Half-Life

I enjoyed reading this article.

I picked up a copy of half-life for £10 at a car-boot sale shortly after release. Perhaps the best purchase I ever made at one.

It was actually a legit copy. I'm not sure why they sold it so cheap, perhaps it was someone not realising the gem that they had. I hadn't heard of half-life until I bought it, I didn't keep up with gaming magazines. It wasn't flying off the shelves yet.

I didn't have a PC that could run it very well, I think I averaged single-digit frames per second.

But it still felt like a revelation in gaming.

It completely changed my relationship with PC games. Games before half-life felt so mechanical in comparison. Get the keycard. Get to the portal.

It also nudged me into playing multi-player games. Something I'd never tried to do before. Fast forward a few years and I lost countless hours in the worlds of TFC, DoD, FLF, NS, and of course counter-strike, although it was a very long time before I properly enjoyed CS compared to those other mods, mostly on account of having a PC that couldn't get a smooth frame-rate and trying to game on a dial-up modem.

The wider world of half-life really shaped me. Not the lore, but the ecosystem of fan-sites, IRC channels, mod communities, etc.