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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?

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

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