6 ms·

Tried it when it was release, then bought it myself in 1999, after I finally had managed to purchase a new PC - can't remember if it was a Nvidia TNT2 or 3dfx V

Tried it when it was release, then bought it myself in 1999, after I finally had managed to purchase a new PC - can't remember if it was a Nvidia TNT2 or 3dfx Voodoo 3 card I bought with it. But it was the first time I could play the game without it being sluggish and looking like crap. We had bought a family PC 4 years earlier, which had cost a fortune - but by 1998/1999 it was woefully outdated. Also, a thought: Imagine purchasing a PC today for $5k, and it being unusable for games in 3-4 years. One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods. The modding community really was something, and kept the game somewhat fresh for years. I also vividly remember downloading all the new iterations of counter-strike, which really took off - until settling on 1.6 On a side not, it's a bit tough to think that all this was 25 years ago now, but I still remember all this quite well - having only been a teenager back then, and in 25 years I'll be this old man. Wonder if all the memories from LAN-parties etc. will be as fresh in 25 years, as they are now.

gonzo41 2y ago
I loved world building with the valve map tools. It was fantastic. Almost as much fun as the game itself.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  Which in turn led to an exploding mod scene, clans, hosting and communities. Truly a world-changing game at a golden moment in game history (beside Unreal). And yes, like a good story book a generation have memories of escaping the crumbling Black Mesa facility chased by alien horrors. Mission accomplished Valve.
- joquarky 2y ago
  Worldcraft was so much fun! At least until "LEAK LEAK LEAK" appeared
  - erikbye 2y ago
    Hah, that reminds me how I started leakfree.org, where Black Mesa got started. That was a long time ago.
lqet 2y ago
> On a side note, it's a bit tough to think that all this was 25 years ago now, but I still remember all this quite well I also remember it like it was yesterday when, after school on a hot summer's day, a friend showed me this "cool new mod" he recently downloaded for Half-Life. It was an early version of Counterstrike. It took him an entire night to download the mod, and it only ran on his machine with a 320x240 resolution. It looked like crap and was basically unplayable. 6 months and a hardware upgrade later, we all played it for hours each day, and often non-stop for 12 hours on LAN parties. I also remember that you could contact the internet provider (Telekom) by mail, and after a few weeks they would activate something called "Fast-Track" for your connection, which would drop the latency from around 110ms to only 35ms, a huge advantage for MP games... it really blows my mind that all of this was 25 years ago. In the early 2000s, CS was arguably better known than the original HL. I had some friends who probably played CS for thousands of hours, but never even touched the original HL.
- time0ut 2y ago
  I was just reminiscing about this with a friend last night. We had tons of free time and games like Counter-Strike were the wild west of creativity. My fondest memory was a Spring afternoon in 2000 after school playing some janky fan made map whose name I don't remember and feeling so happy. Everyone was playing. We played every day. We went to a 300 person LAN party that summer. We formed a 5 man team and competed online. It was so fun cobbling together a computer that could run it. Trying every trick to squeeze a few more FPS out of it. Trying to shave a few milliseconds off my dial up ping. Going to that one guy's house who had broadband internet. It really felt like a golden age back then. My friends and I planned our own mod and started working on it, but our ambition outstripped our ability. That's how we all got our start though. Now we all work as software engineers. About six months ago, I felt nostalgic and started looking into what was up with CS. Amazingly, it is still going and is popular, but seems very focused on competitive play. I wanted to experience that public lobby on a janky fan made map feel. I found a server running custom 'zombie' maps which scratched that itch for a few days. Then I got busy again and haven't touched it since.
  - hypercube33 2y ago
agumonkey 2y ago
The hype was so hot and fast around HL when it came out, that I remember playing it without a dedicated graphics card (I think I was running on a motherboard integrated gpu) in the lowest resolution possible because there was this feeling of "you have to try it".
- rusk 2y ago
  I got by for years on a Pentium 75 and 8mb of RAM. The specs always said the game wouldn’t work, but it did. You could get away with this right up until PC gaming (finally) moved away from DOS. One big issue was the real mode DOS Plug n play drivers (dwcfgmgr.sys - burned into my brain) which occupied just enough of my 640k that most games would fail to start cause they couldn’t claim the whole lot.
  - agumonkey 2y ago
    Specs similar to mine. Not far after that I got a diamond nv3 ..
    - rusk 2y ago
      1MB ATI Radeon all the way baby :)
      - pcdoodle 2y ago
        ATI 3D Rage (1996), 500 nm, 50mhz or so. Had to look it up, didn't know they had 1MB 3D accelerators. I think my first was 8MB and it blew my hair back for sure.
        rusk 2y ago
        It wasn’t a Rage it was a Radeon :) not even a 3D accelerator :) this was the first generation of graphics cards that had hardware acceleration for 2D Was just about time for MDK, Quake, Tomb Raider etc even though it was way outside the official specs for these.
maccard 2y ago
> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods. The modding community really was something, and kept the game somewhat fresh for years. Modding still exists. It’s just called “UGC” now. Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft have thriving and accessible options. GTA has an unbelieveable number of players playing role playing mods of it too.
- doctorwho42 2y ago
  It's not the same though, most FPS' games lock down their code and require you to use their servers. More or less murdering any chance of modding. For example, the same time I played halflife and all the mods (including this mod named counter strike), I played the shit out of battlefield 1942. It's modding community was insane! With total conversion mode that game was like 10 different games. And for a poor teen, that and half life were god sends for getting me into gaming
  - teamonkey 2y ago
    Traditional modding still exists, especially for PC RPGs, where the community is huge. Also UEFN is an extremely powerful tool that sits closer to modding Fortnite than UGC for Roblox, say. The problem is that multiplayer games and any game with a server component - and the engines that make them - are specifically designed to have security against cheating and hacks. No-one wants to play against a modded game. That makes supporting mods, even solo mods, all the more difficult, and it’s harder to make the business case for doing so.
    - Sophira 2y ago
      > No-one wants to play against a modded game. Au contraire. There are plenty of people who would like to play against a modded game. They just might not want to play against a game that's modded differently from their own.
      - teamonkey 2y ago
throwaway519 2y ago
> purchasing a PC today for $5k, and it being unusable for games in 3-4 years. A time when technology changed that fast, too.
- BlaDeKke 2y ago
  Should be changing faster today, it’s just not always visible.
  - crackez 2y ago
    I just replaced my HP z800 from 2008 because it was holding it's own with the addition of a few ssd's and an RX580 GPU over the years. Went from 6c12t Xeon to 16c32t (R9950x) and 7900xt. Performance just hasn't out paced people's needs in the last 15 years the way it used to...
    - BSDobelix 2y ago
      Wait are you me? i shut down my z800 about a year ago (was my mainmachine for about 13 years) i buyd a second cpu for like 10$ after 5 years and upraded the ram to max, i think it was 46gb, also ssd's....and a rx580 which is still in use.
      - crackez 2y ago
        So, what's your replacement machine consist of? I used to use the hardware raid to stripe 2x ssd's to get over 1GB/s from my sata drives. New machine has a pcie5 gen5 m.2 nvme. Stupid fast at 12GB/s. I gotta figure out what to do with the old machine now...
        BSDobelix 2y ago
        >So, what's your replacement machine consist of? Now it's FreeBSD14.1-RELEASE with a AMD Ryzen9 7950x (no 3d) still my old RX580, 64GB 4800 ECC Ram, 2x pci4 2TB nvme one for windows one for FreeBSD (i plan to buy a pci5 later that year), and two HD's 6TB mirrored for backup's and archive-stuff (just accessible from FreeB). >I gotta figure out what to do with the old machine now... It think i will sell/gift it to someone, since i have a ML350p Gen8 server too...but to be honest it hurts a little bit, that was such a good warhorse. BTW: I will probably buy a new GPU if pci5 card's are on the market and affordable and the driver is in FreeBSD...so let's say in a year or more ;)
Spooky23 2y ago
The crazy thing is there are still a few people playing Half Life!
- theshackleford 2y ago
  Maybe it’s because of where I sit on the spectrum but there are a handful of games I’ve not stopped playing since release, and yes despite this, I manage to hold down a career, friendships, family etc. (no kids though to be fair, I give that side of myself to my nieces/nephews) Doom, Duke3d, half life (and mods) and blood. Half life and its expansions get at least a yearly play through in 2D or VR and I play a lot of custom maps. Getting the opportunity to play them all in VR was a huge high for me. To “walk” through those same worlds from a new perspective, it was just something else. I’m aware I’m wasting my limited time on earth etc but…I’m ok with it.
rpicard 2y ago
Nightmare House was a super fun mod that I found at some point. I don’t remember where or how, but it scared the heck out of me.
MrPowerGamerBR 2y ago
> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods. Another game from that time that was also easy to mod was The Sims 1. For a bit of context, EA/Maxis released modding tools BEFORE the game was released, to let players create custom content for the game (like walls and floors) before the game was even released! And installing custom content was also easy, just drag and drop files in folders related to what you downloaded and that's it. Imagine any game nowadays doing that? Most games nowadays don't supporting modding out of the box, but of course, there are exceptions, like Minecraft resource packs/data packs. I don't think Fortnite and Roblox fit the "modding a game" description because you aren't really modding a game, you are creating your own game inside of Fortnite/Roblox! Sometimes you don't want to play a new game inside of your game, you just want to add new mods to enhance your experience or to make it more fun. There isn't a "base game Roblox", and while there is a "base game Fortnite" (Battle Royale... or any of the other game modes like Fortnite Festival or LEGO Fortnite) Epic does not let you create mods for the Battle Royale game. You can create your own Battle Royale map, but you can't create a "the insert season here Battle Royale map & gameplay but with a twist!". Of course, sadly EA/Maxis didn't release all of the modding tools they could (there isn't a official custom object making tool for example, or a official way of editing the behavior of custom objects) but they still released way more modding tools than what current games release. I think that most modern games don't support that easiness of modding because the games themselves are complex, because as an example: The Sims 1 walls are like, just three sprites, so you can generate a wall easily with a bit of programming skill, the skin format is in plain text in a format similar to ".obj", so on and so forth. Lately I've been trying to create my own modding tools for The Sims 1, and it is funny when you are reading a page talking about the technical aspects of the game file formats and the author writes "well this field is used for xyzabc because Don Hopkins said so".
- no_wizard 2y ago
  The official toolkit for modding Baldur’s Gate 3 is extremely extensive. You can make an entirely different game on top of the game if you wanted
  - 2y ago
archagon 2y ago
Modding was amazing back then. I wasn’t a modder myself, but it felt like something new and crazy was happening every week. The excitement for every beta release of Counter-Strike. The buzz around newcomers like Action HL, The Specialists, and PVK. Experiments like Science & Industry that didn’t last long but were a fun romp nonetheless. Endless rounds of TFC and DoD. And there were always populated community servers for any mod you plucked fom Fileplanet. We’ve lost something along the way.
Lonestar1440 2y ago
> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. I'm generally skeptical about the use cases for current-gen AI, but very hopeful that it can help us get back to this golden age of game Modding. I think many people, like me, got lost in all the polygons and shaders soon after Half-Life 1. But if AI tools can make it easier to express Modern game outcomes, the way we could make a funky HL1 mod with the IDEs back then; it could be swing things back.

gonzo41 2y ago

I loved world building with the valve map tools. It was fantastic. Almost as much fun as the game itself.

nonrandomstring 2y ago
Which in turn led to an exploding mod scene, clans, hosting and communities. Truly a world-changing game at a golden moment in game history (beside Unreal). And yes, like a good story book a generation have memories of escaping the crumbling Black Mesa facility chased by alien horrors. Mission accomplished Valve.
joquarky 2y ago
Worldcraft was so much fun! At least until "LEAK LEAK LEAK" appeared
- erikbye 2y ago
  Hah, that reminds me how I started leakfree.org, where Black Mesa got started. That was a long time ago.

lqet 2y ago

> On a side note, it's a bit tough to think that all this was 25 years ago now, but I still remember all this quite well I also remember it like it was yesterday when, after school on a hot summer's day, a friend showed me this "cool new mod" he recently downloaded for Half-Life. It was an early version of Counterstrike. It took him an entire night to download the mod, and it only ran on his machine with a 320x240 resolution. It looked like crap and was basically unplayable. 6 months and a hardware upgrade later, we all played it for hours each day, and often non-stop for 12 hours on LAN parties. I also remember that you could contact the internet provider (Telekom) by mail, and after a few weeks they would activate something called "Fast-Track" for your connection, which would drop the latency from around 110ms to only 35ms, a huge advantage for MP games... it really blows my mind that all of this was 25 years ago. In the early 2000s, CS was arguably better known than the original HL. I had some friends who probably played CS for thousands of hours, but never even touched the original HL.

time0ut 2y ago
I was just reminiscing about this with a friend last night. We had tons of free time and games like Counter-Strike were the wild west of creativity. My fondest memory was a Spring afternoon in 2000 after school playing some janky fan made map whose name I don't remember and feeling so happy. Everyone was playing. We played every day. We went to a 300 person LAN party that summer. We formed a 5 man team and competed online. It was so fun cobbling together a computer that could run it. Trying every trick to squeeze a few more FPS out of it. Trying to shave a few milliseconds off my dial up ping. Going to that one guy's house who had broadband internet. It really felt like a golden age back then. My friends and I planned our own mod and started working on it, but our ambition outstripped our ability. That's how we all got our start though. Now we all work as software engineers. About six months ago, I felt nostalgic and started looking into what was up with CS. Amazingly, it is still going and is popular, but seems very focused on competitive play. I wanted to experience that public lobby on a janky fan made map feel. I found a server running custom 'zombie' maps which scratched that itch for a few days. Then I got busy again and haven't touched it since.
- hypercube33 2y ago

agumonkey 2y ago

The hype was so hot and fast around HL when it came out, that I remember playing it without a dedicated graphics card (I think I was running on a motherboard integrated gpu) in the lowest resolution possible because there was this feeling of "you have to try it".

rusk 2y ago
I got by for years on a Pentium 75 and 8mb of RAM. The specs always said the game wouldn’t work, but it did. You could get away with this right up until PC gaming (finally) moved away from DOS. One big issue was the real mode DOS Plug n play drivers (dwcfgmgr.sys - burned into my brain) which occupied just enough of my 640k that most games would fail to start cause they couldn’t claim the whole lot.
- agumonkey 2y ago
  Specs similar to mine. Not far after that I got a diamond nv3 ..
  - rusk 2y ago
    1MB ATI Radeon all the way baby :)
    - pcdoodle 2y ago
      ATI 3D Rage (1996), 500 nm, 50mhz or so. Had to look it up, didn't know they had 1MB 3D accelerators. I think my first was 8MB and it blew my hair back for sure.
      - rusk 2y ago
        It wasn’t a Rage it was a Radeon :) not even a 3D accelerator :) this was the first generation of graphics cards that had hardware acceleration for 2D Was just about time for MDK, Quake, Tomb Raider etc even though it was way outside the official specs for these.

maccard 2y ago

> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods. The modding community really was something, and kept the game somewhat fresh for years. Modding still exists. It’s just called “UGC” now. Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft have thriving and accessible options. GTA has an unbelieveable number of players playing role playing mods of it too.

doctorwho42 2y ago
It's not the same though, most FPS' games lock down their code and require you to use their servers. More or less murdering any chance of modding. For example, the same time I played halflife and all the mods (including this mod named counter strike), I played the shit out of battlefield 1942. It's modding community was insane! With total conversion mode that game was like 10 different games. And for a poor teen, that and half life were god sends for getting me into gaming
- teamonkey 2y ago
  Traditional modding still exists, especially for PC RPGs, where the community is huge. Also UEFN is an extremely powerful tool that sits closer to modding Fortnite than UGC for Roblox, say. The problem is that multiplayer games and any game with a server component - and the engines that make them - are specifically designed to have security against cheating and hacks. No-one wants to play against a modded game. That makes supporting mods, even solo mods, all the more difficult, and it’s harder to make the business case for doing so.
  - Sophira 2y ago
    > No-one wants to play against a modded game. Au contraire. There are plenty of people who would like to play against a modded game. They just might not want to play against a game that's modded differently from their own.
    - teamonkey 2y ago

throwaway519 2y ago

> purchasing a PC today for $5k, and it being unusable for games in 3-4 years. A time when technology changed that fast, too.

BlaDeKke 2y ago
Should be changing faster today, it’s just not always visible.
- crackez 2y ago
  I just replaced my HP z800 from 2008 because it was holding it's own with the addition of a few ssd's and an RX580 GPU over the years. Went from 6c12t Xeon to 16c32t (R9950x) and 7900xt. Performance just hasn't out paced people's needs in the last 15 years the way it used to...
  - BSDobelix 2y ago
    Wait are you me? i shut down my z800 about a year ago (was my mainmachine for about 13 years) i buyd a second cpu for like 10$ after 5 years and upraded the ram to max, i think it was 46gb, also ssd's....and a rx580 which is still in use.
    - crackez 2y ago
      So, what's your replacement machine consist of? I used to use the hardware raid to stripe 2x ssd's to get over 1GB/s from my sata drives. New machine has a pcie5 gen5 m.2 nvme. Stupid fast at 12GB/s. I gotta figure out what to do with the old machine now...
      - BSDobelix 2y ago
        >So, what's your replacement machine consist of? Now it's FreeBSD14.1-RELEASE with a AMD Ryzen9 7950x (no 3d) still my old RX580, 64GB 4800 ECC Ram, 2x pci4 2TB nvme one for windows one for FreeBSD (i plan to buy a pci5 later that year), and two HD's 6TB mirrored for backup's and archive-stuff (just accessible from FreeB). >I gotta figure out what to do with the old machine now... It think i will sell/gift it to someone, since i have a ML350p Gen8 server too...but to be honest it hurts a little bit, that was such a good warhorse. BTW: I will probably buy a new GPU if pci5 card's are on the market and affordable and the driver is in FreeBSD...so let's say in a year or more ;)

Spooky23 2y ago

The crazy thing is there are still a few people playing Half Life!

theshackleford 2y ago
Maybe it’s because of where I sit on the spectrum but there are a handful of games I’ve not stopped playing since release, and yes despite this, I manage to hold down a career, friendships, family etc. (no kids though to be fair, I give that side of myself to my nieces/nephews) Doom, Duke3d, half life (and mods) and blood. Half life and its expansions get at least a yearly play through in 2D or VR and I play a lot of custom maps. Getting the opportunity to play them all in VR was a huge high for me. To “walk” through those same worlds from a new perspective, it was just something else. I’m aware I’m wasting my limited time on earth etc but…I’m ok with it.

rpicard 2y ago

Nightmare House was a super fun mod that I found at some point. I don’t remember where or how, but it scared the heck out of me.

MrPowerGamerBR 2y ago

> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods. Another game from that time that was also easy to mod was The Sims 1. For a bit of context, EA/Maxis released modding tools BEFORE the game was released, to let players create custom content for the game (like walls and floors) before the game was even released! And installing custom content was also easy, just drag and drop files in folders related to what you downloaded and that's it. Imagine any game nowadays doing that? Most games nowadays don't supporting modding out of the box, but of course, there are exceptions, like Minecraft resource packs/data packs. I don't think Fortnite and Roblox fit the "modding a game" description because you aren't really modding a game, you are creating your own game inside of Fortnite/Roblox! Sometimes you don't want to play a new game inside of your game, you just want to add new mods to enhance your experience or to make it more fun. There isn't a "base game Roblox", and while there is a "base game Fortnite" (Battle Royale... or any of the other game modes like Fortnite Festival or LEGO Fortnite) Epic does not let you create mods for the Battle Royale game. You can create your own Battle Royale map, but you can't create a "the insert season here Battle Royale map & gameplay but with a twist!". Of course, sadly EA/Maxis didn't release all of the modding tools they could (there isn't a official custom object making tool for example, or a official way of editing the behavior of custom objects) but they still released way more modding tools than what current games release. I think that most modern games don't support that easiness of modding because the games themselves are complex, because as an example: The Sims 1 walls are like, just three sprites, so you can generate a wall easily with a bit of programming skill, the skin format is in plain text in a format similar to ".obj", so on and so forth. Lately I've been trying to create my own modding tools for The Sims 1, and it is funny when you are reading a page talking about the technical aspects of the game file formats and the author writes "well this field is used for xyzabc because Don Hopkins said so".

no_wizard 2y ago
The official toolkit for modding Baldur’s Gate 3 is extremely extensive. You can make an entirely different game on top of the game if you wanted
- 2y ago

archagon 2y ago

Modding was amazing back then. I wasn’t a modder myself, but it felt like something new and crazy was happening every week. The excitement for every beta release of Counter-Strike. The buzz around newcomers like Action HL, The Specialists, and PVK. Experiments like Science & Industry that didn’t last long but were a fun romp nonetheless. Endless rounds of TFC and DoD. And there were always populated community servers for any mod you plucked fom Fileplanet. We’ve lost something along the way.

Lonestar1440 2y ago

> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. I'm generally skeptical about the use cases for current-gen AI, but very hopeful that it can help us get back to this golden age of game Modding. I think many people, like me, got lost in all the polygons and shaders soon after Half-Life 1. But if AI tools can make it easier to express Modern game outcomes, the way we could make a funky HL1 mod with the IDEs back then; it could be swing things back.