20 years of Counter Strike

[cobito]

Well, that's it, I read somewhere that it's been two decades since the famous game came out, so I'm going to start telling grandpa stories.

I remember the first time I played and I remember it because it was the first time I went to a cyber café. It was December 1999 and it was raining. Just after school had finished for the Christmas holidays, someone from the group I hung out with said "let's go to the cyber café!". I think he was the only one who had ever been there before.

We had to run almost 15 minutes under the rain until we got to La Red, a place that was on Pedro Antonio de Alarcón in Granada. That place was paradise. Seeing dozens of towers with dozens of monitors, everything working at the same time. Everyone playing at the same time. The cyber café was packed with kids like me who had just come out of class. And the scary thing is that they were all playing the same game. Online! That was completely new to me.

As I have always been a bit of a goofball (and still am), one of the first things that caught my attention was how everything was connected. I had seen modems before but internet wouldn't come to my house until a few months later. All those PCs were connected with a kind of plug like a phone plug but bigger. I thought it was some kind of modem and that they were all making some kind of phone connection. But so many things were happening at the same time, I didn't think much more about it.

Finally, a PC was free and I sat down. The woman who ran the place put a piece of paper with the start time on the table. Two hundred pesetas per hour. I didn't know how to join the online game, so the experienced buddy explained it to me quickly. I remember even the controls I had to swallow because I didn't know how to change them: left mouse button to move forward, right to move back, enter to shoot and space to jump. That was all I needed to know to shoot with the gun.

I don't remember how bad I did in that game, but I enjoyed every second of it. Those graphics amazed me and that there were so many PCs showing the same thing was magic. When I was dead (which was most of the time), I could see the map freely. I could go through walls and when I looked outside the limits, everything started to flicker. It was amazing.

The graphics were spectacular. Up to that moment I had played very few things using a 3D accelerator, so I saw normal to see huge pixels when I got close to an object. In this game that didn't happen. The graphic quality was impeccable, without huge pixels; everything smooth and beautiful. Unbeatable no matter how you look at it.

Two months later, my parents bought me what was the replacement for my 486: a Pentium II at 400Mhz, with 64Mb of RAM, an S3 Savage 3D of 8Mb and an internal 56k modem. That computer was a huge qualitative leap compared to the 486: a color depth of 24 bits with a resolution of 1024x786, 3D acceleration and internet.

I wanted that game but the only thing I had found out until that moment was that it was called Counter Strike. It was the beta 5.2. I asked the colleagues how to get it, but almost none had a computer and didn't know. I went to Lycos and found the official website: counter-strike.net. There I discovered that it wasn't really a game but a modification of Half Life. Looking through Wayback machine, here is the website I remember with its blue background:

Another childhood friend whose father got the coveted CDMIX back in those days, had Half Life. I installed it on my PC and it worked. Now I just had to install Counter Strike, which meant downloading it hehe... with my 56kbps modem and with a per-minute charge. What a good scolding I got back then when the Telefónica bills came. They were more than 50 Mbytes

Well, that's a picture of the beta 6.6, but for the case it's valid: 58675kbytes between 3.5kbytes/s were more than 4 and a half hours. Here I had to ask my parents for permission, not for the permission itself, but so that no one picked up the phone, because back then I didn't know about download managers and any problem meant starting from scratch. I got the file and felt really good. I was going to install it and... it failed. It turns out that the version of Half Life was outdated. And I had to update it.

There it was, another 70 Mb; another 5 hours. Does anyone remember what the local call minute cost? Finally I got it. I must have been one of the few in Granada who had Counter Strike in their own house and whether or not that was the case, I have to admit that this exclusivity (at least with respect to the people around me) made the whole thing even more exciting. More than exciting; terrifying.

My enthusiasm for the game reached such a point that I even created a website:

I ended up replacing the Savage 3D with a Voodoo 3 3000 which along with the Wicked 3D achieved a rate of 40-50fps sustained at 1024x768, I expanded the memory to 128Mb so that the map change would happen faster and at the start it wouldn't lag, and I even changed the sound card to be able to talk through the microphone with other players because the one that came with the PC wasn't full-duplex. Back in those days, the PC was there mainly for Counter Strike. It didn't matter if the connection was cut and kicked me out of the game or if the Winmodem I had produced a ping of close to 400ms on national servers. I was playing with people from all over the world from my house. That was wonderful.

Of course, that milestone didn't prevent the school friends, half of whom celebrated birthdays between May and June, from getting together to invite the other half to 5 hours of cyber. That of going out with our brains fried after 2 hours of counter and another 3 of Age of Empires 2 was the best thing about the summer opening.

Those were great moments. Then people started to have computers with internet at home, we stopped going to the cyber café and it all ended.

For me, this has been the most enjoyable game of all the ones I've had, not just for the game itself, but for the technical advances that were around it: 3D acceleration and online multiplayer, plus the fact that it was technically a marvel.

[whoololon]

I've spent more time reading this thread than staying alive in CS.

With a Savage 3D I lost my virginity to hardware acceleration, and it was also while playing HL, like night and day nowadays. I have it stored in my hardware graveyard.

Changing emoticon sets... thanks.