Played the demo of Half-Life back in the late 1990's when the game was originally released. It came in a cover CD-ROM of some PC gaming magazine.
I had tried Doom, Quake, Unreal and Duke Nukem 3D, but Half-Life felt it had something new, something that combined all those previous first person shooter games in it's own unique way.
Little bit later a friend got the full game (this was before Steam existed so it was a Sierra entertainment release). We were so impressed about the graphics, animation and general pacing of the game that we got instantly glued in front of the CRT monitor. It was probably the first game I played where the story and cutscenes are seamlessly integrated to the gameplay using only the game engine; it was revolutionary!
The game felt so fresh and interesting that we played it many hours to the midnight and continued the next day and the next, probably playing the game almost non-stop over the week, only stopping while going to school or sleeping. That was back in 1998 and we were teenagers..
Soon I discovered all the cool single player mods (They Hunger was my fave) and the famous team based online mod called "Counter Strike". I was never good at original CS but it was fun; Those were the days...
Way later I also played the PlayStation 2 version of HL and that was it's own experience with all of it's enchantments for graphics and gamepad support that later found their way to the Steam version.

It's really great that Valve still shows love for the game that made them famous. The 25th Anniversary Edition update with restored old-school look and full Steam Deck compatibility is truly the definitive edition of HL1.

I still play Half-Life and it's mods and I can recommend it to everyone who likes story based FPS games.

This game is one of those timeless classics everybody should try.
Half-Life is important part of gaming history.


My Steam game time may not look like a lot, but I have the original (pre-Steam) physical versions of HL for PC and PS2 so I have basically played Half-Life most of my life :D