After struggling to download patches for the game through some weird program called Steam (it’ll never catch on), the community would finally see what Valve had been working on for the past five years. Half-Life 2 had finally lurched from the depths of development hell, overcoming source code leaks and a series of costly delays. Nvidia’s 6800 GPU was the new kid on the block, mechanical drives wept at Doom 3’s crushing 2.2GB storage requirements, and the Pentium 4 was still the go-to CPU.