Half-Life 2 shoots to eighth most-played game on the Steam Deck after free-to-play promotion

You were either too young to play it when it came out or too young now.

HL2 alone was worth building a good PC for back in 2004, then you had HL2 Deathmatch and Garry’s Mod soon after which gave a ton of multiplayer fun on top of it.

Nothing came close for years in comparison with HL2 in terms of environment interaction and physics either.