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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It was 20 years ago today that version 1.0 of Counter-Strike launched, boasting iconic maps like Dust and Italy. But what about the maps that didn’t make it out of beta? CS had over twenty which bounced around betas but were cut by the full release, including all the maps representing one entire mode. I revisited the cut beta maps today and was surprised by quite how many I remembered, a lot of weird fond memories mixed in with a few moments of “Oh yeah obviously I see why this was cut”. Come, let’s revisit them.

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On the 9th of November, 2000, Valve released version 1.0 of Counter-Strike. The tactical shooter had started as a Half-Life mod in beta the year before, originally created by Minh “Gooseman” Le and Jess Cliffe, and became the star of the scene. It’s weird to say now, but a twitchy teamplay FPS with a grounded paramilitary setting and realistic style really did stand out. V1.0 wasn’t the end for CS though, as Valve kept expanding and updating it for years, and used it as the testbed for new tech including Steam. It set the model for ‘live service’ games as we now know them.

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Coaches eh? They’re meant to be a great help for improving your game, but it seems some sneaky Counter-Strike: Global Offensive teams have taken that to mean peeking where they’re not allowed during high-stakes competitive games. Now, the Esports Integrity Commission (ESIC) is raking through years of demos to find these meddlesome cameramen, with the suggestion that they might go easy on folks who own up to their crimes.

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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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While Counter-Strike has long seemed one of those games that might just have found its final form and will now be around forever, I am surprised that it’s still breaking its own records. Over the weekend, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive set a new record for the number of people in-game online at the same time, beating a record set in April 2016. That was back before CS:GO went free-to-play, mind, but it’s taken a year for free CS to climb up and topple that mighty record. 901,681 players on Sunday, that’s the new high.

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The dramatically named Korean developer Pearl Abyss has three new games whirring away on their development PCs. The developers of Black Desert Online are working on three new MMOs: one shooter from the creator of Counter-Strike, one child-friendly jaunt, and one fantasy game. The three games have a proper reveal planned for on November 14, during Pearl Abyss Connect at G-STAR 2019. For now, we know they’re called PLAN 8, Crimson Desert, and DokeV, alongside a handful of other details.

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The beta for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive s shiny new UI, Panorama, is now available to players who fancy a preview. Valve is touting it as the most substantial change to the look and feel of CS:GO since the game was released in 2012. Every part of the UI has been updated, so it might take a bit of time to get used to.

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Though Half-Life [official site] is almost nineteen years old and its sanctioned fan remake Black Mesa is nearing completion, Valve have launched a wee patch for their pretty okay or whatever vintage FPS. The patch fixes a few crashes and exploits, and hit other Half-Life engine games too, such as classic Counter-Strike. Given how much of modern PC games history connects to Half-Life and its mod scene, I’m glad Valve are still tinkering a little. Earlier this year, they finally got Half-Life an uncensored release in Germany too. … [visit site to read more]