the first games that had hype that I remember
I had an xbox 360 back in the day during it's release and in my country it was very difficult to find xbox games so one day I went to my local game shop hoping to find some games and luckily they had the orange box for really cheap, picked it up and played half life 2 first and just a few weeks ago I completed the first game!
French gaming channel on satellite had the Orange box footage back in 2007. But I might have discovered it beforehand with Half life deathmatch in the internet cafe. People didn't even know it had single player, all people were flabergasted when I started it.
I got into Portal 2 via my friends recommandation two years ago, and started to get into the lore. There it was mentionned that the story is parallel to the event of Half life, where this mysterious Black Mesa was the center of attention. I thought a few months later thatvI ought to give it a try. Since then I’ve fallen in love with the saga, like with no other game franchise before
Purely through its notoriety.
PC Gamer Game of the Year awards issue in March 1998. I convinced my parents to use their airline miles to get me a subscription. Then I needed to have it
I first played Half-Life 2 through Garry's mod roughly in 2021-22 (I didnt have any money to buy it) Got to WDGTR and bought the game. It's so diffrent playing it through GMod.
Blues news
I discovered it from a YouTube video a long time ago. When I finally got a pc in 2022 for Christmas, I decided to buy it on sale and play it. Great game!
demo disk for PS2 games with the first few levels til maybe the helicopter fight? Then played the PS2 version then the PC version + blueshift and opposing force
'05 here. discovered what it was because of sfm and gmod content on youtube. didn't actually play it until 8th grade cus I got the orange box for the 360
Back when I was a kid, about 8 years old, there was gaming club, close to us. PC, Playstation, that sort of things. And there, on PC, one the favorites in our community was Counter-Strike. I pushed a space in the main menu, by accident, and it went into New Game, that of Half-Life. The game was broken, because I had to go back HL, instead of trying to start a new game from CS (it was a bug, actually, this menu item was supposed to be inaccessible). Half an hour of poking around - and there we are, I am playing Half-Life. Later, once I got my first PC - it was the first game I played and mastered, too to bottom (wasn’t a fan of CS back in the day).
Youtube videos that I ended up watching a lot of, in turn making me know the entire story before I even played the game
I had an issue of Game Informer that had an accompanying demo disc for various games covered in the magazine. It was a demo for We Don't Go to Ravenholm, and I was absolutely terrified but incredibly intrigued by the gameplay, sfx, and atmosphere.
Team Fortress 2. Used to watch those animations when I was a kid so I got the game but sadly got bored from it. It just wasn't my type of game. So I was curious to try something by VALVe, that is Half-Life.
I had a conversation with a discord friend of mine last year, realised the only games I played were strategy games and I wanted to branch out, he recommended the Half Life Series. I bought the valve pack for $9.00 and Finished Half Life 1 In September last year, and I finished Episode 2 last month. Want to Get all the achievements for 2 and the episodes and then play some mods.
I have played just about every game by Valve, but I never played Half-Life until 2021 when I was given a Windows XP Desktop tower... All I can say is thank God the Internet Archive is a thing, because I'm not sure I would have ever been able to try it if I just tried to look for the original CD. About a year later, I copied those files to my 3DS and Oculus Quest 2, and that just made me more determined to beat the game. Hopefully one day I'll get to play hl2 in VR as well...