Steam's Oldest User Accounts Turn 20, Valve Celebrates With Special Digital Badges - IGN
Steam's Oldest User Accounts Turn 20, Valve Celebrates With Special Digital Badges - IGN
The very first Steam user accounts are officially 20-years-old this week, and Valve is celebrating by handing out special digital badges to the oldest members of the community, featuring the storefront's original green aesthetic.
Some of Steam’s oldest user accounts are turning 20-years old this week, and Valve is celebrating the anniversary by handing out special digital badges featuring the original Steam colour scheme to the gaming veterans.
Steam first opened its figurative doors all the way back in September 2003, and has since grown into the largest digital PC gaming storefront in the world, which is actively used by tens of millions of players each day.
“In case anyone's curious about the odd colours, that's the colour scheme for the original Steam UI when it first launched,” commented Redditor Penndrachen, referring to the badge's army green colour scheme, which prompted a mixed reaction from players who remembered the platform's earliest days. “I joined in the first six months,” lamented Affectionate-Memory4. “I feel ancient rn.”
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I remember connecting with WON before steam, nostalgia CS days
Nice. I didn't make a Steam account until it supported Linux back in 2013 or so. So I guess I'll be celebrating 10 years on Steam soon.
Oh man. It is year 20. I think I made my account like 6 days in. I have a 6 digit steam ID.
I remember how much everyone hated steam at first. The WON was fine why ruin it with this stupid steam thing?
Member since 24 July 2004 here. Doesn't feel like 20 years, but it's also hard to imagine having ~5Tb of installed games across multiple launchers just... available. Plus emulators and other resources. Steam was a pain in the arse at first, but they made it work, and they saw beyond the limitations of dialup tech. I was all for it at the time because I had one of the few Coax connections (NTL at the time, later taken over by Virgin Media) which at that point I believe was 10Mbit... Of course, nowadays we have Gigabit FTTP rolling out throughout the UK, so this seems really quaint, but it's pleasing to see how far we've come.
The US coverage still sucks. Sort your shit out guys, you're 20 years behind the UK, and we're a good 10 behind Norway, Hong Kong and others thanks to Twatcher.
11/22/2004 reporting in. Just currently 18 almost 19. I do not have a short steam ID though. Can’t remember which game was the first but pretty sure it was either half-life or HL2
I'm like 3120 or something to sign up. That day was a complete mess as everyone signing up and trying to download their games DDoSed the platform. At that time Steam was just a client to download and play Valve games.
I was younger then and had my own domain thinking I was cool but it is actually shit and uses leet speak. I'm stuck with that forever now as my account name. Sigh.
18 as well.
Damn, 16 here
17 years ago as of August 23rd! Wow.
I'm primarily a console peasant, but my Steam account goes back to 2007. I don't remember the specifics, but I know I opened it after getting a physical copy of The Ship from Target. Never played it much, though.
Damn, getting old. 19 years of service, hitting 20 at the start of February. 😄
Still have 5 more years to go for my 20th.
Still makes me feel old though.
I'm just here to remind people that those guys are active shills that sold out immediately back when all of us principled ones were raging about them forcing always online DRM onto Half Life 2 and actively boycotting it (and still playing a cracked copy anyway, because hey).
And you know what? We were right. Turns out it DID make everything a nightmarish hellscape of big brother-esque remote digital rights control where you never own anything you buy. Those 20 year old veterans ruined it all.
So yeah, they get a badge and I get to go "you maniacs, you blew it up!" and so on.