Look, competitive Counter-Strike is nice and all, but on the 20th anniversary of v1.0 I do find myself consumed with dreams of a wholly different CS skill: surfing. It’s the freestyle skating to proper CS’s baseball, using a movement glitch to skid, glide, and soar through maps filled with abstract shapes. It is stylish as all hell. And people race surfing! Or you could go freestyle and hit cool tricks to wow judges! Maybe you could even do synchronised routines! Or, like with the X-Games, you could think it seems too much effort and just watch YouTube videos and coo approvingly. So let’s do that, for now.

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I frequent a Counter-Strike level design forum called Mapcore. There, a Dutch teenager who goes by “RD” (“RealDespair”) has long claimed to have been the original author of fy_iceworld. His now defunct portfolio site went on a lengthy rant about it:

“Yes, you read it right. I am the creator of this unholy monster. When i created this map i had absolutely no idea how popular it would become. It is sad that there are many txt files in rotation from kids that claim to have made this map, but you have now stumbled upon the true author…”

Was RD actually responsible for making one of the most influential and popular game maps of all time? I began a forensic investigation to verify its authorship, digging through the ancient detritus of dead Geocities pages, Angelfire websites, and Romanian file servers. I even datamined the fy_iceworld file for clues. I now know what “fy_” actually meant, and it wasn’t “fight yard.” Originally, it wasn’t even called fy_iceworld either! But let’s start from the beginning.

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I remember playing a Counter-Strike map in 2001 called fy_iceworld. It was a small simple grey killbox of a map that virtually anyone could’ve made within the first few hours of downloading the editor tools.

fy_iceworld quickly became one of the most popular and divisive CS maps at my school. I was, of course, one of the haters. I tried to convince my friends to vote against fy_iceworld on our local internet cafe’s CS server, but they argued that I was just salty about being bad at it (which was partly true) and they forced the mapchange anyway. Similar conversations played out across countless clan servers, cyber cafes, PC bangs, and LAN parties around the entire world.

To properly gauge fy_iceworld’s influence and legacy, I asked several working level designers for their takes. Should we love it or bury it?

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Half-Life: Alyx is out, and where talk of Valve and Half-Life goes, so too does Garry’s Mod follow. You know Gmod for all the silly Source games the players made with it: Prop Hunt, Trouble In Terrorist Town, Jazztronauts, and the like. Original Gmod maker and Facepunch Studios founder Garry Newman has jumped on the Valve-talk train with a tease that they’re currently working on Garry’s Mod 2, which it turns out is something called Sandbox that they’ve been developing for quite a few years.

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Were Plato alive today, he’d declare a sixth platonic solid: de_dust2, representing the sixth element of devotion. This sacred configuration of geometry escaped its confinement in Counter-Strike and for eighteen years the map has lived in the hearts of men, re-emerging in dreams, in other games with level editors, and in mashed potato sculptures carved at the dinner table. But in the far future, the last remaining copy of de_dust2 is maintained inside Dustnet, a multiplayer sandbox building self-aware deathmatch museum… thing? It’s out now, I’ve played a bit, I adore it, and I’m excited to figure out exactly what it is.

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I’m going to make Have You Played history, and do a game wot we’ve already done. I know! But this is roughly the 1054th entry (going by our terrifying spreadsheet), and Brendy said we’re allowed to revisit games if we’ve got a good reason to [I’ll let this one slide. But never again – Brendan]>. He’s already asked if you’ve played Garry’s Mod. I’m asking if you’ve played Garry’s Mod on Fretta servers.

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Multiplayer games are the best type of games, because they’re built around the most interesting components known to humans: humans. Men, women, and an awful lot of children.

Internet strangers aren’t always the friendliest bunch, but they can surprise you in ways that a static system can’t. People form the living, beating hearts of the gaming moments I value the most. Join me, then, as I point at the games that encase those beating hearts best. (more…)

Jazztronauts is a mod about how mods are made. In this clever meta-modification for Garry’s Mod, you (and optionally your pals) go on scavenger hunts through the 15,000+ maps already on the Steam Workshop. You’re hunting for glowing crystals while stealing everything else (from chairs to wall textures) to sell for cash to spend on persistent upgrades, then escaping in a wall-smashing cosmic tram car. Jazztronauts is out now, and you’ll need Garry’s Mod (plus some extras) to play.

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Jazztronauts is a mod about how mods are made. In this clever meta-modification for Garry’s Mod, you (and optionally your pals) go on scavenger hunts through the 15,000+ maps already on the Steam Workshop. You’re hunting for glowing crystals while stealing everything else (from chairs to wall textures) to sell for cash to spend on persistent upgrades, then escaping in a wall-smashing cosmic tram car. Jazztronauts is out now, and you’ll need Garry’s Mod (plus some extras) to play.

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A fascinating new mod for the Source engine sandbox Garry’s Mod will send players ram-raiding through player-created maps swiped off the Steam Workshop to steal everything that isn’t nailed down, stripping them of everything from antlions to light fittings. That’s the big idea of Jazztronauts, which looks both incredibly clever and stupid as hell. On one hand, it’s deconstructing the illusions of level design. On the other, you do smash into levels inside a giant bus, get to see your haul of trash rain down from a gameshow-y prize tube, and will be able to date cats. An excellent combination. Here, come watch this. (more…)