I sort of haven't "finally" adopted it yet, I may have between 0 and 3 accounts. Though the last couple of years it is seeming "least evil" as others mention, so I may revisit and use more frequently.

Sometime around the HL2 release, there was a promo to get HL1 free, and exclusive HL2 extended demo or something. Anyway, I vaguely remember setting up an account then. But it was on a machine that caught hardware problems, then superceded "temporarily" by another build which by the time I'd used that 2 years, I'd forgotten to transfer anything. May have been linked to an extinct ISP email, so not sure what hopes of reviving that one are.

Then a year or so later I got a bargain bin game that wouldn't install without steam registration, and I forgot I had one or it was too much trouble to bring back, so an account was created for that. Then I stopped using that machine, due to getting too bogged with XP bloat for it's spec, and forgot again to get around to transferring anything much off it.

Then maybe 2010 or so, a year into Win7 I became aware of games being free periodically, so I thought I'd use (another???) account to just collect those as they came up. Did that for two or three months then forgot about it. Maybe have half a dozen games in that one.

Anyway, if any of those are recoverable and not linked to dead emails I might get around to investigating them sometime, and "adopting" steam for the longer haul. Had a couple of games come in that might need registering on it.

My history is weird according to mails.

Bought Counter-Strike: Source in October 2008 and later that month Counter-Strike: Anthology, both in a box at a local online game shop.

Then came Half-Life 2: Orange Box in May 2009. I didn't find the receipt for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which must have been purchased late 2009 or early 2010.

My Steam account was created in October 2009, so whole year later after buying first game needing Steam.

Funny thing about that time, at least where I bought said games, prices were still written in both Slovenian tollars and Euros. Slovenia was submerged to €uropean union on 1st May 2004 and mandatory double price currency listing period was between 1st March 2004 and 30th June 2007 (assuming I found the right info...).

Oh, I think I remembered what was with the delay. I still had the old poor computer with GeForce4 MX 440 until April 2009 when I bought a new computer. But, without a real graphics card, only onboard one! I think the initial plan was to wait for ATI to release D3D11 capable GPU. But apparently didn't wait and bought a Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4890 a month later.

There was another thing, Windows 7 wasn't released yet and I probably spent that time mostly playing Call of Duty 2, which was quite refreshing on new PC, clear picture and normal frame rates. I remember trying out Windows 7 beta later and PunkBuster didn't like it and kicked for "Unknown Windows API Function"!

PunkBuster and CoD2, that was something...I also remember random kicks for "Losing Key Packets"...

Almost certainly Half Life 2.

I never have! But as my posting history shows, games were more of a bridge to 486/Socket 7 hardware for me than the other way around.

Like others, I created a Steam account to be able to play Half-Life 2. I bought the HL2 GOTY Edition from a brick and mortar store and registered my Steam account on June 10th, 2006, some 10 months after GOTY came out and even longer after HL2 first came out.

Then in November 2007, I redeemed some sort of AMD/ATI code to get EP2. I think the code came with the HD2900XT. But Steam also shows that I got EP1 for free so who the heck knows what happened. All I know is that I didn't spend one cent on Steam until 2025, and only because I needed to use depot downloader to download older versions of the games to play on Windows XP, and it required $5 spent on Steam to allow me to download. So I bought CS:S, Portal, and Portal 2 when they went on sale.

I've downloaded a couple of free demos for benchmarking purposes (Shadow of the Tomb Raider Demo, and 3DMark Demo).

And I bought Need For Speed: Heat but I haven't played it yet. I'm too busy playing Underground 2 and Most Wanted 🤣.

GTA V. Still my favorite 3d game of all time.

If I remember correctly it was to activate a copy of Counter Strike: Condition Zero a few months before HL2 came out

Half-Life Platinum Pack on September 15th 2003. Looks like I had a slow start on Steam and didn't really start to expand my library before 2009.

Half-Life. WON had just shut off services for Half-Life in April 2004 and I wanted to continue playing multiplayer. Don't fix what ain't broke so I kept onto WON until then. I've already had given up Counter-Strike years before that point. I've heard about the bad first impressions of Steam's beta and I feel it already been ironed out by April as it didn't nuke my Half-Life folder as rumored.

Also i'm sick of all the fantasizing nostalgia over Steam's military colors that the "y2k aesthetics" internet younguns are into - I used the gray scheme then.

When I bought Team Fortress 2 in December 2008

(I skipped HL2 for some reason. Although I was big fan of first game the sequel passed me by and I only played it for first time recently.)