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

I remember playing one of the early CS betas as a Half-life mod in ~1999. It was such a huge leap in gameplay and style from anything else out there.

Most FPSs up to this point were SciFi based, guns like the BFG and plasma guns. Counterstrike's focus on realism really altered how you connected with the game. Columbine had happened very recently and was still very much in the zeitgeist. There was a very real cultural attack on video games as a scapegoat for the massacre.

My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool and would then run around and shoot each other. This was very taboo at the time. We knew that this would be interpreted as threatening by the powers-that-be at highschool, but it was exciting.

> 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.

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.

You should've tried Doom over dialup :)