This game holds such a special place for me, not only for just fun childhood memories, but also so much of what got me into the excitement of how cool it was to see the rapid progress of tech.
Certainly, it isn't atypical for software industry folks of my age to have games be a gateway into tech, but I think I was a bit different in that I rarely considered wanting to make games, rather I enjoyed the tinkering with my computer and the rapid pace at what games could do as much as the game (which continues today with my spending more money on playing with the hardware and toys rather than the actual games) and half-life just
I first played Half-Life on a family PC with no graphics accelerator and I loved it, but I remember the jank from ~15 FPS at a few hundred lines of resolution. This is what drove me to build my first computer and after debugging my way through all the issues that a 12 a year old would make when building a computer before the age of YouTube, I remember being absolutely blown away by the lighting and speed of what this little piece of hardware added to the experience.
That wasn't the first time I felt the rush of getting a computer to do something I wanted (that would probably be getting doom running in windows 3.1 after dealing figuring out the mystical "command line") but it certainly was one of the most drastic in just how fast tech changed.
A small addendum to this... I really want to figure out how to bring similiar experiences to my kids, because it was that loop of problem -> learning -> breakthrough that I think was hugely transformative to not only my career trajectory, but also just in learning to love learning.
So thanks Valve and Half-Life team for this happy memories... but maybe I won't feel the same when I try and play HL DM this weekend and inevitably realize how slow my reaction times have gotten in the last ~25 years ;)