My Steam account is old enough to drink in the US. Twenty-one years. I am writing this wearing the Half-Life t-shirt that started the whole thing, which feels about right.
It began with a crowbar and a research facility coming apart around me. Half-Life was the first game that truly had me, but looking back, the single-player was never the part that kept me. It was everything that came after.
It was the people. Somewhere along the way the platform stopped being about games and started being about friends, scattered all over the country, who I only ever met because we happened to load into the same server. Clan nights on an old WWII tactical shooter, first the original and then the shinier remake, voice comms crackling, the same in-jokes night after night. Half of growing up online, really.
And then I started making things. Learning to build maps, hunched over the editor far too late, compiling and quietly praying the thing would actually run. Watching people play on something you built with your own hands is a particular kind of magic, and it has never really worn off.
Twenty-one years on, I am still here. Still installing games I do not have time for, still chasing that same itch, still wearing the shirt. Different titles, same feeling. Here is to the next twenty.