A great package, but it's suffocated by Steam.
The game (or in this case: entire package) is a total classic. There were initially three evolutionary series around the time this was released. Quake, Unreal, and Half-Life. Quake and Unreal got all the attention, but Half-Life has an infinitely more interesting storyling. You get a sense of the game being one massive user-controlled cutscene instead of the Quake and Unreal formula of running around and either getting short and vague post-chapter "story" paragraphs or Unreal's datapads with the sparse and unimportant story read from them. Both of those games almost require the manual for you to even know what the hell is going on, but Half-Life starts from zero hour and you witness and actual story as you yourself create/experience it. Half-Life's story is superb, given that particular FPS era of little to no plot in the games.
The only problem with Half-Life Anthology is Steam. For one, the games are picky about when they will work correctly in anything but the worst Software rendering mode. Having to try a million legacy DirectX shortcut switches until you find the right one is a real pain. Another problem is that aside from Team Fortress, the majority of gamers are playing solo in singleplayer games. Yet, Steam demands that you connect to the internet for no particular reason (since the games are installed from discs). The reason is supposedly to prevent piracy (yeah...those old FPS games are really going to get pirated like crazy...you know how kids today would rather play Wolfenstein 3D than Halo 2). Steam is a real system hog too. It frequently eats up more than 20MB of memory just sitting in the tray with no game running. Yep, it's a tray app...one of those annoying kind that likes to turn the close button into an additional minimize button. You have to close it from the tray when you're done playing. Games also load slow as hell on this Steam version. Not too cool when a 90s era FPS takes 2+ minutes to load. The Steam version of this game is total garbage and you have to have both an internet connection and a prayer that someday 10 years from now Steam will still be around...just to play a singleplayer offline game. The games in this collection are superb, but people should really spend an extra couple bucks and get Half-Life Platinum 2nd Edition on the used market and skip this polished turd that would otherwise have been an ultimate collection were it not marred by Steam. I think Steam was named for what came off this program after it came out Valve's rear end.