Counter-Strike has been out for eight years! The very first public Beta of Counter-Strike was released on June 18th, around 8pm pacific time. Of course, since that time Counter-Strike has become the most popular online action game in the world — and has maintained its status for seven years.

If you're interested in getting a blast from the past, you can read this article I wrote about the first year of Counter-Strike. Of course, I was fourteen when I wrote that article, so maybe you'd rather save yourself the embarrassment of seeing a child's first attempts at big-boy journalism and go back to browsing YouTube.

Two years later, I wrote an article entitled CS - Year 3, which described the state of the community at the time. And talked about how awesome Counter-Strike: Condition Zero was going to be. By that time I was sixteen — the age of consent where I currently reside — so I havhttp://www.ghoztcraft.net/forums/Counter-Strike-is-Eight-Years-Old-t9132.html#
Complete Edite no excuse for saying that. I'm sorry.

In 2003, asspennies and I wrote an article discussing the history of Counter-Strike. And just over a year later, I previewed Counter-Strike: Source — which would become the next chapter of Counter-Strike history.

One day, I was thirteen and playing Half-Life Jailbreak — and all good stories start off with thirteen-year-olds playing Half-Life mods — someone told me to ICQ them if I wanted a copy of Counter-Strike. Of course, I had been following Counter-Strike and knew that it had yet to be publicly released.

Nevertheless, I did the most logical thing and ICQ'd a complete stranger over the Internet. I woke up the next morning to find that he had send me a file named something like cstrike.zip. Inside the zip file, I found a true copy of Counter-Strike. Probably a month before the release of the public Beta, I was pretty excited to sit down and play it.
And so I did! I hosted games on my cable modem, and shot terrorists up, and did things to hostages. All on cs_siege, of course. One time a person with the handle "Gooseman" joined my game.
"Hmmph, how did you get this game?" He asked.

"I dunno.. some guy from hljb. Omg are you really gooseman?? This game rocks man! this game rocks," I thirteened out long before the advent of the social networking website MySpace.com.

"... Thanks. Well you should know there's a new server .dll at planethalflife.com/ counter-strike/ sdgsga.zip."

And then he left. And I updated my server .dll.

Last Summer, I met Minh "Gooseman" Le in person at a small party thrown by Jess Cliffe. I liked his shirt, and I thought he was a cool guy.

Article by rizzuh of CSnation

This post has been edited by CampStaff: Jun 19 2007, 06:10 PM