Play Counter Strike 1.6, with full multiplayer, in the browser

Met what ended up being a great friend in real life somewhere in some random IRC room looking for a 5th member to join my friend's group

He had a special CRT monitor to get the best refresh rate to be as competitive as possible for the game

Feels like a lifetime ago

I was always amused by how many of my friends got crazy monitors but still just used headphones. Surround sound for 1.6 made the game incredibly unfair. Being able to hear specifically in what direction and volume footsteps were coming from was basically a wallhack. I would often use headphones because parents weren't the biggest fans of hours of that a night, and it was so crippling.

Funny enough, my semi-pro career (I made $60 total) ended when I abandoned my surround sound when moving out in undergrad.

Weird. My experience has always been that headphones are more effective at producing precise 3D sound than speakers. And intuitively, it seems like they should, because they can feed each ear with exactly the sound that ear should hear.

That said it does require that the game has good 3D sound generation, which isn't trivial, especially differentiating front and back which requires accounting for the shape of the human ear.

You generally need special headphones for that and they really didn't work that well 20 years ago. I don't recall there being any way to tell the Half Life engine or my sound card "output 6 channels to the headphones" and the engine wouldn't do A3D if it was a stereo device.

By having a 5.1 setup surrounding me (about 2 feet away in each direction, it was.. cluttered), the brain produces a surround sound effect the way it does in normal life.

An expert would have to speak further about how headphones can emulate that, but I don't recall it ever really being a thing in the early 2000s.