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

> My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool and would then run around and shoot each other.

There was a small netcafe nearby when I was young that had a good quality T1 connection and hosted their own CS servers. Some of the players got together and actually mapped out the entire netcafe store itself and some of the surrounding area to create a "de_" style map.

This meant you could be playing CS and spawn in the same room that you were actually sitting in.

I can still remember vividly as a 14 year old playing the game and completely dominating a room full of 20-something older guys in the other room. They didn't know who I was and every time I would stomp them they would yell "FUCK" from the other room. Eventually after a series of absurd kills they angrily stormed over to our room in a hostile manner ready to fight and 100% convinced I was somehow cheating. The look on their face when they realized they were "prepared" to fight a kid and the realization as I openly allowed them to inspect the PC for whatever they thought was modified on it was hilarious.

> a good quality T1

Oh man, I remember the good ol' days, when a 1.5 Mbps connection was unthinkably fast. I imagined only God herself had a T3.

That was when I discovered the magnificent beauty of symmetry.

And more importantly for gaming, low latency.

I remember the days when I tried to play Quake on my 28.8 modem over the net pre-Quakeworld.

Almost made me swear online multiplayer off for life.

LPB, Low Ping Bastard.

The only cheat I needed was my bindings, which I stored on my website so I could download at the cafe ;)

haha! wow memories.

>"...hey didn't know who I was and every time I would stomp them they would yell "FUCK" from the other room...."

I laughed so hard about this, I can picture this in my mind.

>>> There was a small netcafe nearby when I was young that had a good quality T1 connection and hosted their own CS servers

PC Bang in Columbia MD circa 2006! $3/hr. Spanking fresh GeForce 7900s.

Starcraft was really why every one showed up though ;)

Nice! I've always appreciated how moddable games like this have traditionally been. I texture-mapped? skinned? myself and my friends onto the models in the Counterstrike installations we had on the four computers we kept LAN'd together in our apartment.

Well. We only ended up playing with them a couple of times, because it ended up feeling uncomfortably gruesome - shooting and and killing your friends in cs_italy or whatever.

Mapping out familiar buildings and locations? A much less traumatizing use of time and resources. Kudos.

Ha! Same here it was about $3/hr but you could also buy a monthly thing. It was about 2002.

Everyone showed up for CS or Red Alert it seemed!

For us it was Starcraft and Need For Speed.

> I can still remember vividly as a 14 year old playing the game and completely dominating a room full of 20-something older guys in the other room.

People just don't understand how good reaction times are for teenagers - even in your twenties it's already getting worse!

You should've tried Doom over dialup :)

> a "de_" style map

Those prefixes indicate the map mission type, not a style. "de" indicates a demolition or defusal mission. The actual official map name is what's after the underscore. I think there were only those and the "cs" "counterstrike" hostage maps at the start.

I don't think gp necessarily contradicts that. Maybe just difference of word choice wrt "style"

I finagled 512kbps SDSL from a startup telco for $70/month in 1998.

It's all about Doom over null modem.

I remember thinking the T1 that lit up my entire school district was insanely fast. That was until I went to college and found they had a 2Gbit fiber optic Internet2 link on campus. That was mind blowing.

So, you don't remember "es_", hmmm ? Tss, tss.

I have a similar story from a pc gaming cafe. Someone became convinced I was cheating and pulled a knife out on me. Strange times.

That is correct. The pedantic and accurate term would be "objective" since they are basically modify the win conditions of the round, but I chose to use the word "style" because it comes down to how you want to play the game.

There are many players that play "cs_" maps where you're technically supposed to be grabbing hostages and returning them to the spawn zone, but many players chose to play those maps in a different style where they just eliminate all the other players or run out the timer.

Likewise on "de_" maps you're supposed to plant the bomb, but instead many players choose to simply use the bomb to pressure (by essentially tricking the enemy into thinking you care about the bomb) people into situations and trade out kills.

Diablo 2 in HC over dial-up in South France was fun, especially with the random disconnection that was plaguing different providers...

vip_ was another early map type that existed pre 1.6.

Duke nukem 3d. Dialup. Wow thats pure nostalgia!

Doom was ok over dial up computer to computer. Quake was even slow connected direct over modem. I would guess the slowness was the extra data for the 3rd dimension going over the wire.

I remember the day I got ISDN at and I could listen to an MP3 as fast as I could download it (if it was encoded at 112kbps...)

It would go out of sync and switch to single player.

To be honest, it used to be.

I have never, ever seen pings as low as the ones I've seen 15/20 years ago when playing online.

I remember when I played Counter Strike 1.5 or 1.6 on a 10 MBit fiber which was very new at the time and pinging on servers nor far my house (few miles) even sub 10 ms. Those were numbers that competed with lan servers over ethernet.

Nowadays I have a much better connection, and yet, I rarely see myself with such a small latency anymore, it's at least twice that.

Nope. I just remember the early versions. I didn't get hooked--stopped well before it was moved to Steam, which I thought was bloatware (and it was back then). My younger brother was obsessed with it for a while, though.

My memory was marathon on the Mac played over a similar connection speed. I forget the software but it allowed a networked game to be emulated over a PPP dialup session.

Fondly look back at those times, indeed.

I miss making CS maps. Was a great creative outlet for one to enjoy with others.

I agree about the big comercial servers/games. The community driven servers are often better latency, e.g. I got 7ms in this game, the same server was 60ms when gaming through the VPN and enterprise proxy.

Quake even synced gibs

This is off topic (because the current comment is just fine) but can you please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34673344?