I'd like to see some discussion of this issue as well. For the moment, there's the Steamless CounterStrike Project, which will allow you to play the various HL1 games in their original state without Steam. Of course this does not address the HL2+ games. I read somewhere that if you already had Steam installed before they dropped Windows 98 support, and did not allow it to update itself, then you could still use it. I can't vouch for this, as I have never had Steam installed, and probably never will. (I refuse to install or buy any game that requires it, or requires any form of "online activation" garbage.) However, if one could track down the installer for a version of it prior to the end of 98 support, then one might manage to work around the issue. I installed the old WON version of Half-Life last night, and it works, all except for online play. Whenever I click the "Internet Play" to view the server list, HL crashes :| I have a feeling it's something to do with the weird process patcher it has running in the background that came with the steamless 1.1.1.2 update. As for the old versions of Steam for Win98, the only way to keep them working is to stay in offline mode (which back then rarely worked.) And usually the second Steam got a whiff of an internet connection, it would attempt to update itself, even if you told it not to. In offline mode, you were pretty much limited to SP only games, and possibly LAN games since you couldn't connect to the auth server or had the same version as other players. Finding an old installer won't help our case since all Steam installers are web installers and store the content remotely. I can totally agree with you that the online tether and activation is really lame, but Steam is the lesser of two evils when you look at a even more horrible system like EAs DRM that is poorly written trash that almost never works. I took one look at BF2142 and was so appalled that I never touched it again.