HL2: Episode One, in August 2006. My Steam account was actually created in August 2004, that was just the first time I gave them a credit card number. Probably the first time I actually had a credit card number to give them!
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2026
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Steam Hardware
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The first game I ever paid for, but did not directly purchase, was Garry's Mod in 2011 or 2012 after UndeadPatch stopped working. I didn't have a bank account, so I paid a classmate in cash to gift it to me. Considering that I first learned programming through Wiremod's Expression 2 chip (basically a virtual ESP32), leading directly to my computer science studies and my current job as a sysadmin, I'd say it was $10 well spent.
My first purchase on Steam was "The Classic", a sniper rifle in TF2, just to remove my account's F2P trading restriction.
Then I got a whole bunch of games through Humble Bundle's subscription. The first one was December of 2018, specifically for MGSV.
The first game I ever actually bought, actually on Steam, was Slay The Spire.
I don't know if this is the first game I ever bought, but according to the link in the OP it was Portal. Which feels almost poetic in a way. Apparently I would have been 18 then.
Well, if your account is older, then Steam might not list all the old games you purchased before the history started listing. I don't know when the cutoff is. But officially it is Portal, so we go with that. :p
Nidhogg!
Totally underrated. I never played the second game BTW.
Half-Life Complete for 7€
My first game was Bastion on 6 Apr, 2013. It cost me 14 Euros. At that time my PC didn't actually have the biggest horse power for gaming and frankly, at that time there wasn't much Linux games available on Linux. Steam was new on Linux and we didn't have Proton yet. A friend told me about this game, it sounded fun and interesting, and it wasn't expensive.
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Apparently it was Arma 2 back in 2012 to play DayZ mod. I remember that I barely ever played vanilla Arma 2 until just before Arma 3 came out. It was always DayZ mod.
Looks like I bought Deus Ex GOTY, Human Revolution, and Arkham City. $50 according to that page. In 2013.
Civ 4.
Weird several games are not on that list for me?
It goes back to ~~2013~~ 2012, but I used Steam on Linux way before that.
But in the beginning I had my games gifted to me because I didn't have VISA.
Edit typo, it was 2012 not 2013.
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My first purchase was "Ravensword: Shadowlands"
Edit: I am not sure if I ever played the game at all, and if I have then I don't remember anything from it.
Only goes back to 2009 and I'm pretty sure I bought something between 2003 and 2008. Maybe I just played all the games I had purchased elsewhere and added to steam, such as the Counterstrike, Orange Box, Dawn of War, and a few others I can't recall. I ended up tossing most of the cases once steam was reliable and I wasn't likely to go back and play.
First one listed is Left 4 Dead and that was a fantastic value. Many hours playing that and LFD2. Scrolling through the list and I don't feel bad about not playing most of them for very long as the vast majority were 75% or more off.
I didn't realize how old the first Dawn of War was (2000). Looking at Wikipedia, ah, Jeremy Soule is the composer. Probably best known for the score on Skyrim, but I also remember him from a Super Nintendo game Secret of Evermore.
I'm pretty stoked about Dawn of War IV becsuse they are going back to DoW style battles instead of the MOBA route they went with DoW 2 which I disliked.
Adding DoW and the expansions I already owned to steam made updates seamless and I could replay it today if I wanted to.
Half-Life 2
Supreme Commander 2.
I bought it from Target for like $15. I put it in my CD drive, had to install this Steam thing, watched it install, clicked play, and watched a black screen crash to desktop immediately. An entire weekend of research later I learned there’s this thing called a graphics card, the game requires DirectX 9 and pixel shader 3.0 support. Mom took me to Microcenter for the first time, bought me a $40 Zotac 9500GT, and the rest is history.
That reminds me 😅. Dad bought me Settlers II for Macintosh back in the day (first game on CD-ROM, whoa).
It needed 16 MB of RAM, but I had only 8...but there was this thing in MacOS 7 called "virtual memory", which is just swap.
I did not understand it, so obviously I was like "what is this shit? Why can I just have RAM, but need to activate it?" So of course I cranked it up to a whooping 32 MB, Hackerman that I was.
Game ran like shit, but it ran. There was a button to skip some time ahead, idk, like 30 seconds. Took longer than those 30 seconds to skip ahead with my shitty HDD RAM 😅. And I thought "what a shitty button, does not make sense at all, wtf is this?"
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Skyrim, i bought a pc to play all of the cool mods i saw on youtube.
art of rally, both the game and the soundtrack I still cherish
The Witcher: Enhanced Edition in 2013 for $9.99. Kind of ironic really as I still haven't played it for more than an hour or so.
The next game I bought was The Witcher 2 three months later for $19.99 which I finished and loved.
Most of the early games were bought on steam sales and were either games I'd already played on console/PC or classics I never got around to.
My first purchase was Deus Ex: Human Revolution in Aug. 2011. Was bought as a retail DVD but needed Steam.
TF2 in 2008 is the first one listed. It was on sale for $9
Out of the Park Baseball 21 for 38$. Was it worth it probably not I have 150 hours but haven't touched it or the franchise even for 4 years. Then again I did spend some time with it.
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Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator in 2018 was the first one I spent money on after only playing free games for years. Definitely a waste of money at the time, it could barely run on the crappy PC I had back then. Haven't touched it much since.
Nier Automata