[phoboslab]

I still remember the day HL2 leaked. All of my friends and I were in IRC trying to download the damn thing from DCC bots.

I was lucky and got a slot that provided the full 80kbyte/s. I finished the download first, but my PC was pretty old back then so I didn't even bother trying to run it. Instead, I removed my hard drive (my system drive!), picked up a friend and we drove to another friend who had the fastest PC at the time. About 30 mins later all of us (I believe 5 or 6 guys) gathered in a tiny dorm and just stood in awe as we booted up HL2.

There was barely any gameplay present. You could just walk around in some maps and admire the graphics. It didn't matter. If we hadn't been stoked before, we were now.

In hindsight, this all was just an amazing PR stunt. Fun times.

[josefresco]

Your account brings back gaming memories from the late 90's and early 00's. "Leaks" and pirated copies of games ruled the day, and only served to make us all even bigger fans/obsessed gamers. The idea that you were using/seeing something that hadn't been released yet was thrilling and made us all even more dedicated to gaming. Of course then we were all poor college/HS kids, but most of us eventually got jobs and turned into Steam customers.