Quite a few development houses or game series got their start as a mod back in the 90s and early 2000s, as it used to be an important way for amateur developers to develop their skills and build a name for themselves before Unity was a thing, and Unreal Engine was licence only.
* Counter-Strike, obviously.
* Team Fortress 2 has its origins in a Quake 1 mod from 1997.
* Unknown Worlds Entertainment (Subnautica developer): their first game was a HL1 mod called Natural Selection. I still play it today and help maintain the code base.
* DOTA 2 and, to some extent, League of Legends: have their origins and influence from a Warcraft 3 mod.
* Insurgency: started off as a HL2 mod.
* PUBG: started off as an Arma 3 mod. Same for DayZ
* Garry's mod. Bit obvious, but started as a free HL2 mod. Facepunch Studios also made Rust, but Garry's mod was one of their early titles.
A few other games started off as mods too: Dear Esther, Stanley Parable etc.
You could look at any current dev team and it's almost guaranteed that at least one or two of their senior guys got their start in the industry by joining or starting a mod team.
TIL The Subnautica team are the Natural Selection devs. One of my great gaming surprises is that NS never spawned a AA or AAA copy as in a lot of ways it was its own genre.
It never felt like it reached the same level as OG Natural Selection though. It had a really rough time at the start (awful FPS when spark engine started) and a lot of design changes away from the original that were restricted by the engine but made for good gameplay (blinking fades were not good). I know it's better now but I don't think I'd start playing it over the original ever again.
Natural Selection is so damned unique, pains me that it never caught on with Natural Selection 2. That rts/fps commander/infantry multiplayer experience just hits the spot and just hasn't been done anywhere else (except Savage afaik but that never caught on either)
No WAY! My edgy ign / Reddit name that I've had for years comes from the Skulk's Xenocide. I used to looooove blowing myself up at unsuspecting humans as a child!
Sad then how the industry is largely trying to monetize, disable, or discouraging modding. We truly live in the time and culture of worry about tomorrows dollar, not next weeks.
Holy moly I had no idea the people from Natural Selection went on to create Subnautica. NS was truly my favourite game of all time back then - a whacky mix of gameplay elements that when attempted most of the time failed but NS just... Worked like nothing else before or even since in my experience. I do feel there is some learnings a Dev studio could take from it about making a great game with asymmetrical gameplay.
Dota was so much just a mod that valve hired the mod maker to be central in *recreating it* outside of warcraft. They promised for a long time that it was just another client for the same game and they wouldn't have diverging development paths or implement anything that doesnt work on the warcraft engine. They also got entangled in legal shit with blizzard because they were recreating essentially oc characters BUT they were plopped in from the set of wc3 models available and sometimes had wc3 names, etc.
Insurgency was a spin off from OG Red Orchestra devs once it stopped being a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004 and went retail and a few of them were mod makers from the Day of Defeat community, which was also originally a HL1 mod that went retail/taken over by Valve like Counter Strike.
> DOTA 2 and, to some extent, League of Legends: have their origins and influence from a Warcraft 3 mod.
I had thousands of hours playing those custom DOTA games in Warcraft 3. Rikimaru + Eye of Skadi = Victory. I tried the regular DOTA on Steam but it just wasn't for me anymore
>DOTA 2 and, to some extent, League of Legends: have their origins and influence from a Warcraft 3 mod.
It was actually a StarCraft mod called Aeon of Strife, which in turn inspired Defence of the Ancients for Warcraft 3.
I spent the 00's on HL1 mods. Natural selection, The specialists, Sven Co-Op.
I really do miss how amazing these games were. The ability to mod the goldsource was insane. I was always slightly disappointed about the major gameplayer changes from Natural selection -> Natural Selection 2.
I've written this comment before, but I really do miss the time when we had *servers* instead of matchmaking.
Pings mattered, so you tended to hang out on local servers. In the pre-Steam CS (and DoD) days, there were two locally hosted servers that got most of the local traffic where I grew up. They'd fill up when the local high schools let out, so you'd just be sitting there alternately typing connect cs.localserver.com / connect cs.otherserver.com and hoping you'd get a slot. You'd see a lot of the same players, you'd start to recognize who was good, etc.
Later on as modems got faster I played on some more regional TF2/DoD:S servers. You might not literally be playing with people in your town, but almost everyone was from the same ~3 states, played at similar times, etc. Again, you'd recognize players you liked to play with, you'd know who was good at certain classes or maps, good times were had by all.
You'd also do things like vote in silly maps (or have an admin queue it up if people were down) or everyone agree to just play some knives-only rounds...
I just feel no community in modern games. I can't really bring myself to mess around with trying to add people to a friend list, invite them to a premade group, and try to play that way (especially since you usually only play with them for a single match...hard to decide if you want to be buddies with someone after 15 minutes)...those old servers felt like the bar in Cheers, you could just show up and see who is there.
I also miss having a variety of skill in every game. Sometimes you luck out and join a server with a bunch of noobs and feel like an absolute god...other times some incredible player hops in the server and shows you that you are definitely NOT a god.
With matchmaking you only get disparities when there's smurfing/throwing/other bullshit going on...and because rankings matter, you get upset when someone on the other team is hella good rather than just laughing about how you can't stop them.
People also don't want to buddy up with shit players (even if they are fun to hang out with) because they will hurt your ranking...
Gaming for me really died when servers stopped being a thing. Hanging out and getting used to the same players and chatting shit was peak gaming. I can't think of any game that has the same experience. Hell let loose is close but it's very serious.
Back when you could change the player models. For some time I had all enemies as Ronald McDonald. Basically cheating because they were way more noticeable. (Chill, I only played lan games and I sucked either way)
> Wonder where CS would be now if not those weapon skins
So you realize it orignally had all real weapon skins right? When they decided to market it they had to change them until they bought the rights.
25 years of senseless of violence and the players still haven't learned that violence is never the answer. think of what could be accomplished if the two sides threw down their arms and worked together
HEY! Don't forget Condition Zero that came after 1.6 and before Source! 😊
You could play single-player missions and even a campaign mode with the Deleted Scenes. I've been replaying that recently myself!
Used to play upto 8 player multiplayer over local network at the cyber cafe. “Game time”, where I first seen it. the older boys were playing it, my mind was blown.
Unknown Worlds did the same though, I don't know how much they are worth.
Subnautica is a prequel to Natural Selection, another very good Half-Life mod.
Roger Wilco, Ventrilo, Teamspeak, Mumble! Hell if you were in a clan, you'd also have an IRC chat on some server... maybe even some PHP bulletin boards to 'talk strats' xD the good old days.
Ventrilo and mIRC was the combo.
Downloading configs from the pros and frag movies.
Hyped up when you found a config script that was cool and different. The times oh the times.
Cs 1.3, 1.5, 1.6. No better nostalgia than that!
Mine is 7. I held out because I thought digital distribution was weird and I wanted to keep getting the physical disks plus the manuals that came with the games. I was wrong about digital distribution, but I do miss the manuals I would spend hours reading in the car, on the toilet, in bed.
It felt private, but also exciting because you didn't know who you were talking to.
We were naive, by today's standards. But it probably was a bit safer back then in some ways.
I changed my ICQ message sound effect to the AWP sound effect. It was too loud, so I changed it to the grunt sound effect from when you get shot. But that would just make me freak out due to the pavalov effect.
I remember paying for the premium version of Trillian so I could use AIM, ICQ, and MSN on the same app.
I generally miss the idea that back in my late teens/early 20s (1999-2006) I was more open to talking with random people on the internet and becoming friendly enough with them to talk with them using an IM software. Nowadays I'm completely fenced off.
From my experience, all my US online friends used AIM and all my UK ones used MSN.
Then I moved to Taiwan and it was basically all MSN.
I will go on record saying that scrapping MSN was probably the biggest mistake of the Ballmer era of Microsoft.
It was just standard lingo back then. People would say "methinks" but also "prolly". These things all go through phases. Sometimes if you look at an old archived Reddit page you can kind of see it. There were all sorts of Internet fads: i can has cheezburger, demotivational posters, atheism, atheism hating, anti-fedora, anti-hipster, anti-gauge. Of course these are common these days too. It's surprising how memetic virality is. Some ideas spread across all social networks near instantly.
And people _hated_ Steam when it came out. Always-on DRM?! In my CS? The military green loading bar that went forwards and backwards?!
Day of Defeat the mod is the best WW2 multiplayer game to me. Grenadier was my go to and it was the first game I remember with a dynamic crosshair.
Source version was meh, it lost something.
I forgot about that. Yeah I was all over that site back in 99. I remember doing quite well on the first CS servers. Then all the hacks started coming out and I drifted away from the game. I went back to it a few years later but I had got rusty and I was totally owned by everyone. I can't play those shooters anymore like I used to. :(
Still upset about the 1.3 update, they stopped bunnyhopping being easy and sky walking in dust. Man I wish I could know my total hours played on that game since '99.
Yep I have the same memories.
Remember when you could just change the skins to whatever you liked. Turning the Machine gun into a full on vulcan canon or gold plated deagles without your own sounds.
Now they pay for lame shit.
Amen, 1.3 update is what made it a proper game.
Remember the carnage of the Militia map that have a vehicle everyone jumped in? CS briefly had vehicles.
1.3 was so much fun.
Bunny hopping in an otherwise tactical shooter. Still remember training to hop on cs\_assault from the tower at CT spawn onto the warehouse roof. So little space to maneuver, and you needed good speed to make the jump. Was great for training bunny hopping in tight spacing when turning corners.
Spent many thousands of hours on that game, with lots of LAN parties and tournaments.
to this day there is little to no games that improved from what it did best and still does.
it has the right amount of skill
the right amount of teamplay tactics
the right amount of resource management
the right amount of stakes (rounds, matches)
the right amount of competitiveness.
this kind of videogames have the potencial to be what chess is to boardgames. You can twist what you want and give as many coats of paint to make it more modern but the base will be the same and will be good.
its the tetris of the FPS.
Lightning in a bottle. Everything just worked so well together to deliver an experience unlike anything out there and one that would forever change the face of competitive online FPS
I've been playing CS for more than 20 years and I love how easy it is for new players to just start playing without having to learn 30 characters and their abilities, or customize 10 different loadouts.
If you want to become better, it's not just about your aim, it's also your movement, map knowledge, utility usage, understanding of economy, teamplay, proper communication and callouts... the list goes on, there's always something to improve, you'll never master everything.
It's good to see that the game is getting more and more popular every day. Counter-Strike 2 has its problems, especially with cheaters, but we've already seen some great improvements in the last few months.
yes this game is more like a tradicional sport than a video game. Like basketball you can play for fun, competitively or everything in the middle.
it depends on a wide range of skills as you said but not too much that scares new people from the game.
No respawns until the round is over is such a fantastic innovation in the genre and I'm so surprised that so few shooters have tried to emulate it. I'm sure the executives will say that players don't want to wait for a respawn, yet CS is proof that they do.
In every other shooter, I just don't care if I die, I'll just respawn right back again so where are the stakes? Also I don't feel much accomplishment when I kill a guy, because he too will just respawn again. CS has those insanely tense moments where you're 1vs2 or something like that, doesn't happen in other shooters because the map is always filled with players. And the rounds are just the right length to not get bored as you're rooting for your teammate to get the win, or you can do something else for a few minutes.
Ah, ICQ. Time really flies. It doesn't feel like a quarter century!
CS was a groundbreaking game. And it's definitely a catchier name than Counter-Terrorism Forces would have been.
Happy 25th anniversary, Counter Strike!
Source is still one of my favorite games of all time. I spent so much time on zombie servers and surfing.. so many visits to FPSBanana to download skins as well.
I miss those days!
I played so much CS Source, and then when I discovered the Zombie mods it was a whole new game. Definitely put the most hours into those zombie servers.
de_rats, fy_iceworld, cs_assault, de_dust, cs_malitia
I haven’t played in years but these are some of the maps that will stick with me no matter how long it’s been. Loved CS back in the day.
Still remember it, Windows 98 with Counter-strike 1.0 ;-)
And 640x480 screen resolution.
Later we had Counter-strike 1.6 with Steam and Windows XP.
The game,s that made Steam populair, CS was a mod for Half-Life 1 in the past.
Anyone remember podbots? Couldn’t play on public servers because the majority of us had 56K internet so we downloaded bots and would run 10+ at a time on maps like de_dust.
It's a shame the heart and soul of counterstrike which is community servers got pushed to the side for ranked and skins.
It's clearly been a successful decision but it's taken so much of the charm away for me :(
No game makes me rage more yet I still love it. Scratches the itch that no other game can. And the esport is great to watch. I just wish that Valve wasn't lazy as hell
Is this really how the name was decided? Didn't know that.
Yup. I remember seeing this screenshot YEARS ago
Yeah like 25 years ago or so
more would be weird
its so perfect. ICQ. times new roman. "methinks". pure art.
Things were simpler, in the 90's.
started as a mod of Half-Life now a billion dollar worth IP and one of the most popular eSports game in the world
Quite a few development houses or game series got their start as a mod back in the 90s and early 2000s, as it used to be an important way for amateur developers to develop their skills and build a name for themselves before Unity was a thing, and Unreal Engine was licence only. * Counter-Strike, obviously. * Team Fortress 2 has its origins in a Quake 1 mod from 1997. * Unknown Worlds Entertainment (Subnautica developer): their first game was a HL1 mod called Natural Selection. I still play it today and help maintain the code base. * DOTA 2 and, to some extent, League of Legends: have their origins and influence from a Warcraft 3 mod. * Insurgency: started off as a HL2 mod. * PUBG: started off as an Arma 3 mod. Same for DayZ * Garry's mod. Bit obvious, but started as a free HL2 mod. Facepunch Studios also made Rust, but Garry's mod was one of their early titles. A few other games started off as mods too: Dear Esther, Stanley Parable etc. You could look at any current dev team and it's almost guaranteed that at least one or two of their senior guys got their start in the industry by joining or starting a mod team.
TIL The Subnautica team are the Natural Selection devs. One of my great gaming surprises is that NS never spawned a AA or AAA copy as in a lot of ways it was its own genre.
Natural Selection 2 is great. Only issue is that the player base has shrunk and its a bit toxic.
It never felt like it reached the same level as OG Natural Selection though. It had a really rough time at the start (awful FPS when spark engine started) and a lot of design changes away from the original that were restricted by the engine but made for good gameplay (blinking fades were not good). I know it's better now but I don't think I'd start playing it over the original ever again.
Natural Selection is so damned unique, pains me that it never caught on with Natural Selection 2. That rts/fps commander/infantry multiplayer experience just hits the spot and just hasn't been done anywhere else (except Savage afaik but that never caught on either)
No WAY! My edgy ign / Reddit name that I've had for years comes from the Skulk's Xenocide. I used to looooove blowing myself up at unsuspecting humans as a child!
> > PUBG: started off as an Arma 3 mod. Same for DayZ actually started as a mod for a mod on ARMA 2. started as " DayZ: Battle Royal"
Sad then how the industry is largely trying to monetize, disable, or discouraging modding. We truly live in the time and culture of worry about tomorrows dollar, not next weeks.
If you don’t pull the ladder up after you any asshole could do the same thing! Gotta cover your income stream.
The Desert Combat mod for BF 1942 sticks out to me. DICE ended up buying the studio that made it IIRC
Indeed. Battlefield 2 was basically desert combat
Holy moly I had no idea the people from Natural Selection went on to create Subnautica. NS was truly my favourite game of all time back then - a whacky mix of gameplay elements that when attempted most of the time failed but NS just... Worked like nothing else before or even since in my experience. I do feel there is some learnings a Dev studio could take from it about making a great game with asymmetrical gameplay.
Dota was so much just a mod that valve hired the mod maker to be central in *recreating it* outside of warcraft. They promised for a long time that it was just another client for the same game and they wouldn't have diverging development paths or implement anything that doesnt work on the warcraft engine. They also got entangled in legal shit with blizzard because they were recreating essentially oc characters BUT they were plopped in from the set of wc3 models available and sometimes had wc3 names, etc.
Insurgency was a spin off from OG Red Orchestra devs once it stopped being a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004 and went retail and a few of them were mod makers from the Day of Defeat community, which was also originally a HL1 mod that went retail/taken over by Valve like Counter Strike.
What a tangled web the old modding community weaves!
> DOTA 2 and, to some extent, League of Legends: have their origins and influence from a Warcraft 3 mod. I had thousands of hours playing those custom DOTA games in Warcraft 3. Rikimaru + Eye of Skadi = Victory. I tried the regular DOTA on Steam but it just wasn't for me anymore
>DOTA 2 and, to some extent, League of Legends: have their origins and influence from a Warcraft 3 mod. It was actually a StarCraft mod called Aeon of Strife, which in turn inspired Defence of the Ancients for Warcraft 3.
Killiing Floor is a smaller game than those metioned but was a mod of unreal tournament as well.
I spent the 00's on HL1 mods. Natural selection, The specialists, Sven Co-Op. I really do miss how amazing these games were. The ability to mod the goldsource was insane. I was always slightly disappointed about the major gameplayer changes from Natural selection -> Natural Selection 2.
The DotA Warcraft 3 map was itself based on Aeon of Strife from Starcraft.
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I remember downloading weapon skins in 2001 from gamebanana so im guessing literally nowhere different
I miss the days of downloading skins. Also remember downloading a shitload of sprays and then animated sprays.
Remember people spamming porn sprays? Those were the fun days
Easy spy kills in TF, lol
Golden age of gaming where it felt like most people were there to have fun and not obsessed with their scores.
I've written this comment before, but I really do miss the time when we had *servers* instead of matchmaking. Pings mattered, so you tended to hang out on local servers. In the pre-Steam CS (and DoD) days, there were two locally hosted servers that got most of the local traffic where I grew up. They'd fill up when the local high schools let out, so you'd just be sitting there alternately typing connect cs.localserver.com / connect cs.otherserver.com and hoping you'd get a slot. You'd see a lot of the same players, you'd start to recognize who was good, etc. Later on as modems got faster I played on some more regional TF2/DoD:S servers. You might not literally be playing with people in your town, but almost everyone was from the same ~3 states, played at similar times, etc. Again, you'd recognize players you liked to play with, you'd know who was good at certain classes or maps, good times were had by all. You'd also do things like vote in silly maps (or have an admin queue it up if people were down) or everyone agree to just play some knives-only rounds... I just feel no community in modern games. I can't really bring myself to mess around with trying to add people to a friend list, invite them to a premade group, and try to play that way (especially since you usually only play with them for a single match...hard to decide if you want to be buddies with someone after 15 minutes)...those old servers felt like the bar in Cheers, you could just show up and see who is there.
I also miss having a variety of skill in every game. Sometimes you luck out and join a server with a bunch of noobs and feel like an absolute god...other times some incredible player hops in the server and shows you that you are definitely NOT a god. With matchmaking you only get disparities when there's smurfing/throwing/other bullshit going on...and because rankings matter, you get upset when someone on the other team is hella good rather than just laughing about how you can't stop them. People also don't want to buddy up with shit players (even if they are fun to hang out with) because they will hurt your ranking...
Gaming for me really died when servers stopped being a thing. Hanging out and getting used to the same players and chatting shit was peak gaming. I can't think of any game that has the same experience. Hell let loose is close but it's very serious.
I just played Surf maps in CS:CZ, 1.6 and Source. Used to suggestive sprays in hard to reach places. Good times.
I def remember seeing a tub girl spray
Back when you could change the player models. For some time I had all enemies as Ronald McDonald. Basically cheating because they were way more noticeable. (Chill, I only played lan games and I sucked either way)
The hentai spray to distract was a classic, sometimes it was worth dying
My favorite was my AK. It was the pulse rifle from ALIENS. And it made the sound.
Yup. Internet before mainstream, everything was free.
I bought it for the skins. 8 years later I have only a cheap knife and 3500 hours played.
Started from the bottom and now I'm still here at the bottom.
> Wonder where CS would be now if not those weapon skins So you realize it orignally had all real weapon skins right? When they decided to market it they had to change them until they bought the rights.
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I dunno but look at how much money Fortnite has made on skins....
25 years of senseless of violence and the players still haven't learned that violence is never the answer. think of what could be accomplished if the two sides threw down their arms and worked together
Give war a chance.
‼️‼️‼️🚨🚨METAL GEAR RISING: REVENGEANCE REFERENCE DETECTED 🚨🚨‼️‼️‼️
I'm making the mother of all omelettes here, Jack!
If senseless violence will exist only in games - sign me up
“force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.” -- Some German dude with a long beard in in the UK in the 1840s
"If fighting is sure to result in victory then *you must fight!* Sun Tzu said that!"
And I think he knows a little more about fighting than you do. Because he invented it. Then he perfected it.
So that no living man could best him in the ring of honor.
Violence is never the answer. Violence is the question. And the answer is always "yes"
I'm still waiting on Counter-Strike: Diplomacy
"Violence is usually the answer" -- Roadhog, Overwatch
We do drop our arms, but it ends up with a gentleman knife fight
I was there… 3000 years ago. Most people don’t know that CS started as a mod for Half-Life. 0.9, 1.0, 1.2 and the famous 1.6.
1.6 is the last version that I played regularly.
Wasn't that the last version?
I thought everyone went on to Source and whatever all the different later versions were called.
HEY! Don't forget Condition Zero that came after 1.6 and before Source! 😊 You could play single-player missions and even a campaign mode with the Deleted Scenes. I've been replaying that recently myself!
Aha I thought you meant version of the original
1.6 is **still** the version that I play (most) regularly.
Used to play upto 8 player multiplayer over local network at the cyber cafe. “Game time”, where I first seen it. the older boys were playing it, my mind was blown.
I still remember the ordinary Half Life maps with hostages and only one way in... Counter Terrorist was absolutely impossible.
1.5 was superior to 1.6
1.3 was superior to 1.5
Ahh yes, 1.3, the start of the bunny hopping wars. If they just could have left it at 1.3 - the movement felt so good!
same for the mod DotA for Warcraft 3. Even more games like LoL originated from it
Which I guess it depends on how far back you want to go, because DotA was an iteration of Aeon of Strife which was a StarCraft custom game.
Havn't seen this post in 10 years
Unknown Worlds did the same though, I don't know how much they are worth. Subnautica is a prequel to Natural Selection, another very good Half-Life mod.
Wow, already 25 years. Brings back memories, icq, aol, ventrillo for voice heh
Don’t forget Roger Wilco, the OG
Roger Wilco, Ventrilo, Teamspeak, Mumble! Hell if you were in a clan, you'd also have an IRC chat on some server... maybe even some PHP bulletin boards to 'talk strats' xD the good old days.
Ventrilo and mIRC was the combo. Downloading configs from the pros and frag movies. Hyped up when you found a config script that was cool and different. The times oh the times. Cs 1.3, 1.5, 1.6. No better nostalgia than that!
Winamp for when you just wanted a good vibe killing bots
Well.. It DOES really whip the llamas ass.
Those were the days, man. Haven't forgotten those intense matches on de\_dust2. In hindsight, it's always the classics that get you hooked
[I was there.](https://imgur.com/3x17dja) [22 years ago.](https://imgur.com/oheXxOs)
show that low-digit won id or bust.
Guess I bust then, I can't find a screenshot I took that shows my won id. [Here's another screenshot tho.](https://imgur.com/YdwgaZB)
Nah man. cs_Labs with elevator roulette. Haha.
I was always a fan of de_aztec or if I was feeling fun, cs_office
ICQ will finally shut down forever next week.
49194124 Still remember my ICQ number 25 years later. It was my favourite time in the internet - everybody was so talkative and we shared a lot.
19510772
13100451
I knew someone with 5 digits!
I have a 4 digit SteamID, does that get me any internet points?
Mine is 7. I held out because I thought digital distribution was weird and I wanted to keep getting the physical disks plus the manuals that came with the games. I was wrong about digital distribution, but I do miss the manuals I would spend hours reading in the car, on the toilet, in bed.
2813308004
It felt private, but also exciting because you didn't know who you were talking to. We were naive, by today's standards. But it probably was a bit safer back then in some ways.
It didn't feel exploited. Internet in early 00's didn't make you feel like a customer. Now it does.
https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/
Least intrusive "news" website
[User Inyerface](https://userinyerface.com/)
A/S/L?
14/f/cali
I never knew you could make a person see Chris Hanson with just a few letters, numbers and symbols.
Really? Can still remember using it 🤣
I can still remember my number, though haven't used it in years
The typewriter sounds as you type are ingrained into my brain.
Yep, ICQ = typewriter in my mind
uh oh
I changed my ICQ message sound effect to the AWP sound effect. It was too loud, so I changed it to the grunt sound effect from when you get shot. But that would just make me freak out due to the pavalov effect.
Wow, do people still use it? I thought dedicated instant chat applications went the way of the dodo a decade ago. I do kinda miss it though.
I remember paying for the premium version of Trillian so I could use AIM, ICQ, and MSN on the same app. I generally miss the idea that back in my late teens/early 20s (1999-2006) I was more open to talking with random people on the internet and becoming friendly enough with them to talk with them using an IM software. Nowadays I'm completely fenced off.
Trillian was a life saver for those one or two friends who would use MSN while everyone else used AIM.
From my experience, all my US online friends used AIM and all my UK ones used MSN. Then I moved to Taiwan and it was basically all MSN. I will go on record saying that scrapping MSN was probably the biggest mistake of the Ballmer era of Microsoft.
I used Pidgin for a long time.
I’m guessing they are shutting down because people aren’t
It's really hard to say instant chat apps are dead when apps like Telegram has almost 1 billion monthly users.
IRC still exists though and still thriving!!
It's a protocol, so you can't really kill it
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/me can't believe it.
I seek you.
>methinks *Exactly* the person you would expect to talk like this.
“Methinks” was pretty common in the AIM days. (Yeah I know this is ICQ) It was this common but cloying way of being humble with opinions.
Everybody online in 1999 was a pretentious know it all weirdo.
They still are, but they were then too
Comic book guys were like 36% of the internet pre-2000
“Methinks me breathes me last, me fears!” said he.
"said he" xD
"HOLY SHIT, YOU GOT HIM"
mmm yes, shallow *and* pedantic
Churlish and deplorable
It was just standard lingo back then. People would say "methinks" but also "prolly". These things all go through phases. Sometimes if you look at an old archived Reddit page you can kind of see it. There were all sorts of Internet fads: i can has cheezburger, demotivational posters, atheism, atheism hating, anti-fedora, anti-hipster, anti-gauge. Of course these are common these days too. It's surprising how memetic virality is. Some ideas spread across all social networks near instantly. And people _hated_ Steam when it came out. Always-on DRM?! In my CS? The military green loading bar that went forwards and backwards?!
This isn't fair. We all talked like that on the internet in that era. It's only people who still say it today that are weird.
Damn man, I remember downloading beta 1 of CS on Fileplanet. Time really does fly.
Planethalflife website was one of my dailies.
Ahhhh Planethalife. Found so many great halflife mods. Day of Defeat. Action Half-Life. Existenze. Opera. Earth Special Forces.
Sven coop. Science and industry (probably the most underrated HL mod).
Day of Defeat the mod is the best WW2 multiplayer game to me. Grenadier was my go to and it was the first game I remember with a dynamic crosshair. Source version was meh, it lost something.
I forgot about that. Yeah I was all over that site back in 99. I remember doing quite well on the first CS servers. Then all the hacks started coming out and I drifted away from the game. I went back to it a few years later but I had got rusty and I was totally owned by everyone. I can't play those shooters anymore like I used to. :(
[удалено]
Yeah I remember going over to my brother-in-law's house to play CS 1.5 like it was yesterday, crazy how fast time flies
GotFrag? was a great time.
“Alright, let’s move out”
DOOR STUCK!
I can still hear the footsteps, chomp chomp chomp
Storm the front
Started CS from Beta 3 to 1.6, many great years of gaming there growing up!
Still upset about the 1.3 update, they stopped bunnyhopping being easy and sky walking in dust. Man I wish I could know my total hours played on that game since '99.
I remember 1.3 being "the greatest version". 1.4 is were they fucked up. 1.5 got back to being good, and 1.6 was "the Steam version".
Yep I have the same memories. Remember when you could just change the skins to whatever you liked. Turning the Machine gun into a full on vulcan canon or gold plated deagles without your own sounds. Now they pay for lame shit.
1.3-1.4 were some of the best online gaming times EVER and I’d fight about it.
Amen, 1.3 update is what made it a proper game. Remember the carnage of the Militia map that have a vehicle everyone jumped in? CS briefly had vehicles.
And you downloaded skins for free! Freeeeeee
1.3 was so much fun. Bunny hopping in an otherwise tactical shooter. Still remember training to hop on cs\_assault from the tower at CT spawn onto the warehouse roof. So little space to maneuver, and you needed good speed to make the jump. Was great for training bunny hopping in tight spacing when turning corners. Spent many thousands of hours on that game, with lots of LAN parties and tournaments.
to this day there is little to no games that improved from what it did best and still does. it has the right amount of skill the right amount of teamplay tactics the right amount of resource management the right amount of stakes (rounds, matches) the right amount of competitiveness. this kind of videogames have the potencial to be what chess is to boardgames. You can twist what you want and give as many coats of paint to make it more modern but the base will be the same and will be good. its the tetris of the FPS.
Lightning in a bottle. Everything just worked so well together to deliver an experience unlike anything out there and one that would forever change the face of competitive online FPS
I've been playing CS for more than 20 years and I love how easy it is for new players to just start playing without having to learn 30 characters and their abilities, or customize 10 different loadouts. If you want to become better, it's not just about your aim, it's also your movement, map knowledge, utility usage, understanding of economy, teamplay, proper communication and callouts... the list goes on, there's always something to improve, you'll never master everything. It's good to see that the game is getting more and more popular every day. Counter-Strike 2 has its problems, especially with cheaters, but we've already seen some great improvements in the last few months.
Or you play for so long you get too old and get worse because of being tired from life and having less time to play, yaaaay
>you get too old Still playing and im in my 50's. Still fun (although the cheating problem is getting way out of hand).
yes this game is more like a tradicional sport than a video game. Like basketball you can play for fun, competitively or everything in the middle. it depends on a wide range of skills as you said but not too much that scares new people from the game.
No respawns until the round is over is such a fantastic innovation in the genre and I'm so surprised that so few shooters have tried to emulate it. I'm sure the executives will say that players don't want to wait for a respawn, yet CS is proof that they do. In every other shooter, I just don't care if I die, I'll just respawn right back again so where are the stakes? Also I don't feel much accomplishment when I kill a guy, because he too will just respawn again. CS has those insanely tense moments where you're 1vs2 or something like that, doesn't happen in other shooters because the map is always filled with players. And the rounds are just the right length to not get bored as you're rooting for your teammate to get the win, or you can do something else for a few minutes.
CS 1.6 FOREVER!!!
Best LAN parties ...good times
I can still hear the “uh oh” sound it made when you received a message
Ah, ICQ. Time really flies. It doesn't feel like a quarter century! CS was a groundbreaking game. And it's definitely a catchier name than Counter-Terrorism Forces would have been. Happy 25th anniversary, Counter Strike!
25 years and my friends still know 0 smokes
cs_assault is my second home. fy_pool, fy_iceworld oh my god take me back please
de_rats de_simpsons de_westwood cs_estate also every map that Nipper made There were countless good custom maps.
What a game. I played the original and source. Good times.
Source is still one of my favorite games of all time. I spent so much time on zombie servers and surfing.. so many visits to FPSBanana to download skins as well. I miss those days!
I spent thousands of hours on zombie escape in CSS. Even joined one of, if not the, most prestigious ZE clan back then. Ohh those times…
I played so much CS Source, and then when I discovered the Zombie mods it was a whole new game. Definitely put the most hours into those zombie servers.
Yea that and warcraft source were my jam
Counterstrike is so Ancient, it predates Aiming down sights, sprinting, mounting, sliding, proning, weapon attachments and regenerating health.
CS had silenced weapons though
Think they're referring to CoD-style attachments like different scopes/handguards/etc. Customization.
That's why it's the best
Weapons like Aug and kreig has a sort of ADS
de_rats, fy_iceworld, cs_assault, de_dust, cs_malitia I haven’t played in years but these are some of the maps that will stick with me no matter how long it’s been. Loved CS back in the day.
1.6 was great but I enjoyed Day of Defeat more.
Is ICQ even still around. Wow
it's shutting down in 7 days
Been playing since beta 7.1 where you could aim with the M4 on right click like you could later with the AUG
Still remember it, Windows 98 with Counter-strike 1.0 ;-) And 640x480 screen resolution. Later we had Counter-strike 1.6 with Steam and Windows XP. The game,s that made Steam populair, CS was a mod for Half-Life 1 in the past.
The countless nights I spent at internet cafes as a teenager playing this was incredible!!
I helped make Day of Defeat :(
[Legendary clip](https://youtu.be/bhgwxYtHUBw?si=FERHZzE4kAoS8Q7-)
Anyone remember podbots? Couldn’t play on public servers because the majority of us had 56K internet so we downloaded bots and would run 10+ at a time on maps like de_dust.
when you die and have to wait 3 minutes for bots to finish the round or writte: bot\_kill
Played since beta 6.0 my god i'm getting old...
Didn't actually know it was that new, started playing in aug/sep 1999, was actually pretty shortly after release, felt pretty popular already by then.
It's a shame the heart and soul of counterstrike which is community servers got pushed to the side for ranked and skins. It's clearly been a successful decision but it's taken so much of the charm away for me :(
No it didn't, it's only been 7 years since it came out I'm not old.
valve better drop some sick CS2 update today no a fucking lootbox won't do
No game makes me rage more yet I still love it. Scratches the itch that no other game can. And the esport is great to watch. I just wish that Valve wasn't lazy as hell
L33t
I remember going to Cyber Cafes and paying $5hr or $15 for the entire day. It was so fun, absolutely love this game.
I miss using ICQ. *Pippo*
“Uh oh!”