The retail version required 256MB, it's the Steam version that needed 512.

I was thinking another decade further back than that, or so. :)

Also, Half Life 2 was a state-of-the-art video game for an audience that largely had fancy gaming PCs.

Video games still target pretty mainstream pc specs. They have to, or no one can run the game. Sans Crysis.

Not every game is Crysis for sure, but for instance, a lot of AAA games right now require 8 GB of memory minimum. The $400 Surface Go 2 that came yesterday has only 4 GB of memory in the base config, and such specs aren't isn't particularly uncommon. Not that you'd be playing AAA games on that machine even if it had more memory, but hence my point.

Neither the Xbone or the PS4 offer 8GB of ram to the game (system reserves), and yet almost every AAA game launches on those platforms.

They likely couldn't run Slack or the NYT tho. Just think about how slow the PS4 store loads (it's html5) or the whole xbone ui.

Games are actually optimized for speed. NYT is optimized on a different key performance indicator.

Looked up similar hardware running games on Youtube and yup - it's pretty awful even for quite old AAA titles. Bet it still runs league of legends at like 150fps though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ4Oh0BAt6I

Half-Life 2 was remastered with updated graphics in 2007 when it was re-released as part of The Orange Box. I pulled the original box from 2004 out of my closet and it states 256MB was the minimum required: https://slerp.xyz/img/misc/hl2_reqs.jpg