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CS2 community servers are nothing like the 1.6 or Source golden era. Those games are still going, but the playerbase has shrunk considerably.

I'm glad I got to experience it all (primarily in Source): gun game, deathmatch, RPG, surf, jailbreak, zombie mod and escape, iceskate, sliderace, hide'n'seek, trickz, xtreme climbing, multigames, deathrun, knifeball, HE wars, vehicle maps, bob, nipper maps, even hack vs hack, and the many many communities, each uniquely flavored and with their own story.

Back then I took it for granted...

I totally feel that. The most fun I ever had gaming was back in my teens playing various different game modes in source. And yeah the communities really made it so special, to this day I'm good friends with some people that I initially met in CSS.

I can't help but feel Valve dropped the ball with cs:go and cs2. I mean, they did become incredibly popular but IMO there was potential for so much more if they would've supported custom game modes even just a little bit.

I think they may have been possible with Metamod: Source and SourceMod but now that it's on the Source 2 engine, server plugins are once again an unsupported hack.

I spent long hours playing CS Surf. What a wacky mod. Good times, odd memories.

You may be interested in KSF. They host skill surf servers and publish chill WR runs: https://youtube.com/@ksfrecords

The more modern surf maps are aesthetically quite pleasing and smooth to play.

Oh waw, that's a trip straight to nostalgia lane. CS surf was so fun, good times.

> About six months ago, I felt nostalgic and started looking into what was up with CS. Amazingly, it is still going and is popular

I played the "original" CS (at least a version that looked like 1.6) around 3 years ago, and was surprised how painless it was to install it on Linux using Steam. I was also surprised that it was still no problem to find a de_dust server with > 20 players.

> That's how we all got our start though. Now we all work as software engineers.

Yes. It was so easy back then to play around with game development, web development, or desktop development. Around 2002, I hosted a web site for months on my local desktop server, reachable via a DynDNS solution.

Sorry for getting nostalgic, but it was even easier in the mid-90ies. As a 9 year old, I created a Dyna Blaster clone using a Demo-Version of "Klik&Play" on Windows 3.11 [0]. You could develop quite advanced games by just dragging around sprites, animating them, listening to mouse and keyboard events and object collisions. You could even "compile" the game into a single portable .exe! It was dead simple, but it introduced me to the basic concepts of programming and animation, and I didn't even realize it. A little later, I was able to teach myself BASIC by just reading the DOS man pages. We didn't even have internet back then. I very clearly remember realizing that "if ... then ... else" statements and variables were exactly what was missing in my "Klik&Play" demo-version. In the demo, you had to simulate these concepts by triggering the spawn of a hidden moving object and listening for the collision with another object. The hidden objects encoded the game state. Basically, the developers tried to remove Turing-completeness from the demo version, but failed and forced kids like myself to restore it via wild tricks (I remember feeling very clever when I had the idea for this trick). I only realized 2 decades later how useful these experiences were for a career in computer science.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/e2e98t/making_ga...

Very cool.

The first web site I ever made was for my CS clan. I hosted it on the Linux server in my university dorm room that also hosted our CS server. I don't remember what I did for DNS back then. I learned so much that I still use to this day.

I also think its neat, guessing based on your ISP, that you had such similar experiences at the same time half a world away from me (in the US).

Rats maps or the ones with a ton of vehicles were the most fun before the game got way too serious (before 1.5)

I ran a server that was primarily rat surf maps with a Warcraft/RPG server mod for years back then. It was super fun and something that modern games just can't touch in terms of that kind of niche.

Surf maps were so strange as a concept. Dunno how stuff like that can become such a big thing.

I miss the custom games of Warcraft 3 and the likes. The creativity was running wild.

It is sad that hats, loot boxes amd dlc has killed modding in commercial games.

I still remember the name "gimli", a creator of high-quality maps around 1.3.

He still publishes maps!

It's still tons of fun but definitely different now, and since they came out with counter-strike 2 a while ago, it's me being specced out on my old gaming computer all over again - as with you I'm way too busy as a working adult to get too deep into it, was fun to play a lot during the pandemic though.

The craziest innovation I seen is counter strike 1.6 in the browser, fully playable multiplayer. Not sure how safe letting that much execution happen in wasm environment truly is but was still pretty funny to see how far the game has come in terms of graphics. Basically a bunch of the same maps still even though a couple have always been way skewed to one side or the other.