What was your first Valve game?

[BTGBullseye]

Half-Life 1, my brother's copy. I still remember holding the jewel case. IIRC, it was also the Goldsrc version, cause I remember being able to enter cheats (the only way I could handle playing M rated games as a kid) was a huge pain (for me), cause it wasn't as simple as pressing the tilde button, typing sv_cheats 1, and then god 1. I think you had to modify one of the files back then.

 

Definitely goldsrc, if it was a physical copy. They never made physical copies of HL1 source

They had it on the discs of the HL2 GotY copy, but never on its own.

[Crowbars]

Pirated HL1 (Argentinian Economics are a bitch). I remember being blown away with the first section...Until after 20 min my shitty Notebook overheated and had to restart everything, those where hard times.

[PriestOfJudas]

My first Valve game was the first Half-Life. It was an old computer and I was around 11 years old at the time. I immediately turned off the game and the computer after the first headcrab jumped at me. I finished the game a few years later after that scary experience.

[Alyxx Thorne]

My first Valve game was the first Half-Life. It was an old computer and I was around 11 years old at the time. I immediately turned off the game and the computer after the first headcrab jumped at me. I finished the game a few years later after that scary experience.

My mind was blown when the whole incident happened. Thought I had failed the whole game so I was surprised when it just kept going.

[Blightmare]

My first Valve game was the first Half-Life. It was an old computer and I was around 11 years old at the time. I immediately turned off the game and the computer after the first headcrab jumped at me. I finished the game a few years later after that scary experience.

My mind was blown when the whole incident happened. Thought I had failed the whole game so I was surprised when it just kept going.

Actually that was my first thought the first time I played it. Thought I died so I actually reloaded. -.- I was a rather quick to act child...

[RyanConner360]

Half-Life for PlayStation 2. Still nostalgic for that version's intro theme. (Deathmatch and Decay mode too)

[John]

Half life death match. I got it out of a friends house took it from the magazine so I could play as a cheesy santa clause skin on a single map with my friend for hours at a time.

[longliveprose]

Half-Life 1, when I was 10.

Half-Life for PlayStation 2. Still nostalgic for that version's intro theme. (Deathmatch and Decay mode too)

I loved PlayStation 2 Half-Life, I don't really understand the hate it gets.

[islandfox]

I had the Half-Life Uplink demo that came out in 99; it was on a CD attached to some PC gaming magazine. There were loads of shareware games and demos bundled together on one disc. Do magazines still do that? I used to discover so many games that way.

 

Anyway, I absolutely loved the demo and played it repeatedly, and got the full game soon after. I had a full on nostalgia squeal when Ross brought Uplink into Freeman's Mind, as I'd heard nothing else about it and thought it was some lost gem that only I'd heard of. After seeing it on FM I found out it'd been modded to run on Steam.

[Alyxx Thorne]

I had the Half-Life Uplink demo that came out in 99; it was on a CD attached to some PC gaming magazine. There were loads of shareware games and demos bundled together on one disc. Do magazines still do that? I used to discover so many games that way.

 

Anyway, I absolutely loved the demo and played it repeatedly, and got the full game soon after. I had a full on nostalgia squeal when Ross brought Uplink into Freeman's Mind, as I'd heard nothing else about it and thought it was some lost gem that only I'd heard of. After seeing it on FM I found out it'd been modded to run on Steam.

Yeah, the neat thing about Uplink is that it was basically cut content so it was clever marketing in that none of it actually appeared in the game so anyone that had the demo, basically had more of the full game. Gunman Chronicles did the exact same thing with their demo.

[CARRiON]

I had the Half-Life Uplink demo that came out in 99; it was on a CD attached to some PC gaming magazine. There were loads of shareware games and demos bundled together on one disc. Do magazines still do that? I used to discover so many games that way.

 

Anyway, I absolutely loved the demo and played it repeatedly, and got the full game soon after. I had a full on nostalgia squeal when Ross brought Uplink into Freeman's Mind, as I'd heard nothing else about it and thought it was some lost gem that only I'd heard of. After seeing it on FM I found out it'd been modded to run on Steam.

Yeah, the neat thing about Uplink is that it was basically cut content so it was clever marketing in that none of it actually appeared in the game so anyone that had the demo, basically had more of the full game. Gunman Chronicles did the exact same thing with their demo.

 

When demos were still popular and useful, I know a number of games that did this. Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, Starcraft and Age of Empires all include levels that are not in the full game iirc. It was pretty cool.

 

Also, my first Valve game was Half-Life in '99 or '00. I was young and already a fan of numerous game studios and their games. id, Westwood, Bullfrog, Microsoft (when they made games), Looking Glass (aka Blue Sky), Monolith etc etc... When Valve released Half-Life I was hearing crazy things about it, and once I got my hands on a copy thanks to my father... my life changed.

 

A huge chunk of my time gaming is playing/modding Half-Life, playing the countless mods that spawned from it, and participating in the various communities like HIT and Sven-Coop. I still remember going to Planet Half-Life almost everyday. And while I don't think Half-Life itself is very fun to play nowadays (Though Black Mesa looks like it might fix that for me), I'll always cherish it for giving me so many good memories and getting me through a few rough periods growing up. Definitely one of my all time favorite games right next to DOOM, Dungeon Keeper and Command & Conquer.

 

Quake was a huge step for FPS after Wolf3D and DOOM, and I honestly think HL was the next huge step afterwards, because like Quake it gave us SO much. I was a Counter-Strike junkie for YEARS and I still get the itch to go back to it here and there.

[Luis]

Mine was CS 1.6 NOSTEAM. I was like 10 when I started to play and soon discovered Half-Life after encountering the props in mod servers and wondering what game they came from. I remember I had a 733 MHz Pentium III that could run GoldSrc but could not run Source so my uncle had a Pentium III that ran at 1 GHz and had a 16 mb video card so I installed Half-Life 2 on it (pirated) and took my first sip of Source in like 5 FPS. I went back to my PC and played the heck out of the GldSrc games, even Decay. At that time I didn't know anything about editing config files so it was until 2012 that I built my first PC with a C2D E7500 and a HD5750 and got myself the Valve Complete Pack and experienced all of the valve goodness.

[Remolay]

I'd never heard of Valve until the Orange Box was anounced. My first Valve game was Portal.

 

Oddly, I had heard of Counter Strike, but I didn't know what it was.

[TheManUpstairs]

My first Valve game was Portal 1 and 2.

But I didn't actually play them. I just found out about them from the "Cake is a lie" meme.

 

The first Valve game I actually played was HL1. It was a good game.

[thou]

Portal 2, I got it on the PS3.

[t850terminator]

Half Life Source.

 

FM hooked me into it.

[mrgrtt123]

Left 4 Dead

Team Fortress 2

Counter-Strike 

[Prinny]

Portal 2. Great characters and great puzzles.

[rairii]

HL1, Followed by TF2. I didn't play HL2 until years after because my computer somehow couldn't handle it.

[Im_CIA]

Portal 1. Then Half-Life, but I never got far in it. Why play Half-Life when you can just play Quake II?