There’s a meme currently going around Bluesky where people are posting their first purchases on Steam. Taking a look presents a neat time capsule, offering a glimpse of who we used to be. It also gives us a chance to compare our gaming habits now with what they were 10 or more years ago — that is, if you’re one of the Olds that’s been around that long. On a lark, I looked at mine and got the thrill of being able to place a date on when exactly my current life began.
Sometimes, examining your earliest Steam purchases presents as many questions as answers. My very first Steam purchases were made on December 25th, 2010, and were all over the place in genre: Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the Left 4 Dead bundle, and Team Fortress 2. I played and enjoyed many hours of both Left 4 Dead and Amnesia, but to this very day, I have never stepped foot inside a TF2 lobby.
TF2 was not my kind of game. Hero shooters wouldn’t be a Thing for me until Overwatch blew down the doors of my anti-multiplayer shooter bunker and even then, it’s only Overwatch. Not to mention that the stories of TF2 voice chat toxicity were the stuff of 4chan legend. My Black, female ass in a voice chat multiplayer lobby in 2010? Absolutely not!
This list has kickstarted memories that I haven’t reached for in decades, but I don’t think I’ll ever understand why I bought TF2.
My next set of purchases came a few months later in January and February 2011: DC Universe Online and Rift. Why I bought these MMOs makes far more sense to me than my forever mysterious purchase of TF2. Before getting my Steam account, the only computer games I had ever played were MMOs and the Rise of Rome expansion from Age of Empires II. (If you want to know how the Roman Empire became my Roman Empire, look no further.)
I was a big World of Warcraft player, but by that time, I had grown bored with it. 2011 would have been right between the Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria expansions, neither of which I particularly liked. I didn’t really jive with DC Universe Online either, but I played it because, of all things, a boy. My boyfriend at the time was super into the MMO, in which you cosplay as heroes who take over when Wonder Woman and Batman are indisposed. Both my subscription and the relationship lasted longer than they should have.
I remember the buzz surrounding Rift, a new-at-the-time MMO that was supposed to be the “WoW killer” — unaware that such claims had been made about many other MMOs at the time. I remember very little about Rift, which is probably why my WoW subscription is more than 20 years old at this point.
The fact that Dragon Age: Origins is on this list at all is another mystery. Before it, I had never played any BioWare games nor any narrative PC games. I don’t remember who suggested it to me — maybe my boyfriend, maybe a friend at college. But the presence of this game on this list gives me an exact date for when my life changed as a gamer and a person: Saturday, March 19, 2011.
Origins isn’t my favorite in the series. In fact, it’s the one I dread the most trying to replay. (I am mad as hell at the revelation from Dragon Age producer Mark Darrah that EA refused to fund a remaster of the series.) But it’s the one that introduced me to narrative, choice-focused, and companion-romancing RPGs. It introduced me to my first BioWare romance Alistair Theirin, and as in all things regarding love, you never forget your first.
Knowing when I bought this game puts me back in a place that I haven’t thought of in literal decades. I played Origins on a tiny desktop computer tucked into the corner of my too-small living room. That was my first apartment with my boyfriend, and I felt grown for the first time, even though I was well into my early 20s. But even though I was cohabitating with a real man, I was obsessed with the pixelated one in my computer. So obsessed that I taught myself to mod just to add more, shall we say, “narrative” scenes between my Warden character and Alistair. There’s even a funny bit of environmental storytelling with this list. After Origins, I didn’t make another Steam purchase for more than a year. The game took over my life.
The rest is history. My introduction to the Dragon Age series brought me into the Dragon Age fandom. Through it, I would meet my best and longest friends, rediscover my love of writing, and with that instigating spark, start the journey that would lead me to becoming a game journalist — the second-best decision I’ve made in my life. (The first being finally letting go of that previous relationship.)
I really appreciate that Steam has kept such a thorough accounting of my early activities on the platform because it’s put a date on the origin of the person that I am today. Go look at yours and see how much you’ve changed.
