Flutterby™! : Influential video games Day 10: Counter-Strike

Influential Video Games, Day 10: Counter-Strike

I played Castle Wolfenstein 3d (I also played the original Castle Wolfenstein back in the ྌs, but you kids are too young to appreciate actual spoken German played through the Apple ][ speaker). I played Doom. I never got into multi-player Doom, both because of life circumstance, and because it looked like just a lot of building reflexes. At that point in my life I had a bunch of real-life reflexes and didn't feel the need to build ones for virtual worlds.

2000 came along, and a group of people created a mod for the Half-Life 1 engine to create a multi-player game that felt different: Several of the weapons killed in one or two shots. The game play had objectives that encouraged stealth over run-and-gun. "Camping" was built in to the game, but balanced by objectives and time limits.

If I remember right, there were 3 basic scenarios, all 2 teams:

1. Rescue the hostages from the terrorists, hostages were stupid NPCs that would follow you if you told them to, and there were costs for shooting hostages, but if you were on the bad guy team using the hostages as cover to get the good guys to shoot them was totally on-point, but generally the goal was to keep the hostages secure for the length of the round.
2. Bomb a site. Usually there were two bomb sites on the map. There was an advantage to surviving the round, so there was strategy in setting the bomb, protecting the bomb site from the counter-terrorists, and then escaping alive before the bomb detonated.
3. Protect the VIP. One player on the counter-terrorist team is designated the VIP and only gets a pistol (but gets extra armor), the goal is to move this player across the map.

It spread quickly through the 30-somethings of that era. We had a consulting company over in El Cerrito, and lunch often involved a few rounds.

Charlene had worked as a nanny for many years, and she'd... well... long story, but on Friday evenings I'd load up a car full of teenagers in the San Geronimo valley, and we'd head over to the offices in El Cerrito and play multi-user video games into the early hours of Saturday morning, and Counter-Strike was one of my favorites.