I got my start in the tech industry thanks to Half-Life - or more specifically thanks to the Half-Life mod Team Fortress Classic.
I built an early fan news site for that game (effectively a blog before I knew they were called blogs) which got me a job with an early online gaming company ~1999 where I got paid to learn how web development works.
Man, TFC was the greatest. I’m surprised there aren’t more threads mentioning it here. Got overshadowed by Counter-Strike of course (also great) but TFC was the “prototype mod” released by Valve themselves as an example of what could be done with the HL SDK and it was a great game in its own right. I spent many hours perfecting rocket jumps and timing those grenade throws to wipe out unsuspecting enemies. 2fort ftw.
Yeah Team Fortress Classic seemed to be a lot of the reason that Half-Life got the VGUI SDK 2.0 (basically exposing a bunch more interfaces and callbacks to mod authors) - Team Fortress Classic needed all of this flexibility (and without engine access to show off the SDK).
I built an early fan news site for that game (effectively a blog before I knew they were called blogs) which got me a job with an early online gaming company ~1999 where I got paid to learn how web development works.