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Valve's first game shipped on November 19, 1998. Rather than cutting to separate scenes, it staged its events in front of a player who never left the character's viewpoint, and its released tools produced a generation of modifications.
Narrative in games stopped being something that happened between the playable parts. The technique of staging events inside continuous play was adopted so widely that it is now essentially invisible. The modification community the game supported also produced both a lasting competitive title and the commercial logic behind digital distribution.
Valve released Steam on September 12, 2003, at first as a way to patch its own multiplayer games and combat cheating. It grew into the dominant storefront for computer games.
Digital distribution moved the computer game business away from boxed retail within a decade. For small developers it removed the hardest barrier, which was getting shelf space, and it made continuous updating and long tails of sales a normal part of how games are released and maintained.
Half-Life 2 shipped on November 16, 2004 with mandatory Steam activation, even for copies bought on disc. The requirement angered many buyers and quietly established account-based ownership as the norm.
Tying a physical purchase to an online account was the moment digital rights management became unavoidable for mainstream computer games. It also gave Steam the installed base it needed to become a storefront, using a single highly anticipated release to accomplish what years of marketing could not.
Included in a multi-game bundle released on October 10, 2007, Portal grew out of a student project. It taught its own spatial rules entirely through level design and finished in a few hours.
Teaching a player through arrangement of space rather than instruction became a reference standard for design, and the game is used in courses to demonstrate it. It also legitimized brevity, showing that a few concentrated hours could be a complete work rather than a compromise.
