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Bought used CD of Half Life 1- can't activate on Steam

N

Nukemann

Junior Member
I was down at Value Village and bought a used CD of Half-Life 1 GOTY. I try activating the CD key on Steam, and it says the CD key has already been activated. Would just installing from the CD work instead of Steam? I believe HL1 was before Steam era, so it shouldn't affect installing the CD. I remember other games from before online registration they'd work even if used with the CD key. Does HL1 require Steam now, or can I still install without Steam?
 
You can install it without Steam, but you'll never be able to play it online (via Steam) or take advantage of any of the Steam mods that use it. You could still go in and find old installers for Half-Life mods, but since WON.net doesn't exist anymore, online capabilities are effectively none, which limits what you can actually do with a lot of them...

But it will totally let you install from the disc to your harddrive and play through the original, unedited HL1. So if that's all you're after, you should be good to go.
 
Not sure what you paid for a used CD but you can currently get Half-Life 1 in Source (much better graphics plus lots of mod support) for $5. Or every part of the first two Half-Lifes (Half-Lives?) plus Team Fortress Classic for $20.
 
werepossum said:
Not sure what you paid for a used CD but you can currently get Half-Life 1 in Source (much better graphics plus lots of mod support) for $5. Or every part of the first two Half-Lifes (Half-Lives?) plus Team Fortress Classic for $20.
Click to expand...

Given it's the Steam Summer Sale right now, I'd be surprised if you couldn't manage to get it even cheaper at some point this week.
 
You may want to e-mail Steam customer support. I remember seeing somewhere on my retail copy of CS:S that if something ever happened, I could e-mail them a photo of the install disc or product card with activation key and get the game back into my Steam account.
 
jlchoi said:
You may want to e-mail Steam customer support. I remember seeing somewhere on my retail copy of CS:S that if something ever happened, I could e-mail them a photo of the install disc or product card with activation key and get the game back into my Steam account.
Click to expand...

Activating it on Steam would be to agree to the Steam TOS, which prohibits selling the game. While I don't know their actual policy in this, I wouldn't be surprised if they blew him off with, "Sorry, but you bought an illegally sold game." While the first-sale doctrine limits a copyright holder's rights over the disposition of the physical copy, it doesn't impose an obligation for Steam to grant you access to their network. They could just ban the key entirely.
 
jlchoi said:
You may want to e-mail Steam customer support. I remember seeing somewhere on my retail copy of CS:S that if something ever happened, I could e-mail them a photo of the install disc or product card with activation key and get the game back into my Steam account.
Click to expand...

that's just for recovering your account, you take a photo of a registered game as proof...

it would not work for recovering the game I think... it could be used to take control of the previous owner account, so it's wise not to sell the used games you registered on steam... I think I've lost my account from 2003 in this exact way... I even tried to ask for it back sending as much data as I could about the account, but they still asked for a photo of the original box/key to recover the account, and I didn't have that..

I don't think Steam is really supportive of used games anyway... so just play the game outside steam or buy it again on steam...
 
You should be able to buy everything valve have ever made for £1.50 at some point during the summer sale, 😉
 
HL1 was pre-steam, you should be able to install and play the single player just fine as I believe the activation just requires a valid key, there's no online activation. However the original half life (unpatched) required the WON servers for multi player which were eventually replaced by steam, so you won't be able to play multi player.

It's been patched a whole bunch of times both pre and post steam, you won't be able to get the post steam patches so it's likely that you'll have a hard time getting things like mods to work correctly.

Almost all PC games being sold second hand are going to have the online/multiplayer components already registered to an account so I'd advise against buying that kind of thing, especially anything modern.
 
I haven't bought a CD of a game in... i don't even remember and i threw out the ones I use to keep as well. All digital, same with music.
 
zerocool84 said:
CD? Did those exist before Steam?
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Those are those medium density shiny round things with the hole in the middle.
They came before "dvds" which are the slightly higher density shiny round things with the hole in the middle.

Before that they used to use hard squares with circle magnetic disks of floppy stuff.
And before that they used softer and slightly bigger squares with the magnetic floppy stuff inside ...

The "pre-steam" era involved lots of primitive shapes!
 
BurnItDwn said:
Those are those medium density shiny round things with the hole in the middle.
They came before "dvds" which are the slightly higher density shiny round things with the hole in the middle.

Before that they used to use hard squares with circle magnetic disks of floppy stuff.
And before that they used softer and slightly bigger squares with the magnetic floppy stuff inside ...

The "pre-steam" era involved lots of primitive shapes!
Click to expand...

I thought those were from keeping cups from damaging your furniture and computer cases. 😕

I always thought it was cool that computers had cool little Star Trek-like storage compartments that you could press a button and stow those things in too. Those things were neat how they made that whooshing sound.
 
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