I remember playing one of the early CS betas as a Half-life mod in ~1999.
It was such a huge leap in gameplay and style from anything else out there.
Most FPSs up to this point were SciFi based, guns like the BFG and plasma guns. Counterstrike's focus on realism really altered how you connected with the game. Columbine had happened very recently and was still very much in the zeitgeist. There was a very real cultural attack on video games as a scapegoat for the massacre.
My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool and would then run around and shoot each other. This was very taboo at the time. We knew that this would be interpreted as threatening by the powers-that-be at highschool, but it was exciting.
> My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool and would then run around and shoot each other.
There was a small netcafe nearby when I was young that had a good quality T1 connection and hosted their own CS servers. Some of the players got together and actually mapped out the entire netcafe store itself and some of the surrounding area to create a "de_" style map.
This meant you could be playing CS and spawn in the same room that you were actually sitting in.
I can still remember vividly as a 14 year old playing the game and completely dominating a room full of 20-something older guys in the other room. They didn't know who I was and every time I would stomp them they would yell "FUCK" from the other room. Eventually after a series of absurd kills they angrily stormed over to our room in a hostile manner ready to fight and 100% convinced I was somehow cheating. The look on their face when they realized they were "prepared" to fight a kid and the realization as I openly allowed them to inspect the PC for whatever they thought was modified on it was hilarious.
> My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool and would then run around and shoot each other. This was very taboo at the time.
I had a friend that was the victim of a local news "expose" on this. Just a harmless high school geek who thought it would be fun to combine the School blueprints with his CAD course to build a "fun" way of digitizing the blueprints.
The main lesson we learned from this exercise is that the Duke Nukem 3D pistol is totally OP when used in realistically proportioned hallways. Auto-aim and all.
The other lesson we learned is that local news investigative reporters care more about a compelling story than to represent the mundane truth.
I remember creating a map of my high school in the Build engine for duke3d.exe matches. This was before Columbine, but every outsider, nerd kid had fantasized in a similar way.
We got our aggressions out on deathmatch, but it never occurred to us in a million years to actually hurt people IRL. We hated the jocks and the preps with the burning passion of a billion Wolf-Rayet stars, but never thought to hurt any of them, we simply accepted our lot in the genetic and social lottery and hoped to get revenge later in life (so far so good, judging by facebook).
We knew that this would be interpreted as threatening by the powers-that-be at highschool
These days that kind of behavior, if reported to law enforcement (mandatory reporting in some cases), will get investigated with the potential for criminal charges, and likely school expulsion.
> My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool and would then run around and shoot each other. This was very taboo at the time. We knew that this would be interpreted as threatening by the powers-that-be at highschool, but it was exciting.
I think every budding DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D map creator made their school at one point. Of course, that was years before Columbine (despite the inclusion of DOOM in the Columbine finger-pointing), and nobody thought twice about it then.
I wanted to make a map of my high school for CSS but I thought it would be too taboo in the post columbine world, so instead I made a version of my parents house with some added ladders. Honestly it was great fun playing with my friends who had been over and knew the real life layout. Hiding in the closet or peeking out the back window into the yard for flankers was great!
I miss map making. The hammer editor wasn't the best but it was simple enough to figure out, and I actually had some old blueprints of the house layout that made it easier to get things to scale. I don't think many newer games like Call of Duty have the same community spirit of community servers, community maps, etc.
Counter-argument, before CS (CounterStrike) the predecessor we played a ton of was multiplayer Goldeneye 64. The guns weren’t super realistic, but it also wasn’t a giant leap to CS.
The big thing with CS was the online multiplayer with low lag, and it was popular enough that you didn’t have to wait long to join a room - which was a whole lot different than having friends over and playing couch multiplayer.
Doom users did what you say on creating real life based environments before, to be honest. And, yes, FPS where scifi based but the Delta Force series had more realism than CS itself.
We also built a similar map while in high school in the late 2000s, no one really complained (keep in mind I'm not from the US). Some of our teachers quite liked it though. We just viewed it as a familiar location (albeit with secret tunnels, lifts and higher ceilings), it had no particular negative connotations.
My journey started with Action Quake II mod, which was an action-movie inspired mod (complete with Lights, Camera, Action when a round starts). I wasn't too thrilled with sci-fi style FPS games, they held little appeal to me, but I easily logged a thousand hours on Action Quake. Then moved onto CS and BF2 from there. There went my high-school years!
Sorry to make this an "old-off" but I played Action Quake, a Quake II mod that was how you described your CS experience. An interesting feature on Action Quake that never made it to its modern counterparts was being able to jump into an enemy to perform a kick attack. It's also my first experience with friendly fire. I had a blast playing online with Action Quake. That was probably the time I realized mouse + keyboard was far superior to keyboard-only.
That’s around the time I started playing too. I still go through phases where I’ll get really into a new game. I don’t have the reaction time of the younger generation but the skills built up over decades of gaming allows me to stay competitive.
BF recreated his house and the square in front of it in hl2. He added secret room to his house. We only ever played it 1vs1 but it's one of my top 5 FPS memories ! The fun came from walking in a setting I knew and recognizing it as "our" immediate surroundings. It was not about killing each other, though blowing up part of the furniture in the house was fun.
I didn't like playing with people who were too much focused on killing+owning/taunting other players though, it was (and still is) my limit.
I remember being so enjoyed by the inability to walk into buildings and shoot from there that I tried to build a whole map full of office buildings. Don’t think I ever got further than a single building and a parking garage though.
was asked and very tempted to create a map of my school back in the day, but awareness of the ramifications stopped that from happening. additionally, the powers-that-be were very incompetent, especially in regards to judging these kinds of situations
I worked at a high-pressure game company and I remember an engineer showing me a Counterstrike map they made of our company's office building, desks and all. It was amusing at the time, but in retrospect, maybe I should have said something to HR.
Man, what a trip down memory lane. Learned to fear that AWP sound again immediately.
Counter to others I'm actually surprised by how little I enjoyed it. I used to play a ton of FPSes back in the day (CS betas to 1.6 heyday) then stopped for well over a decade. Picked up Call of Duty during the pandemic as a means to stay social with friends and told myself barely anything had changed. Boy was this a great lesson that things have, in fact, changed a lot.
Played this for a bit but ran into some trouble with the key mappings. CTRL to crouch means that I can't really press anything else without causing firefox to ruin the game.
* CTRL+R (reload) causes the page to refresh
* CTRL+W (walk forward) attempts to close the current tab
* CTRL+S (walk backward) opens a dialog to save the current page
* CTRL+D (walk right) bookmarks the current page
Luckily firefox shows a confirmation dialog before refresh or closing the tab, but that causes the game to freeze until you dismiss it.
For anyone interested in WebAssembly and the future of gaming in the browser - my team and I at Wonder Interactive are bringing the full power of native gaming to the web. We're building out a platform and suite of tools that allows developers to publish, host, share, and monetize their games directly to their players online, without 30% fees.
The current focus is on the Unreal Engine (4.24, 4.27) and UE5 support which is coming later this year. Other engines will follow such as Unity, Godot, Open 3D Engine, and custom engines we can provide porting for on our paid plans. We're building out a WebGPU backend for UE5, to really enable high end desktop and console quality games in HTML5.
I still have a copy of the alpha release version of CounterStrike here somewhere. As I recall, probably as a self-extracting exe but maybe a zip file, and it was about 8 megabytes; that's not quite so amazing as it sounds, as it was purely a mod for Half-Life and sat on top of an existing Half-Life installation.
I should check that it's available in historical repositories and if not, see where I can send it for posterity.
fy_iceworld was my favorite from 1.6. I recall nothing could touch it with regard to rapid, repeatable chaos. I've probably put 500 hours into that one map alone.
You will find an almost identical structure in virtually every Call of Duty multiplayer experience - One big room with 4 "cubes" in it that players fight around, with various degrees of partial cover scattered throughout.
I recall installing CS from CDs. I was so excited to play, but my internet was so slow it took basically the rest of the day to download the updates. Then, when I got into the game, some servers had mods and maps to download which took forever.
Needless to say, once I was playing I felt so gradified and cool. My dad brought home a 'flat' CRT a few months later from his work. It felt life changing at the time.
A while later, I thought it would be fun to try out some of the cheat packs.. It didn't take more than 15 minutes for a ban. Still have a VAC ban on record with Steam. 6,400ish days ago. Its an odd reminder, and badge of honor.
This is pretty wild! Seems like it's running the FWGS xash3d engine, which seems to be some sort of rewrite of the Valve goldsrc engine (which I didn't realize had available code to be rewritten)?
I'm curious about how it's actually executing in the browser (WebGL? WebGPU? WASM, even?) but cant seem to be able to get onto a server to poke around at the moment.
I have been recently playing CSGO with my family members.
Its honestly very difficult to play, its really not suited for Casual players(playing on speakers with mediocre mice and so on) especially with the very difficult aiming system.
But I didn't find anything that is both free or basically free and can run on everything, from macbooks with Intel/m2 GPU to a gaming PC.
Overwatch 2, too gimmicky and heavy
Fortnite, same thing and we hate battle royal, so no COD WZ2 and so on.
Its definitely an improvement on playing C&C Generals with endless problems that come with a game, which is checks notes 20 years old now.
I had a flashback to the day I figured out that the scroll wheel cancels the reload animation on the guns. I immediately became 10 times better at the game. Also, the zombie servers were mindless but fun.
Wow! this brought back a whole lot of memories. I spent countless hours of my childhood on de_dust, de_dust2, the Italy map and the pool one. I still remember the "Roger that", "Fire in the hole", "Follow me", and so on. Playing this on my constantly-virus-riddled Windows XP computer is one of my earliest computer memories.
spent so many hours playing this years ago.. great memories. too bad it doesn't seem to support inverting mouse y-axis or changing keybindings. too much muscle memory to overcome.
Its funny to say but this game has had a huge impact on my life.
I've joined cyber cafes and made life-long friends that last till now, travelled to different countries to play against other teams and won tournaments nation-wide when the main prize was a can of beer and a motherboard.
We used to pick-up our keyboards, discuss mouse DPI and how it influences aim as well as trying to figure out whether 640 or 800 was the best resolution.
I am glad that this game was made, such nostalgia!
Also if someone wants to go down the memory lane remember the golden age of CS movies? Annihilation?
[+] [-] zactato|3 years ago|reply
Most FPSs up to this point were SciFi based, guns like the BFG and plasma guns. Counterstrike's focus on realism really altered how you connected with the game. Columbine had happened very recently and was still very much in the zeitgeist. There was a very real cultural attack on video games as a scapegoat for the massacre.
My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool and would then run around and shoot each other. This was very taboo at the time. We knew that this would be interpreted as threatening by the powers-that-be at highschool, but it was exciting.
[+] [-] ddtaylor|3 years ago|reply
There was a small netcafe nearby when I was young that had a good quality T1 connection and hosted their own CS servers. Some of the players got together and actually mapped out the entire netcafe store itself and some of the surrounding area to create a "de_" style map.
This meant you could be playing CS and spawn in the same room that you were actually sitting in.
I can still remember vividly as a 14 year old playing the game and completely dominating a room full of 20-something older guys in the other room. They didn't know who I was and every time I would stomp them they would yell "FUCK" from the other room. Eventually after a series of absurd kills they angrily stormed over to our room in a hostile manner ready to fight and 100% convinced I was somehow cheating. The look on their face when they realized they were "prepared" to fight a kid and the realization as I openly allowed them to inspect the PC for whatever they thought was modified on it was hilarious.
[+] [-] howlin|3 years ago|reply
I had a friend that was the victim of a local news "expose" on this. Just a harmless high school geek who thought it would be fun to combine the School blueprints with his CAD course to build a "fun" way of digitizing the blueprints.
The main lesson we learned from this exercise is that the Duke Nukem 3D pistol is totally OP when used in realistically proportioned hallways. Auto-aim and all.
The other lesson we learned is that local news investigative reporters care more about a compelling story than to represent the mundane truth.
[+] [-] darkwraithcov|3 years ago|reply
We got our aggressions out on deathmatch, but it never occurred to us in a million years to actually hurt people IRL. We hated the jocks and the preps with the burning passion of a billion Wolf-Rayet stars, but never thought to hurt any of them, we simply accepted our lot in the genetic and social lottery and hoped to get revenge later in life (so far so good, judging by facebook).
[+] [-] geph2021|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rco8786|3 years ago|reply
Ah yes, forgotten artifacts of an innocent past.
[+] [-] Legion|3 years ago|reply
I think every budding DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D map creator made their school at one point. Of course, that was years before Columbine (despite the inclusion of DOOM in the Columbine finger-pointing), and nobody thought twice about it then.
[+] [-] naet|3 years ago|reply
I miss map making. The hammer editor wasn't the best but it was simple enough to figure out, and I actually had some old blueprints of the house layout that made it easier to get things to scale. I don't think many newer games like Call of Duty have the same community spirit of community servers, community maps, etc.
[+] [-] friendlyHornet|3 years ago|reply
I was never that good a mapper but it got me into computers in general.
If I had never discovered Hammer Editor on one summer afternoon in 2008, my life would be SOOOO different
[+] [-] ambrose2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anthk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gzalo|3 years ago|reply
I still have it, you can view some screenshots and download the bsp here: https://gzalo.com/en/projects/cs_electronicaort/
[+] [-] sasawpg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lewdev|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stanmancan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnchristopher|3 years ago|reply
I didn't like playing with people who were too much focused on killing+owning/taunting other players though, it was (and still is) my limit.
[+] [-] montag|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aeolun|3 years ago|reply
It’d be nice to see that again now…
[+] [-] hot_gril|3 years ago|reply
Same except in Age of Empires 2. We got in minor trouble for it.
[+] [-] 1letterunixname|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyinstallwoes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NovaPenguin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taskforcegemini|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1letterunixname|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpeterso|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timeon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afavour|3 years ago|reply
Counter to others I'm actually surprised by how little I enjoyed it. I used to play a ton of FPSes back in the day (CS betas to 1.6 heyday) then stopped for well over a decade. Picked up Call of Duty during the pandemic as a means to stay social with friends and told myself barely anything had changed. Boy was this a great lesson that things have, in fact, changed a lot.
[+] [-] bogwog|3 years ago|reply
* CTRL+R (reload) causes the page to refresh
* CTRL+W (walk forward) attempts to close the current tab
* CTRL+S (walk backward) opens a dialog to save the current page
* CTRL+D (walk right) bookmarks the current page
Luckily firefox shows a confirmation dialog before refresh or closing the tab, but that causes the game to freeze until you dismiss it.
Also sound didn't work at all
[+] [-] astlouis44|3 years ago|reply
The current focus is on the Unreal Engine (4.24, 4.27) and UE5 support which is coming later this year. Other engines will follow such as Unity, Godot, Open 3D Engine, and custom engines we can provide porting for on our paid plans. We're building out a WebGPU backend for UE5, to really enable high end desktop and console quality games in HTML5.
Further reading, with demos attached:
https://theimmersiveweb.com/blog
[+] [-] MuffinFlavored|3 years ago|reply
He had a special CRT monitor to get the best refresh rate to be as competitive as possible for the game
Feels like a lifetime ago
[+] [-] klaussilveira|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lqet|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EliRivers|3 years ago|reply
I should check that it's available in historical repositories and if not, see where I can send it for posterity.
[+] [-] bob1029|3 years ago|reply
You will find an almost identical structure in virtually every Call of Duty multiplayer experience - One big room with 4 "cubes" in it that players fight around, with various degrees of partial cover scattered throughout.
[+] [-] 0xbadcafebee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grapescheesee|3 years ago|reply
Needless to say, once I was playing I felt so gradified and cool. My dad brought home a 'flat' CRT a few months later from his work. It felt life changing at the time.
A while later, I thought it would be fun to try out some of the cheat packs.. It didn't take more than 15 minutes for a ban. Still have a VAC ban on record with Steam. 6,400ish days ago. Its an odd reminder, and badge of honor.
[+] [-] mushishi|3 years ago|reply
There was: "Exception thrown: Uncaught SimulateInfiniteLoop" Uncaught SimulateInfiniteLoop
[+] [-] kept3k|3 years ago|reply
The game play is so much better, and more intense in Counter-Strike:
* Respawn points are consistent
* You have to manage money
* It gets intense when you are the only one left on your team
[+] [-] cptcobalt|3 years ago|reply
I'm curious about how it's actually executing in the browser (WebGL? WebGPU? WASM, even?) but cant seem to be able to get onto a server to poke around at the moment.
[+] [-] rmccue|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesfinlayson|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spijdar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacooper|3 years ago|reply
Its honestly very difficult to play, its really not suited for Casual players(playing on speakers with mediocre mice and so on) especially with the very difficult aiming system.
But I didn't find anything that is both free or basically free and can run on everything, from macbooks with Intel/m2 GPU to a gaming PC.
Overwatch 2, too gimmicky and heavy
Fortnite, same thing and we hate battle royal, so no COD WZ2 and so on.
Its definitely an improvement on playing C&C Generals with endless problems that come with a game, which is checks notes 20 years old now.
[+] [-] sakopov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pharmakom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 8s2ngy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metabrew|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rightbyte|3 years ago|reply
It lagged way to much to be playable. Also sound seem to be not working.
[+] [-] kirso|3 years ago|reply
I've joined cyber cafes and made life-long friends that last till now, travelled to different countries to play against other teams and won tournaments nation-wide when the main prize was a can of beer and a motherboard.
We used to pick-up our keyboards, discuss mouse DPI and how it influences aim as well as trying to figure out whether 640 or 800 was the best resolution.
I am glad that this game was made, such nostalgia!
Also if someone wants to go down the memory lane remember the golden age of CS movies? Annihilation?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6gcmbioqiE&t=96s
[+] [-] RGamma|3 years ago|reply