So. 1 TB drives indeed were out before Half-Life 3.
But I'm nostalgic over a simpler time when 1 GB for a game was a lot.
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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Lol.
I've now got Steam games spread across 5 hard drives. One of which is a 5tb old school disk drive for the games I have A LOT of user made content for. I've gotta be in the terrabytes range at this point.
Not many people these days understand that Steam used to suck bad.
I have heard that people used to be super PISSED that steam is required for valve games. I guess it makes sense now considering hdd sizes back then.
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Lol those were the days. I remember Simcity 4 releasing back then and how quickly my mod folder blue up. Then by the time that game was old it was only 2.15gb and that was nothing. The jump from >10gb to 50gb games was insane. Now the jump to 100+ Gb hurts a lot. Any time a game is iN MB I do a little happy dance.
how quickly my mod folder blue up
Mine was green.
I remember clearing drive space on my first computer once, I went off of install size and anything other than a couple of key games that took up multiple hundreds of Mb got the boot and anything less than 100 Mb stayed installed for a bit longer. When you've only got a 40GB drive, thems the choices you have to make!
Meanwhile I've seen Fortnite literally fail to update with less than 100GB free because it needs to modify so many files in its gigantic install
When I was young, I was not allowed to install anything on the family PC whatsoever. I had a 100MB Zip disk and was told anything that I wanted to keep, I could keep on there. That disk got a big workout. Had Duke 3D and the Half-Life Uplink demo on there, plus about 30MB to spare! Great days man.
Man I was jelly green over classmates that could afford zip drives. They'd bring it to school retiring computer class, whip it out, both showing off and fake-lamenting that oh they didn't know the school didn't have zip drives.
Zip drives filled such a small tech window between floppies & CD-Rs.
I was the ubernerd with the Zip 250, lol
Hah I was the same. Downloaded demos (happypuppy.com, gamesdomain.com), installed on a Jaz drive.
Those iomega devices had a pretty awesome design.
Oh, maaaan. HappyPuppy. I haven't thought of that in ages.
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Looks at 500 gb New Vegas install
Yeah I don't see the problem here.
How is that even possible? Even with 8k retextures of every single asset of the game I can't imagine it being half that size.
Uncompressed audio and way too many mods with unique assets, also I think something duplicated a bunch of random assets. I've tried to fix it but noooo apparently duped ruble13 is load bearing. But hey at least it doesn't CTD so there's that, ignore NPCs just not spawning and some terrain just not appearing note this is not due to conflicts it fits when I restart the game and I don't know if it's the SSD or not.
Lol next thing you know they'll sneak HL3 into a VR game
... oh
Gone are the days when a game delivered on seven floppy disks was considered "overblown".
I installed HL2 from five CDs back in the day
I can't be certain but I seem to recall installing Unreal Tournament 2004 from seven CDs
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I still remember when I had to reinstall my WindowsXP from the 3GB HDD onto my 1.5GB HDD so I could install The Sims 2
And now 1.5GB RAM won’t even load Windows.
It will. I've tried. It's not a pleasant experience though.
But 2GB on Fedora was pain as well, though definitely more usable.
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Wait until they get to the end of level one and have to turn the tape over and press play.
The lack of any comment saying "Half life is not retro gaming" is concerning to me.
Half Life came out in 1998 (27 years ago) and this post is from 2003 (22 years ago). Half Life is retro gaming.
Please stop, you are hurting me with facts
This world is too cruel
I love you had this ready and/or knew exactly where to find it.
I think the first time I saw this meme was an edit posted on Chubbyemu's channel where she says "I don't know what -emia means".
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This is as much of a valid complaint now as it was back then.
There is absolutely no excuse for games now to be over 100GB in storage space. Unless you have the longest game ever that span across like 1 and a half "normal" game lengths. The biggest games now should be 60GB or less. So many developers refuse to compress things that could be compressed with zero noticeable loss in quality except for maybe a camera being really close to an object with an 8k display resolution.
At the absolute worst, do what games used to do for like 6 months before not caring: make the game for 1080p players, compression and all, then offer a free DLC with all the uncompressed stuff. At least make the storage feast optional.
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