In my case, when I was younger, I was watching my uncle play HL1 on his computer, I asked him if I could play, and i've been hooked ever since.
through Garry's Mod, ive seen small parts of it long before, but that is how i started playing it, i intended to make a machinima series based off of hl2 and thats how i found the game
i never made the machinima, and it's been 8 months
One of my dads friends copied it for us. Eventually i bought it and it's expansions.
SMod, as in, that Chinese mod with duke nukem's boot, a thousand wacky weapons, and extreme gore
When I was like 9 or 10 or something, we were playing Counter-Strike 2.5D with my friend and he said "There's a zombie version of this which is called Half-Life!" and that's where I probably first heard it. Got to play it multiplayer in several internet cafes with friends probably between 2004-2007.
I think the time when I properly had the chance to play the campaign was when I bought Half-Life 1 anthology.
Glanced over a copy of the PS2 version (HL1) back in Blockbuster around 2005 or so
hl.exe on the counter-strike folder
My mom worked at a book store, there was an unsold Half-Life 2 Collector's Edition poking my eyes out for about a year and a half. My mom gave it to me for my birthday!
My dad was into PC gaming in the 90s, and my brother got a hand me down computer from him at some point in 1999/2000. I am 4 years his junior, so one day when I took a day off school, I decided to play around on his computer. I played The Sims, and a bit of Xen in Half Life. It was probably the first time I played a PC FPS, and it got me hooked, but I didn't finish the game myself all the way through for another couple of years until I was old enough (8-9) to properly make use of a mouse and keyboard.
I started playing HLDM and CS 1.6/CZ in 2003/4. Joined my first "clan" group at the age of around 11.
back in 2008 along with TF2, thanks to youtube and Garry's Mod. back when I found machinima with The Movies and when I was playing Nintendo games on the Wii.
That discovery changed my view on games dude, I dev games and know how games work thanks to this brit over here
There was a show called Cinematech on G4 that would show game clips. I was around 7 years old when I was watching it and I saw footage of HL1 during the Black Mesa incident and HL2 in Ravenholm. Eventually my Dad got HL2 and let me play through it, been a fan ever since.
Dad got me the demo of Opposing Force when I was about 5 or 6, afterwards I was pretty much hooked. Got Blue Shift before getting HL:GOTY. Then I found a half-life mods disc with a magazine in some dumpster behind CVS. I don't remember when I got Gunman Chronicles, but I was amazed even back then that there was a retail copy.
[editline]18th September 2017[/editline]
I'm still not sure though if the first game I ever played was Doom shareware or OpFor Demo.
It was from one of those thin booklets that advertised the Orange Box, and I found Gordon Freeman and the name Half-Life 2 to be really interesting. I begged my dad to buy it for the 360, and when I first loaded it up I was hooked onto it, though it did challenge me at some points.
Picked up the Orange Box for PS3 because I heard it was good, and it was.
PS3 version was shit, so it goes to show how good Half Life 2 was.
A friend got HL1 as a birthday gift (this was sometime around the beginning of 2001). At that birthday party we ended up playing it on his dad's PC for something like 5 hours continually. Needless to say after that little taste I was hooked. Begged my parents for like a year and a half and eventually they broke down and got it for me (I was like 12 at the time and they were big on ESRB ratings so it was a bit of an "issue"). Once I finished my first playthrough of the Singleplayer I wanted more. I discovered these amazing things called "mods" and never really looked back.
Come 2004 I bought HL2 on release with my own money and have bought every Half-Life release day one since then.
Through Half-Life: Uplink which was included with the CD-Action magazine.
First time i saw half-life was on a friends pc, i later got it myself for the PS2 one birthday.
Man, playing decay co-op was so much fun back in the day.
Not to mention the cheat code that let you play as a vortigaunt, that blew my mind as a kid.
I was around 9 or 10 and I saw the Run Think Shoot Live ad in my copy of Computer Gaming World. I wanted to get Quake II instead though, luckily my dad talked me out of it.
Through downloading and playing Half-Life: Uplink as a kid. I don't remember where I found it though :/
Had my fair share of fun with that destructible vending machine and those explosive canisters in the T-part of the post-elevator hallways in the second map though!
My dad bought a new 3DFX voodoo card in the late 90's and the Half-life Day One demo disk came with it. I still remember when i first got to anomalous materials and when the NPCs talked their mouths moved. I was completely blown away. I used to play as a zombie in multiplayer back then because I thought they looked really cool. I still prefer the low poly skull pressing against the headcrab zombies to the HD pack ones or even the HL2 ones.
My cousin was playing Gmod9 one day when I went over his house, played it with him for a few hours and got hooked. Mom bought me Half-Life 2 shortly after so I could play with him. Popped the disk in, made a steam account and regret nothing.
One of them old-school demo CDs. Bought a copy not long after that. Got Half-Life 2 not long after it was released, and I had a PC vaguely capable of playing it.
I got shown Counter-Strike in 2005 I think and played a bit of that, then checked out Half-Life.
When my brother bought our first computer and bought with it half life 1.
I remember watching him play it at night for weeks. that was also the day I was introduced to PC gaming.
Garry's Mod. Before Gmod I only ever played arcade driving games and wasnt much of a gamer in the first place, but then I grabbed Gmod and noticed all these odd maps in there. Played them...oh hey, HL2.
My mom was the one who picked it up for my dad when it first came out. Said she read it in some magazines and sure enough, greatest game my dad and I have ever played. I was 6 when it came out.
My dad still plays both Half-Life and Black Mesa to this day.
played it with my cousin on the ps2, he was too scared to play it by himself so I had to take the controls
we also played decay a lot but he ended up killing dr rosenberg whenever we had the chance. thanks
Around 2005, my mom and I lost home so we stayed at her friend's place for few months. He had computer with few games on it like Mafia and cracked verdion of Half-Life 2.
Mafia became for me what GTA was for others (driving everyone over and then shooting them for good luck).
HL2 was a weird one. I got to the point where you fight Manhacks, got scared and turned it off. I was around 11 at the time. But I didn't stop playing it. I replayed it many times but always stopped before encountering Manhacks. After some time when we finally got our own place again and our own computer with those games, I finally maned up and pushed through all the way to Black Mesa East. Then the same thing happened with Ravenholm for few months :v:
Maned up again, pushed through and finished the game. Problem was, I barely understood anything back then and didn't know how to download Czech subtitles. So instead I wrote down everything I wasn't sure about and asked my English home teacher about it. And like that, HL2 slowly but surely taught me English and more importantly got me interested in it.
Few years down the line I learned to use the internet and found out there are more HL games and finally got around playing those as well.
So yah, HL2 literally shaped my life how it is today :v:
Got into gaming because of my aunts husband who gave me some random discs which included "Half-life : Generation", that had Half-life GOTY, Half-Life : Opposing Force and Counter Strike : Ultimate Edition.
I really liked the how the game worked, and it was also one of the few games that i could run on my moms old work pc.
When my dad bought first computer, my older cousin gave us pirated HL2 to install - that was first my own PC game ever. Me and father were playing it together at first, giving each other hints and switching places if we got stuck. I remember everything being so alien, yet so familiar (because i live in eastern europe). We could stop for a minute and discuss purpose of some buildings or landscape in general. Ravenholm scared the crap out of us back then. Funny, since i didn't had any exposure to HL before, i didn't got that it was headcrabs at zombies' heads at first and thought it was some sort of tumor, which made it even scarier for some reason.
Then i moved to mother's house and tried to install game there, but the laptop was worse than what you call potato, so well, it didn't run. Then i tried to download pirated HL to install it there. I ended up finding old WON version. I didn't even know what resolution settings is back then, so when i played it there my screen was cut and i couldn't see HUD, but it was amazing nevertheless. I had a blast with it, and was pleasantly surprised that it's more like HL2 instead of Quake clone which i thought of it initially.
Now, many years after i own all of the games in HL series and very much enjoy completing them again from time to time.
Half-Life pretty much defined me as a gamer, and became ethalon experience to which i compare everything else.
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