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Comment by Hikikomori | Hacker News Reader

Bit weird to compare a singleplayer game with little replayability to the genre defining multiplayer game of its time and try drawing conclusions from that.

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Doom was the genre defining multiplayer game, and it released in 1993. And there were a ton of multiplayer shooters released in the 7 years interim. The only really distinct thing about Counter-Strike, besides its quality, is that it came to Steam from the very beginning. But the game had already become a classic before 1.6 launched on Steam and the idea of playing on/through Steam at the time was quite divisive.

Counterstrike was the defining game for a subgenre of tactical shooters, of which you can see that Valorant is a member.

CS was 3D shooter and not a DOS game - quite important distinction as it gave better(and nonpixelating) graphic. Pre 1.6 CS had many modifications already - frankly I stopped playing CS before 1.6 and had my fun.

Descent and Quake were both 3D shooters and DOS games, and Halo came out a year earlier with "better graphics"; CS was neither the first 3D shooter nor the first Windows game in its genre. Also, the first Counter-Strike was not a completely new game -- it used a modified Half-Life engine (which itself was built on the Quake engine).

Sure, CS was arguably the most popular and long-lasting of the FPS of that era -- but let's not pretend that that was because of technical superiority, it won out because of gameplay.

"of its time"

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