Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room

I have so much nostalgia for that time period.

Counter-strike was my introduction to how the Internet and TCP/IP worked. I built my first PC to play it. I learned linux to run servers for it. It inspired me and my friends to learn C to try and make our own mod. I made a website for my clan, self hosted it, and registered a domain for it.

The community was incredible, partly because of the server browser, as you point out. There was also a massive IRC community around it that was way more cohesive than what exists today. So CS was also my on ramp to IRC and the technology communities there.

I don't play a lot of games any more. Every now and then I'll try something. I have the GPU anyway and everything works great on Linux now. I found out there are third party server browsers for CS2 with modded servers. It is so tiny compared to the old days, but they exist. I played around on a couple around a year ago and had a good time. If you are feeling nostalgic, you should check it out.

I legit miss early 2000s gaming.

1) People interacted, they truly did. Dramas, friendship, everything. Where? Quakenet, Forums. Every clan had their channel, some easily reached 1000+ people.

2) People genuinely played together in teams: CS, Day of Defeat, you name it. You had your clan and spammed #5on5 on quakenet.

3) Those clans actually met in lan! At Smau Italian Lan Party 2002 there were more than 60 Counter Strike teams from *Italy alone*. And it was a bring your own computer event[1].

I know it's part nostalgia but I legit think it is borderline impossible to have anywhere near the same level of interactions with people today. Reddit is just not a good substitute for legacy threaded forums. Discussions die fast, they don't even have the material time to develop meaningfully.

[1] https://www.aspidetr.com/images/immagini/blu/varie/smau02_03...

> I will forever mourn the general demise of server browsers.

I miss GameSpy, the original application, not the service it morphed into later. It was so easy to find a server to play on, playing the levels/mods you wanted to play.

Before that, I spent a lot of time (and money from my dad's credit card) on DWANGO. For those not familiar with DWANGO, you dialed in to their servers and then it acted like you were on a LAN. You could play games like Doom, Doom 2, Duke Nukem 3D, etc against other people. There was a main chat room to talk about what games you wanted to play.

It was also a much nicer place to play, partly because you had to pay _per minute_ in each game. The price wasn't anything crazy, if I recall, but it definitely kept people focused on the game.

Also met some good people and ended up working on a gaming site with one (MeccaWorld.com, on the off chance someone remembers that - I ran the Quake section) and started a company with them a decade or so later.

In general I see this as an issue of gaming becoming more professionally run and maturing over time.

Server Browsers make sense in a world in which members of the community are self-hosting their own infrastructure for others to play on. While a great way to build community, it can be a problem when it comes to player retention and competitive mechanics.

Player retention can often suffer over the long-term as such communities establish boundaries and rules, eventually orienting around a small clique of individuals, increasing the friction for integrating new members into the community.

Additionally, the competitive mechanics, which often draw a large amount of players, can suffer as player-run infrastructure can vary wildly in its connection, uptime, speed, etc. and bring a risk of unsanctioned modifications, cheats, and hacks, all negatively affecting the player experience.

Overall, its a tradeoff, the community building aspects of player run servers can truly build colorful and vibrant communities, but this can be at the expense of overall player retention, trading a large and accessible playerbase for a small dedicated community.

Most game companies choose the route of building and running dedicated server infrastructure. Which of course, internally run servers tend to be built with a set image that gets cloned each time more are needed, making each one indistinguishable and fungible. The only problem becomes assigning the players accross servers depending on which ones have available capacity, which is where matchmaking comes in.

Thought I'd throw this out there, but server browsers are still around in CS2. There are a large number of servers populated around the clock with everything from surf maps, bhop, to even old custom maps from 1.6.

It's still very much alive.

Similar story, running modded COD4 dedicated servers largely got me into programming.

It's depressing the modern COD lobbies - chucked in with skill matched randoms on a small range of gamemodes, comms kept to a minimum so no one gets offended.

Then don't get me started how 50% of playtime is spent loading / in lobbies so eye balls on store can be maximised - I'll pass.

I also miss this. I used to be an admin of a popular Spanish community for Garry's Mod, TTT specifically. The whole community existed because we had our own server(s), and then added a BBS forum. It's impossible to do that anymore, afaik.

I've been playing a lot of Half-Life 1 deathmatch on the few servers left for the last year and a half, and have been having a lot of fun!

Thanks for sharing this! Very interesting!

I believe de_dust2 is likely still the most played FPS map. Not sure which other map could have dethroned it. It can’t be Fortnite since Fortnite changes the map every few months and nowadays makes a new one every year or so.

I guess Blood Gulch from the time when Halo was super popular was a very popular map as well.

Then you also have 2fort from the Team Fortress games.

But yes I would say de_dust2 is very likely still the most played FPS map and it will likely stay that way.

Whenever I jump into CS I only play dust2. It’s such a perfect map.

I also have a soft spot for Aztec because of the rain. I would join empty servers just to hang out on Aztec for the aesthetic.

Dave Johnston also has a write up on his blog, for those interested: https://www.johnsto.co.uk/design/making-dust2/

Always enjoyed de_dust more than de_dust2. But I am clearly in the minority on that one.

The most fun one I've used is that it is my home environment in VR. In 3D it is a weird feeling to walk around and see how all the old sight lines are. I still duck a bit walking past mid doors :)

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=21021...

After De_Dust2, the Jungle Warfare map in the first Ghost Recon game that has a special place in my heart.

I'd like to throw Facing Worlds in the ring...

Well, not just FPS games. It got ported to Assetto Corsa[1], which is a driving simulator.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yeh5vFG1GK0

You'll probably like this short series on fy_iceworld if you haven't seen it already: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-legacy-of-fy_iceworld-c...

But yes, I was never really a 1.6 player but I felt the same way about Garry's Mod maps. Joining a random server and seeing the maps and assets download and never really knowing what you were going to spawn into... it was wonderfully weird in a way that reminds me of the individuality of the Old Internet™. It might be nostalgia talking but there's some crispness and snappiness to the Source engine that games these days don't quite have.

Modding and mapping were what made CS great in my opinion. Since CS:GO, Valve has been quietly killing that scene by making it harder and harder for people to find these game modes.

But to be honest, I think it's an artifact of our (or at least my) generation. I've played CS for thousands of hours, same with l4d and cod2/4, and I don't _need_ a battle pass, seasons, constant updates etc. Though when chatting with my ~14 year younger cousin about this some months ago, he said it'd be "boring to play a game that doesn't get updates". So.. different times :)

When CS:Go came out, one of the younger guys on my team got into it, and invited me to come play some rounds at a LAN cafe. A lot of the skills were rusty, but the muscle memory was still there from playing the original starting from beta 0.7. He was stunned, not realizing that I had many more years of practice playing what was essentially the same game.

I don't really play games anymore. The last one I got into was Tribes: Ascend, and when that died, I never started another one. I enjoyed the community aspect of it, and I was never one for RPG elements in games that weren't RPG games, which seemed to become an increasingly emphasized strategy for driving engagement and retention.

I don't recognize the industry anymore, and while I used to feel sad about that, I've since come to realize that, for me at least, the experiences I had playing those games were as much a product of the time and place as they were about the game. I can't go back and see stormwind for the first time again, but I'm sure kids these days are experiencing their own version of that, even if it's not quite the wild west that it used to be. The gambling aspects can piss right off, though.

Likewise for Dota 2 players. Some of those old / early cosmetics have shot up in price. A friend of mine I used to play with had a $500 item. Getting rid of them may fund your game purchases for a bit.

There are plenty of sites out there that can give you a value of your inventory. Just make sure your privacy settings for your inventory are set to "public": https://steamcommunity.com/my/edit/settings (though I'd recommend changing it back to private after you use one of the tools, since scammers will try and target you if you have public high value items).

That's already over ten years ago... Wow CS:GO is still the new CS for me, that never catched on and everybody played 1.6

I did this too! A few hundred dollars in my steam wallet now. Wonder how that compares to the money I would've made/lost by opening all of them.

Made $350 selling all my crates when csgo 2 came out

Same for TF2. I got like ~300€

Coming from UT/CS and a bunch of other games where skins were simple mods I hate that skins cost so much real world money and so I refuse to spend a cent in protest.

Game with cool mechanics and a universe to play it in, that is worth $$$. Making your shirt green is not worth $... it is worth a colour-wheel implementation.

Did this a few years ago and made close to $350.

However, if I reflect on how much time I spent in the game in order to receive that much money it's laughable as it was easily 2 thousand hours of game play.

I have two tips:

Sell hardware and then you can get real cash. For example, use the Steam Wallet balance to buy Steam Deck Docks which you ship directly from Steam to your customer on eBay.

Secondly, use Steam Economy Enhancer.

I have some old crates, including the oroginal 'Weapons crate'. But looking at the steam store, it's only worth about $100 usd.

Is there a more valuable one?

Hate it all you want, but it's the sole reason Counter-Strike still exists today. Without skins, Valve would have shut the door on the game (and quite possibly the company entirely).

Skins is literally a money printing machine.

> I would love to see a modern shooter with nice graphics and self hostable servers in the same niche as the old CS.

I mean, that is still CS: you want one without gambling (which is reasonable!)

As someone with 10,000+ hours in CSGO/CS2, I think your argument is weak clearly is coming from someone who is a boomer.

CS is one of, if not, the least egregious "loot cases" systems in the gaming industry. Every case you open, gives you a reward, which can be sold. Each case you open has fixed odds and is not manipulated by the gaming companies to psychologically torment you. You get no benefit from using skins or stickers on your gun. It is purely cosmetic. Compared to other games which rely on pay2win mechanics, CSGO/CS2's systems are great.

I think skins are one of the best parts of CS. It blows my mind you can have skins worth thousands of dollars, trade them between friends like collectables, sell them for real life money and make your inventory look cool.

I agree the third party skin gambling sites aren't good, although the whole base concept, within Steam and a handful of trusted selling sites are perfectly fine.

Your gripe with the eSports side of this is also stupid. Have you watched / seen any sport on the planet? Gambling is apart of sports and sports culture, its one of the main revenue streams. Gambling helps grassroot sports and helps get kids into sports.

The whole "often give a segment to gambling people talking about odds" is rubbish. At most ESL, Blast, PGL events, the most that is even talked about odds is a brief mention of the odds, no breakdowns, no match betting options, etc. It's very, very tame. I likely have hours watching CS than I do playing too.

CS eSports is in a weird place because the funding comes from two main places in 2025, Saudi sportswashing and gambling. There used to be tons of VC, although that dried up when eSports didn't take off exactly how everyone expected it to. CS was one of the more safe investments are the game has been around for effectively two decades and has always had a competitive scene, dating back to early 2000s. CS is one of the most enjoyable and easy to watch eSports so its pretty enticing for viewers (and advertisers) although the marketablility of CS is hard due to bombs, guns and terrorists.

eSports needs a pay per view option otherwise the funding is always going to come from sketchy places, but the average eSports fan does not care enough to pay because they are too cheap to pay for stuff, or too young to have the funding to do so. Unlike traditional sport.

You are seemingly fine with killing gambling, so might as well kill all tier 2 and 3 scenes, including local scenes. They are mostly funded by gambling and even so, people throw matches because they get like 1k a month for being a tier 2 pro. People need to live and throwing gets more than their wage.

Your final point is Twitch chat messages saying stupid shit about match-fixing, I am not sure why this is even relevant. Studying twitch chat is like studying The Onion, not sure why you would.

Richard Lewis has talked extensively about everything I've said above.

#priming

Uhm, wow. Most winnable matches often enough end when the drugs wear off for hundreds of reasons.

You are looking at it from the wrong angle. From what I have seen, it's rarely a whole team that fucks up while winning. Also: often enough: they don't seem to be aware of the pattern that just occurred in their brains (are not, as far as I learned from Paul E.). I believe these kids are put on drugs without consent.

I have no proof, of course.

I noticed it first in soccer back in '16, I think. Which surprised me because it was not boxing or wrestling or the UFC, where such things are the standard.

Why does the gambling side affect you? Just don't care what your gun or your body armor looks like, and you can play the game normally. As far as I understand it, at least the way it was the last time I played like 7 years ago, the loot boxes didn't give you special powers in the game, they were just skins

Dude i love play-cs, I feel like there is a slight lag in the browser compared to the native app that I was playing on Windows back in the day... maybe i gotta switch over to Chrome from FF.

So many good mods back then - "the specialists" I remember being particularly fun as well

The AQ2 community perceived CS as way too slow though. No wonder when you are used to strafe jumping through team jungle and urban :-)

If you haven't seen it, TastySpleen Studios is working on a spiritual successor to aq2 called Midnight Guns.

AQ2 was such a fun mod. It's been a while since I played, but if I recall you could some real John-Woo style moves as if you are in an action movie.

The article says that Le created it though:

    Two years later he created Action Quake 2, a fast-paced game inspired by “Die Hard”

I loved aq2 so much, just an incredible mod with so many gaming moments seared in my memories.

Leaping off the cliff on "cliff" straight through the hatch in the cable car breaking my legs but right next to my opponent and blasting him with the double barrelled shotgun as they turned round. Classic .

Yeah I dabbled with the “competitive” play in 1.6 back in the day when it was finding matches on irc but most of my fun came from the communities I played with consistently. Maybe you can find these in some form but it’s not what most people are talking about these days if they say they “play counter strike”. I don’t really like the seriousness of ranked play so I never got back into it.

Yeah, I started playing it on vacation in a German lan cafe.

Came back to Canada and asked EB games for a copy but they didn’t know what counter strike was, and I didn’t understand that it was a mod for half life

I can't quit, it's the only game I love but my hands are getting old.

The same Valve that one day decided to put ads in spawn on de_dust2? :) They pretty much refused to fix anything related to Counter-Strike until they realized they could use it to sell the equivalent of hats.

I'd argue that the only reason Steam survived when it came out was because Valve forced people to use to play Counter-Strike. They've done better in the past 15 years though, I'll give them that!

Newer versions of counterstrike have skins/loot boxes