Wifi from those days wasn’t nearly as good as a hard wire. Also, it might have just not been available. It wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous 20 years ago as it is now.
This was more like 10 years ago, but yeah, WiFi was still crap (and still is :v). In particular, the signal in that room wasn't great.
Oh - original counter strike (mod for half life) came out in 2000 - I’m old!
Play counter strike on wireless? Hahaha no way man. CS is a highly latency sensitive game (as is any competitive fps). Wifi is much too prone to disturbances and packet loss, so you will experience lag/jitter/loss.
WiFi was crap, wired we could pretty much saturate our gigabit NICs. And WiFi had similar, but different filters iirc.