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Comment by ping_pong | Hacker News Reader

I love how the term "pwn" came from Counterstrike culture back when I was playing it at the turn of the century, and it's still in use today.

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lol, pwn did not come from counterstrike. It originated from "leetspeak", which were creative misspellings that script kiddies and anarchist hackers on bbs boards (or IRC chans) would create to bypass text filters or go undetected by mods or operators. It later became part of internet culture adopted to mock n00bs.

Nope. It 100% came from Counter-strike. There was a typo in one of the messages and that's how it got famous.

This is not true. You're declaring objective history from what seems to be your personal anecdotes (and you say you're guessing in another comment).

HIBP links to this article which shows the history of the term before any of these games: https://www.inverse.com/gaming/pwned-meaning-definition-orig...

That's an enjoyable article, but geez is it light on details.

The one tangible instance mentioned is the Spice Girls hack — but follow the link to discover they didn't even use pwn, but 0wned!

I tried searching a few pre-00s bbs/usenet archives but could only find a couple of gaming-related instances. [1][2]

It'd be pretty interesting to see some hacking groups usage in the 80-90s. Maybe someone with better access to archives could see some trends?

[1] https://groups.google.com/g/alt.games.everquest/c/GN9tm8Esrw...

[2] https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.computer.ultima.online...

Ah, the youngsters... I started playing Counter-Strike at beta 6. You could be pwned years before that.

Funny, WoW nerds have this exactly same origin myth about the term, and that came out 4 years after CS 1.0.

The origin of pwn in gaming context is in quake multiplayer which predates CS by some years. I also recall seeing people on irc using it before that in the same context as cracking a system.

Back in the day, I played Counter-strike, Quake, Warcraft, Doom (I played PvP against people in my dorm using modem using IPX protocol pre-Internet). The first place I saw it was definitely Counter-strike. My guess is that it originated in CS and then leaked out from there.

1989: http://phrack.org/issues/24/11.html

Unless Y2K comes before 1989 it most certainly did not come from Counter-strike. Pwning something had existed throughout the 1990's hacker culture and likely was in use in the 80's too. There are some of us old enough to remember it being used. It probably stemmed from QWERTY keyboards and o/p being close to one another. "Pwned" is an easy typo from "Owned" and "owned by [some hacker/hacker group]" was always common way to deface hacked websites. It easily predates Counter-strike's release date by at least a decade so it could not have originated from CS.

“Phrack World News” and it’s acronym are a different usage to the word synonymous with “own” — which is not saying it wasn’t in use before counter-strike, but the link isn’t good evidence for it.

I overlooked the acronym and that is a very fair point.

Do a bit better research. It stands for Phrack World News in this context. I also read Phrack back in the day as well.

How about trying to search through all the Phrack articles to find the use of the word "pwn" that doesn't refer to Phrack World News? Spoiler alert: you won't find any usage of "pwn" or "pwned" until well past 2000. If it was so much part of hacker culture you would have seen a reference in the earlier articles, but you don't.

I saw pwn being used as a synonym for own in the mid-90's so it definitely predates Counter Strike.

That being said, it probably originated as a typo and that could have happened on multiple occasions.

You are definitely correct.

Hack/phreak BBS culture and leetspeak went mainstream though IRC and video game chat.

Everything old is new again, nothing new under the sun, etc.

I'm waiting for !!1!!!1!11 to make a resurgence.

> The first place I saw it was definitely Counter-strike

Nobody ever made that hilarious typo in a shooter before CS, lol

You are the arbiter of truth.

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