I’m glad Valve never sold out with Counter Strike. The game still has that raw brutal aesthetic that works so well with the gameplay. It’s a big part of the reason the game feels the way it does.
Other games have lots of wacky skins and stuff but the Counter Strike games never had that and hopefully never will. Some of the unofficial servers are pretty wacky which is fine as they are unofficial.
I started with CS: Source and quickly got into 1.6 because of the more expansive funmaps and modding scene. It was like the Wild West (or literally as was the case with de_westwood) - Nipper's penchant for glitchy drivable vehicles, ridiculously huge maps with teleports galore and weird music, fy_iceworld, gun game... it was so wonderfully weird. The fact that the core of the game stayed the same for so many years without DLC meant that people got good at it on their own merit without worrying about dropping money on upgrades or grinding long hours to get drops or whatever.
Maybe I'm old but I feel as though there's still a place for shooters of this nature. Every time I hear about new seasons dropping for some ultra-popular game I lose interest; I've no desire to keep up with the evolution of a game coordinated by a billion-dollar company to extract money from my wallet after I already paid for it.
There was also the whole branch of Surfing, which exploited a glitch in the physics engine that caused standing sloped surfaces to generate forward velocity. Flying around massive expansive maps gliding on slopes while blasting people with shotguns was so much fun (or sniping them mid air with an awp).
There was also a whole sub-genre of skill surf, with mechanically challenging courses to complete.
Oh and then kz maps too, which was just for climbing up huge structures.
Ahh, I started playing CS back in 2004. I go back to it every year for a few weeks / months, but the latest iteration (CS2) leaves some things to be desired from the 'community server' perspective.
No good surf ("TDM") style games anymore, seems like that game mode has mainly died in favour of the timed surf game-mode.
So now I stick to the 'vanilla' game much more, but without a group of friends that plays regularly, it's a bit of a frustrating experience at times.
So many great memories growing up playing this game decades ago, but you can still pick it up and have a blast. Counterstrike is a great example of a simplistic concept executed flawlessly, in a way that a lot of modern games choose not to match. It's the video game equivalent of soccer or beer pong, you can pick it up in 10 minutes and play forever.
Recently I stumbled upon an online port of CS 1.6, called play-cs.com.
It's just great - exactly the same game and works very smooth in a browser.
I played it briefly for a few months and was happy I was able to get into the top rankings overall.
Just sharing it here if anyone wants to try it out.
Timely, I was just wondering yesterday (as I was launching the BF6 beta) if there was a current FPS with a mod scene like we had for Half Life and BF 1942.
Minh “Gooseman” Le, one of CS’s creators, was a fan of AQ2. Counter-Strike (first released in June 1999 as a Half-Life mod) built on AQ2’s ideas but refined them with better hitboxes, buy menus, maps, and more tactical pacing.
AQ2 is often described as “the bridge between Quake and Counter-Strike”.
Heads up to those who played CS:GO years ago and like money. I was a pretty active player from 2012 to 2014.
Back then I got dozens of crates that I didn't open, now worth as high as 31$CAD each. I looked it up last week and it's worth over a thousand dollars in Steam. I cashed in on almost half of it and now I have some cash to buy games for my family and friends.
I was looking forward towards the Classic Offensive mod but then Valve DMCA'd it just a few days before the release. Awful move considering that not only they've okayed it before but also completely ignored the developers when they were trying to contact them. 8 years of development for nothing.
I grew up with CS1.6 and spent what must be thousands of hours on it before I turned 18. But I can't stand what Valve did to modern versions of CS. The reason? Gambling. So much fucking gambling everywhere. Other games have lootboxes, I hate them, but they are usually "contained" in the sense that you do not see them in every context surrounding the game. But because CS skins can be traded between players, there is now an entire third party ecosystem for skin trading and worse, skin gambling. Lootboxes inside lootboxes. And now it feels like every CS YouTuber, streamer and even teams at lower tiers is sponsored by a skin casino. I remember dropping into a stream of a professional player only to watch him throw $500 (God knows where the money comes from) away playing what is basically a CS skin roulette. WTF.
And there is also the typical sports gambling shit. HLTV the main news source of the pro CS scene is full of gambling ads. Higher tier tournaments often give a segment to gambling people talking about odds between matches. And as you would expect in a scene with rampant gambling there is match fixing. The serious media and the authorities will not look into it because esports is not serious stuff, but people know it’s there. Whenever you see a tier 2 team throw a most winnable match in the weirdest fashion you can see a stream of Twitch chat messages calling it rigged. People know but nothing will be done against it. Check out Richard Lewis if you want more information on that.
I would love to see a modern shooter with nice graphics and self hostable servers in the same niche as the old CS. But all we got is Valorant and its kernel spyware (oops I mean anticheat). Guess I should just keep player CS1.6 until I die shrug
Something that wasn't mentioned in the article is that Counter-Strike spawned the creation of the most iconic FPS map ever: de_dust2. If an FPS supports custom maps, it's inevitable that de_dust2 will get ported to it.
There's actually a mini-documentary about the creation of de_dust2 [0] which I think will be of interest to FPS fans.
I wonder if de_dust2 is the most played FPS map or if it has been dethroned by something like Fortnite or some other shooter map.
> At the end of June, Le was asked to join a handful of professional gamers onstage for a round of Counter-Strike at a game conference in Austin, Texas.
Conference isn't really the right term here: it's more equivalent to a sports tournament (it was the BLAST Austin Major, with a $1.2 million prize pool). Also, round is confusing given the dual usage, he played for an entire showmatch.
Beta 5.2 was when I had the best time with Counter-Strike. de_dust with a Colt was fun. Never forget the AWP snipers lurking near the big front door in cs_assault. There were some weird maps like cs_siege — I think it had some sort of a moving vehicle there somewhere in a tunnel.
I will forever mourn the general demise of server browsers. Too many games require you to use matchmaking systems, which means it's very hard to build up a small community in-game anymore. You either have to rely on forming small parties with people you've stumbled upon one by one, or you have to seek out people from some much larger area like Reddit or Discord. It takes a lot of the serendipity out of the experience. Without a small community it becomes much harder to ensure you're not playing with people who make the game less fun by whatever metric you care about.
I used to be an admin on a group of about 18 or so connected Counter-Strike 1.6 servers called T3Houston*. We ran modified versions of various Warcraft 3 mods which added persistent XP/leveling, as well as integration with an external item store and player database the owner maintained. Most of those servers were filled to the brim during peak US gaming times, and our forum was quite active.
There aren't many games these days where you could do something like that. I discovered the community because one day I was just looking for a server with open slots for me to join. I was fairly skeptical of whatever a Warcraft mod would be like, but ended up enjoying it so I added it to my favorites. Eventually I got to know the regulars and joined the forum. Notably, the place felt far less toxic than the average server I'd join back then. I can completely believe this is just me looking at the past through rose tinted glasses, but it feels like the general toxicity has gotten worse at the same time as we've lost a lot of tools to manage it.
* If anyone else here remembers the name T3Houston: hi! I'm Stealth Penguin
Wow, I played on your servers as a 9-10 year old. I lived in Houston and joined your server simply because they said Houston and I assumed my ping could make it there. I became obsessed with the WC3 mod. Handle was probably Coomie at the time.
I still remember invisible humans, elves with evasion, orcs with massive nade damage, undead with life steal… good times. I didn’t know how to spell “ultimate” so it took me forever to actually be able to bind an ult to keyboard.
These things still exists in CS (though not as popular in US but that's a reflection of CS losing popularity there)
People right now are having the same community experiences in custom server, or with official Valve, or third party like FaceIt... From crazy custom mods to try hard competitive games.
From time to time I stumble on some community servers when looking for a better DM warm-up server. Players and admin talking to each other like they were regulars, admin flying around in a batman skin killing a camper with lightning bolt, all the usual admin/community tools and more... also all the laughing, banter, playing songs and crap on the mic...
Would you have tried to join in? Let's just face it we've abandoned and stopped seeking it as we got older.
> I will forever mourn the general demise of server browsers. Too many games require you to use matchmaking systems, which means it's very hard to build up a small community in-game anymore.
It's been many moons since I was into gaming, but back in the RtCW [1][2] days there was a bunch of regulars that played on a server run my (IIRC) Charter. There were many servers in the browse list, and I'm sure many had a community of regulars just like we did.
Undoubtedly I’ve seen / played with you at one point or another. I spent many years in these kinds of servers, because with active mods they weren’t toxic. You kept the cheaters at bay, and they were reliable places to jump in, frag and chat for hours. I used a handful of different names over the years, but usually bounced between variations of “Trigger,” “Asylum,” and “Shifty”. I miss the days you could bop into a server, meet a handful of people, end up on a CAL team with them, and find friends for the next few decades. Best case today, everyone in online games now might as well be a ghost. They’re just strangers in passing if they talk at all. And worst case - they’re overly toxic, loud, and abusing the mic. The only communities I belong to now are the ones I build myself and with friends I’ve made in real life - and we jump between games together now.
I'm afraid that time we long for is gone now as we've all gotten older, busier, and moved on to other things. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Oh yeah I used to play on T3Houston all the time, back in ~2003 (as Undead). There weren't that many W3 mod servers that had a consistent player population. I lived in PNW though so the latency was always around ~80ms.
The move is intentional, it's extremely hard to sell someone microtransactions if they find themselves a member of a tight knit community they enjoy playing a game with. If they are isolated and believe the only mechanism for advancement is microtransactions, they are much more likely to spend money.
I have fond memories of playing on those modded community servers once in a while, it was a nice variety in the world of rats and regular gameplay.
While there is still some amount of it around in the Counter-Strike 2 era, there's a strong disincentive for joining random community servers when there have been client vulnerabilities that allow arbitrary code execution.
If anyone else played on the T3Houston servers, there's a (mostly dead) Steam group which would be a solid place to reconnect in https://steamcommunity.com/groups/t3houston
Absolutely.
The unique flavor the admins of your server added were something completely special.
As an aside. I always appreciated the street justice the admins would sometime enact. Running through the level with invincibility and godlike mods just gibbing everyone left and right.
This inspired me to check on Cube2: Sauerbraten. Still alive? Yep, barely. I guess some online games never die. In the case of Cube2, the game isn't really competitive (servers have no lobby, players can join and leave games anytime, even switch teams in the middle of the game sometimes when it's not the server itself that moves you to the other team on respawn in order to balance the game a bit) and it is one less toxic component of online gaming. People were having a break and talk about various topics in the chat while watching the ongoing game.
100% - local servers is what led to having lan events in your city, less toxic players and its just funner running into the same players. those were the good old days
OMG. I also just created an account on this site after being in read-only mode forever just to say 'Hi'.
We played together basically daily for quite some time in the early 2000s. I remember you and CamCam.
My handle here is the same as it was in CS. I spent countless hours in college in this server leveling up every class to the max and trying to break the game with the 'spider man rope'. Great times!
The rope mod was always one of my favorites. I think I asked rACEmic to add it. I have distinct memories of putting up votes in the server to see if people wanted me to enable it, especially in de_rats or de_jeepathon2k
I had a mild addiction to this game about 7 or so years ago. Purely casual but lots of hours. I found it sort of a stress relief.
On the upside it gave me all sorts of free items as in-game 'drops'. I ignored them all at the time as didn't care about buying keys or cosmetics. Last year I saw that they'll worth a bunch of money now (!) and had about $1500 if sold on the steam marketplace. I got a Steam Deck with money from some of them, and it's basically my C:S 401k for steam games. What a weird world.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 73.8 ms ] threadOther games have lots of wacky skins and stuff but the Counter Strike games never had that and hopefully never will. Some of the unofficial servers are pretty wacky which is fine as they are unofficial.
Maybe I'm old but I feel as though there's still a place for shooters of this nature. Every time I hear about new seasons dropping for some ultra-popular game I lose interest; I've no desire to keep up with the evolution of a game coordinated by a billion-dollar company to extract money from my wallet after I already paid for it.
There was also a whole sub-genre of skill surf, with mechanically challenging courses to complete.
Oh and then kz maps too, which was just for climbing up huge structures.
Good times
No good surf ("TDM") style games anymore, seems like that game mode has mainly died in favour of the timed surf game-mode.
So now I stick to the 'vanilla' game much more, but without a group of friends that plays regularly, it's a bit of a frustrating experience at times.
It's just great - exactly the same game and works very smooth in a browser. I played it briefly for a few months and was happy I was able to get into the top rankings overall.
Just sharing it here if anyone wants to try it out.
I can't seem to find anything.
Fond memories of 1.4 and 1.5, when it was still a Half-Life mod.
Minh “Gooseman” Le, one of CS’s creators, was a fan of AQ2. Counter-Strike (first released in June 1999 as a Half-Life mod) built on AQ2’s ideas but refined them with better hitboxes, buy menus, maps, and more tactical pacing.
AQ2 is often described as “the bridge between Quake and Counter-Strike”.
as_oilrig ftw
Back then I got dozens of crates that I didn't open, now worth as high as 31$CAD each. I looked it up last week and it's worth over a thousand dollars in Steam. I cashed in on almost half of it and now I have some cash to buy games for my family and friends.
The skin is worth over $2k now, oh well.
And there is also the typical sports gambling shit. HLTV the main news source of the pro CS scene is full of gambling ads. Higher tier tournaments often give a segment to gambling people talking about odds between matches. And as you would expect in a scene with rampant gambling there is match fixing. The serious media and the authorities will not look into it because esports is not serious stuff, but people know it’s there. Whenever you see a tier 2 team throw a most winnable match in the weirdest fashion you can see a stream of Twitch chat messages calling it rigged. People know but nothing will be done against it. Check out Richard Lewis if you want more information on that.
https://richardlewis.substack.com/p/prologue-no-one-really-c...
I would love to see a modern shooter with nice graphics and self hostable servers in the same niche as the old CS. But all we got is Valorant and its kernel spyware (oops I mean anticheat). Guess I should just keep player CS1.6 until I die shrug
There's actually a mini-documentary about the creation of de_dust2 [0] which I think will be of interest to FPS fans.
I wonder if de_dust2 is the most played FPS map or if it has been dethroned by something like Fortnite or some other shooter map.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWWhxfGq_yk
Conference isn't really the right term here: it's more equivalent to a sports tournament (it was the BLAST Austin Major, with a $1.2 million prize pool). Also, round is confusing given the dual usage, he played for an entire showmatch.
This is closest the article gets to mentioning css and csgo. Both of those games were like 90% of my teens
Lots of history glossed over. Like the maps and plugins/addons. The mappers were legends in their own right
I used to be an admin on a group of about 18 or so connected Counter-Strike 1.6 servers called T3Houston*. We ran modified versions of various Warcraft 3 mods which added persistent XP/leveling, as well as integration with an external item store and player database the owner maintained. Most of those servers were filled to the brim during peak US gaming times, and our forum was quite active.
There aren't many games these days where you could do something like that. I discovered the community because one day I was just looking for a server with open slots for me to join. I was fairly skeptical of whatever a Warcraft mod would be like, but ended up enjoying it so I added it to my favorites. Eventually I got to know the regulars and joined the forum. Notably, the place felt far less toxic than the average server I'd join back then. I can completely believe this is just me looking at the past through rose tinted glasses, but it feels like the general toxicity has gotten worse at the same time as we've lost a lot of tools to manage it.
* If anyone else here remembers the name T3Houston: hi! I'm Stealth Penguin
I still remember invisible humans, elves with evasion, orcs with massive nade damage, undead with life steal… good times. I didn’t know how to spell “ultimate” so it took me forever to actually be able to bind an ult to keyboard.
People right now are having the same community experiences in custom server, or with official Valve, or third party like FaceIt... From crazy custom mods to try hard competitive games.
From time to time I stumble on some community servers when looking for a better DM warm-up server. Players and admin talking to each other like they were regulars, admin flying around in a batman skin killing a camper with lightning bolt, all the usual admin/community tools and more... also all the laughing, banter, playing songs and crap on the mic...
Would you have tried to join in? Let's just face it we've abandoned and stopped seeking it as we got older.
It's been many moons since I was into gaming, but back in the RtCW [1][2] days there was a bunch of regulars that played on a server run my (IIRC) Charter. There were many servers in the browse list, and I'm sure many had a community of regulars just like we did.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Castle_Wolfenstein
[2] A Linux client was actually released, which is what I mostly used. (Actually running it on FreeBSD's Linuxator.)
I'm afraid that time we long for is gone now as we've all gotten older, busier, and moved on to other things. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
While there is still some amount of it around in the Counter-Strike 2 era, there's a strong disincentive for joining random community servers when there have been client vulnerabilities that allow arbitrary code execution.
I can't explain how excited I was for the Reforged version of the game and how disappointed I was when it flopped.
My favorite part of games is learning the mechanics and coming up with strategies. Which paired well with an endless supply of new game modes to try.
I have been unable to find any modern game that is both active and has a series of custom maps. If anyone knows of any, please let me know.
As an aside. I always appreciated the street justice the admins would sometime enact. Running through the level with invincibility and godlike mods just gibbing everyone left and right.
We played together basically daily for quite some time in the early 2000s. I remember you and CamCam.
My handle here is the same as it was in CS. I spent countless hours in college in this server leveling up every class to the max and trying to break the game with the 'spider man rope'. Great times!
The rope mod was always one of my favorites. I think I asked rACEmic to add it. I have distinct memories of putting up votes in the server to see if people wanted me to enable it, especially in de_rats or de_jeepathon2k
On the upside it gave me all sorts of free items as in-game 'drops'. I ignored them all at the time as didn't care about buying keys or cosmetics. Last year I saw that they'll worth a bunch of money now (!) and had about $1500 if sold on the steam marketplace. I got a Steam Deck with money from some of them, and it's basically my C:S 401k for steam games. What a weird world.