Gift Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/arts/counter-strike-half-...

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

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.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWWhxfGq_yk

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 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.

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

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.

I Started with actionquake (aq2). check it out.

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”.

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

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.

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.

> After several other versions, Valve released Counter-Strike 2 in 2023 without Le’s direct handiwork.

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

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.

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 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

I can't seem to find anything.

The background video looks like an AI video for "generate a video of Counter Strike 1.4 gameplay"

Fond memories of 1.4 and 1.5, when it was still a Half-Life mod.

Anybody got a working archive link?

1.5 was peak CS in my opinion. No shield bullshit and massive amounts of customization and maps and servers.

as_oilrig ftw

My favorite game. It has singularly kept me fully entertained for 11 years.

Oh. the NYT... reference trusted paper on everything. HN niggaz' most beloved paper.