First person to play Half-Life 2

On 19 September 2003, game-obsessed hacker Axel Gembe (Germany) became the first person outside of the employees of Valve to play Half-Life 2 when he illegally downloaded the source code for the game. Gembe had to make some changes to the code to run it on his machine, resulting in a far more rudimentary game experience than that of the finished article.

Half-Life 2 was stolen a year or so before the game’s eventual release. The hack was all the more embarrassing for publisher/developer Valve as it revealed that Half-Life 2 was not anywhere near ready to meet the 2003 release date the company had set.

While Gembe admitted to hacking into Valve and downloading the game's source code, he denied subsequently uploading it to the internet, although he admitted sharing the hack with an online acquaintance who apparently placed the files on BitTorrent.

On 15 February 2004, Gembe sent an email to Valve Co-founder Gabe Newell revealing his identity as the hacker in the hope that the company might give him a job. The hacker was ultimately arrested for his piracy by the German police, he pled guilty and was sentenced to two years probation.