Man, Steam’s official website has come a long way in 21 years

A twitter account that catalogs classic interfaces from the history of web browsing, the Web Design Museum (opens in new tab), shared a screengrab of the Steam homepage circa May, 2005 (opens in new tab). This look back at the early days of Valve’s juggernaut set our minds alight, conjuring memories of Day of Defeat Source, surf maps, and custom Half-Life 1 campaigns. Things have come a long way since those olive drab days.

A quick trip on the Wayback Machine can serve up versions of the site from any era of its almost 20-year existence (opens in new tab), but I think the Web Design Museum hit a real sweet spot with this ’05 iteration⁠—it’s nowhere near as sparse as our first look (opens in new tab) at the Steam official site in 2002, but we’ve also yet to see the gleaming grey-and-blue terminator of today start to tear out of its olive drab flesh like in this snapshot (opens in new tab) from 2006.