20 ms·

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

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.

taskforcegemini 4y ago
was asked and very tempted to create a map of my school back in the day, but awareness of the ramifications stopped that from happening. additionally, the powers-that-be were very incompetent, especially in regards to judging these kinds of situations
hot_gril 4y ago
> My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool Same except in Age of Empires 2. We got in minor trouble for it.
lewdev 4y ago
Sorry to make this an "old-off" but I played Action Quake, a Quake II mod that was how you described your CS experience. An interesting feature on Action Quake that never made it to its modern counterparts was being able to jump into an enemy to perform a kick attack. It's also my first experience with friendly fire. I had a blast playing online with Action Quake. That was probably the time I realized mouse + keyboard was far superior to keyboard-only.
anthk 4y ago
Doom users did what you say on creating real life based environments before, to be honest. And, yes, FPS where scifi based but the Delta Force series had more realism than CS itself.
- zactato 4y ago
  Sure there were some real gun mods in doom, but the gun sprite resolution was crap, the limitations of the engine added limitations to map design and while multi-player was possible it wasn't anything like the post-quakeworld era.
rco8786 4y ago
> My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool Ah yes, forgotten artifacts of an innocent past.
- danuker 4y ago
  They could have argued it was self-defense training :)
- proser 4y ago
  Naive feels like a much better word than innocent.
geph2021 4y ago
We knew that this would be interpreted as threatening by the powers-that-be at highschool These days that kind of behavior, if reported to law enforcement (mandatory reporting in some cases), will get investigated with the potential for criminal charges, and likely school expulsion.
- sneak 4y ago
  I wonder if that's legal, given that mapmaking is protected expression, and a recent ruling saying that (public) schools can't police protected expression off of school grounds. Without a clear expression of threat, I don't think simple mapmaking is sufficient grounds for a terror threat charge.
  - vuln 4y ago
    > simple mapmaking It's not simple mapmaking though is it? It's creating a map inside a video game to simulate school grounds. Drawing a map of the school and putting it in a frame on your wall? Fine. Drawing a map, recreating it inside a first person shooter, then spending hours playing (training) memorizing the map? I believe anyone could see that as a terroristic threat. Edit: Example Legos. Having a Lego model of the US Capital? Fine Have a Lego Capital, attend the Jan 6 protest, have books and other militia type information? Probably going to get questioned by the feds. https://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-took-lego-set-of-capitol-from-january-6-rioter-2021-7?amp https://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-took-lego-set-of-capitol...
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      > Drawing a map, recreating it inside a first person shooter, then spending hours playing (training) memorizing the map? Right, because if they couldn't practice on a computer, schoolchildren would have no idea how to get around within their own school.
    - moring 4y ago
      > Drawing a map, recreating it inside a first person shooter, then spending hours playing (training) memorizing the map? I believe anyone could see that as a terroristic threat. I'd like to point out that "legal" means "not forbidden by law", which in our default-allow mode means "no law exists that prohibits it". This affects both criminal charges for playing CS in a school-like map as well as the behaviour of the school in response to that. The correct way to assess legality is therefore not "anyone could see" but "is there a law that prohibits it?" (Note that the hurdle to expulsion may be lower than for criminal charges.)
ddtaylor 4y ago
> 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.
- elymar 4y ago
  I miss making CS maps. Was a great creative outlet for one to enjoy with others.
- monktastic1 4y ago
  > 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.
  - CalRobert 4y ago
    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...)
  - epolanski 4y ago
    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.
darkwraithcov 4y ago
I remember creating a map of my high school in the Build engine for duke3d.exe matches. This was before Columbine, but every outsider, nerd kid had fantasized in a similar way. We got our aggressions out on deathmatch, but it never occurred to us in a million years to actually hurt people IRL. We hated the jocks and the preps with the burning passion of a billion Wolf-Rayet stars, but never thought to hurt any of them, we simply accepted our lot in the genetic and social lottery and hoped to get revenge later in life (so far so good, judging by facebook).
gzalo 4y ago
We also built a similar map while in high school in the late 2000s, no one really complained (keep in mind I'm not from the US). Some of our teachers quite liked it though. We just viewed it as a familiar location (albeit with secret tunnels, lifts and higher ceilings), it had no particular negative connotations. I still have it, you can view some screenshots and download the bsp here: https://gzalo.com/en/projects/cs_electronicaort/ https://gzalo.com/en/projects/cs_electronicaort/
- pezezin 4y ago
  I was in high school in 2001 when Counter Strike exploded in popularity in Spain. We also discussed to make a map of our high school, one teacher even got us the floorplans! Mind you, this was one year after a guy killed all his family with a katana and the media blamed it on games. Still, nobody thought we were criminals. The benefits of living in a mostly peaceful country I guess...
timeon 4y ago
There were also several other mods, like medieval one.
stanmancan 4y ago
That’s around the time I started playing too. I still go through phases where I’ll get really into a new game. I don’t have the reaction time of the younger generation but the skills built up over decades of gaming allows me to stay competitive.
Legion 4y ago
> 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. I think every budding DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D map creator made their school at one point. Of course, that was years before Columbine (despite the inclusion of DOOM in the Columbine finger-pointing), and nobody thought twice about it then.
howlin 4y ago
> 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. I had a friend that was the victim of a local news "expose" on this. Just a harmless high school geek who thought it would be fun to combine the School blueprints with his CAD course to build a "fun" way of digitizing the blueprints. The main lesson we learned from this exercise is that the Duke Nukem 3D pistol is totally OP when used in realistically proportioned hallways. Auto-aim and all. The other lesson we learned is that local news investigative reporters care more about a compelling story than to represent the mundane truth.
- antihero 4y ago
  I did this and showed my school’s head of ICT (in the UK, where there’s near zero threat of shootings happening) and they were just happy I was doing something to keep myself out of other sorts of trouble, if anything.
- amatecha 4y ago
  Yeah, my buddy and I mapped out a lot of the school in 3dsmax for our 3d/computer class. We never did anything with it because, well, yeah. We REALLY wanted to make it into a Counter-Strike map but I mean, you can guess how that would have gone. It sure solidified our grade in the class though, we took photos of the vending machines, lockers etc. and texture-mapped them onto the geometry we built out. Seriously fun project.
- base698 4y ago
  How did they even find out he made the map? Was it published online?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
naet 4y ago
I wanted to make a map of my high school for CSS but I thought it would be too taboo in the post columbine world, so instead I made a version of my parents house with some added ladders. Honestly it was great fun playing with my friends who had been over and knew the real life layout. Hiding in the closet or peeking out the back window into the yard for flankers was great! I miss map making. The hammer editor wasn't the best but it was simple enough to figure out, and I actually had some old blueprints of the house layout that made it easier to get things to scale. I don't think many newer games like Call of Duty have the same community spirit of community servers, community maps, etc.
cpeterso 4y ago
I worked at a high-pressure game company and I remember an engineer showing me a Counterstrike map they made of our company's office building, desks and all. It was amusing at the time, but in retrospect, maybe I should have said something to HR.
montag 4y ago
I, too, created a 3D model of my high school... a little "I am Spartacus" moment on Hacker News.
friendlyHornet 4y ago
Making maps for Half-Life and Portal is what lead me down the path to become a software developer. I was never that good a mapper but it got me into computers in general. If I had never discovered Hammer Editor on one summer afternoon in 2008, my life would be SOOOO different
- nonplus 4y ago
  Very similar story here.
sasawpg 4y ago
My journey started with Action Quake II mod, which was an action-movie inspired mod (complete with Lights, Camera, Action when a round starts). I wasn't too thrilled with sci-fi style FPS games, they held little appeal to me, but I easily logged a thousand hours on Action Quake. Then moved onto CS and BF2 from there. There went my high-school years!
1letterunixname 4y ago
Counter-terrorist win. ):
ambrose2 4y ago
Counter-argument, before CS (CounterStrike) the predecessor we played a ton of was multiplayer Goldeneye 64. The guns weren’t super realistic, but it also wasn’t a giant leap to CS. The big thing with CS was the online multiplayer with low lag, and it was popular enough that you didn’t have to wait long to join a room - which was a whole lot different than having friends over and playing couch multiplayer.
1letterunixname 4y ago
So many sleepless until sunrise LAN parties.
Aeolun 4y ago
I remember being so enjoyed by the inability to walk into buildings and shoot from there that I tried to build a whole map full of office buildings. Don’t think I ever got further than a single building and a parking garage though. It’d be nice to see that again now…
NovaPenguin 4y ago
It seems like this is something that happens in every high school. Our School was a Quake 1 map however.
johnchristopher 4y ago
BF recreated his house and the square in front of it in hl2. He added secret room to his house. We only ever played it 1vs1 but it's one of my top 5 FPS memories ! The fun came from walking in a setting I knew and recognizing it as "our" immediate surroundings. It was not about killing each other, though blowing up part of the furniture in the house was fun. I didn't like playing with people who were too much focused on killing+owning/taunting other players though, it was (and still is) my limit.
pyinstallwoes 4y ago
Yeah I remember having to buy half life and there wasn’t any recoil yet! Haha. Good ol’ cs_assault days.

taskforcegemini 4y ago

was asked and very tempted to create a map of my school back in the day, but awareness of the ramifications stopped that from happening. additionally, the powers-that-be were very incompetent, especially in regards to judging these kinds of situations

hot_gril 4y ago

> My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool Same except in Age of Empires 2. We got in minor trouble for it.

lewdev 4y ago

Sorry to make this an "old-off" but I played Action Quake, a Quake II mod that was how you described your CS experience. An interesting feature on Action Quake that never made it to its modern counterparts was being able to jump into an enemy to perform a kick attack. It's also my first experience with friendly fire. I had a blast playing online with Action Quake. That was probably the time I realized mouse + keyboard was far superior to keyboard-only.

anthk 4y ago

Doom users did what you say on creating real life based environments before, to be honest. And, yes, FPS where scifi based but the Delta Force series had more realism than CS itself.

zactato 4y ago
Sure there were some real gun mods in doom, but the gun sprite resolution was crap, the limitations of the engine added limitations to map design and while multi-player was possible it wasn't anything like the post-quakeworld era.

rco8786 4y ago

> My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool Ah yes, forgotten artifacts of an innocent past.

danuker 4y ago
They could have argued it was self-defense training :)
proser 4y ago
Naive feels like a much better word than innocent.

geph2021 4y ago

We knew that this would be interpreted as threatening by the powers-that-be at highschool These days that kind of behavior, if reported to law enforcement (mandatory reporting in some cases), will get investigated with the potential for criminal charges, and likely school expulsion.

sneak 4y ago
I wonder if that's legal, given that mapmaking is protected expression, and a recent ruling saying that (public) schools can't police protected expression off of school grounds. Without a clear expression of threat, I don't think simple mapmaking is sufficient grounds for a terror threat charge.
- vuln 4y ago
  > simple mapmaking It's not simple mapmaking though is it? It's creating a map inside a video game to simulate school grounds. Drawing a map of the school and putting it in a frame on your wall? Fine. Drawing a map, recreating it inside a first person shooter, then spending hours playing (training) memorizing the map? I believe anyone could see that as a terroristic threat. Edit: Example Legos. Having a Lego model of the US Capital? Fine Have a Lego Capital, attend the Jan 6 protest, have books and other militia type information? Probably going to get questioned by the feds. https://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-took-lego-set-of-capitol-from-january-6-rioter-2021-7?amp https://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-took-lego-set-of-capitol...
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > Drawing a map, recreating it inside a first person shooter, then spending hours playing (training) memorizing the map? Right, because if they couldn't practice on a computer, schoolchildren would have no idea how to get around within their own school.
  - moring 4y ago
    > Drawing a map, recreating it inside a first person shooter, then spending hours playing (training) memorizing the map? I believe anyone could see that as a terroristic threat. I'd like to point out that "legal" means "not forbidden by law", which in our default-allow mode means "no law exists that prohibits it". This affects both criminal charges for playing CS in a school-like map as well as the behaviour of the school in response to that. The correct way to assess legality is therefore not "anyone could see" but "is there a law that prohibits it?" (Note that the hurdle to expulsion may be lower than for criminal charges.)

ddtaylor 4y ago

> 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.

elymar 4y ago
I miss making CS maps. Was a great creative outlet for one to enjoy with others.
monktastic1 4y ago
> 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.
- CalRobert 4y ago
  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...)
- epolanski 4y ago
  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.

darkwraithcov 4y ago

I remember creating a map of my high school in the Build engine for duke3d.exe matches. This was before Columbine, but every outsider, nerd kid had fantasized in a similar way. We got our aggressions out on deathmatch, but it never occurred to us in a million years to actually hurt people IRL. We hated the jocks and the preps with the burning passion of a billion Wolf-Rayet stars, but never thought to hurt any of them, we simply accepted our lot in the genetic and social lottery and hoped to get revenge later in life (so far so good, judging by facebook).

gzalo 4y ago

We also built a similar map while in high school in the late 2000s, no one really complained (keep in mind I'm not from the US). Some of our teachers quite liked it though. We just viewed it as a familiar location (albeit with secret tunnels, lifts and higher ceilings), it had no particular negative connotations. I still have it, you can view some screenshots and download the bsp here: https://gzalo.com/en/projects/cs_electronicaort/ https://gzalo.com/en/projects/cs_electronicaort/

pezezin 4y ago
I was in high school in 2001 when Counter Strike exploded in popularity in Spain. We also discussed to make a map of our high school, one teacher even got us the floorplans! Mind you, this was one year after a guy killed all his family with a katana and the media blamed it on games. Still, nobody thought we were criminals. The benefits of living in a mostly peaceful country I guess...

timeon 4y ago

There were also several other mods, like medieval one.

stanmancan 4y ago

That’s around the time I started playing too. I still go through phases where I’ll get really into a new game. I don’t have the reaction time of the younger generation but the skills built up over decades of gaming allows me to stay competitive.

Legion 4y ago

> 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. I think every budding DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D map creator made their school at one point. Of course, that was years before Columbine (despite the inclusion of DOOM in the Columbine finger-pointing), and nobody thought twice about it then.

howlin 4y ago

> 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. I had a friend that was the victim of a local news "expose" on this. Just a harmless high school geek who thought it would be fun to combine the School blueprints with his CAD course to build a "fun" way of digitizing the blueprints. The main lesson we learned from this exercise is that the Duke Nukem 3D pistol is totally OP when used in realistically proportioned hallways. Auto-aim and all. The other lesson we learned is that local news investigative reporters care more about a compelling story than to represent the mundane truth.

antihero 4y ago
I did this and showed my school’s head of ICT (in the UK, where there’s near zero threat of shootings happening) and they were just happy I was doing something to keep myself out of other sorts of trouble, if anything.
amatecha 4y ago
Yeah, my buddy and I mapped out a lot of the school in 3dsmax for our 3d/computer class. We never did anything with it because, well, yeah. We REALLY wanted to make it into a Counter-Strike map but I mean, you can guess how that would have gone. It sure solidified our grade in the class though, we took photos of the vending machines, lockers etc. and texture-mapped them onto the geometry we built out. Seriously fun project.
base698 4y ago
How did they even find out he made the map? Was it published online?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

naet 4y ago

I wanted to make a map of my high school for CSS but I thought it would be too taboo in the post columbine world, so instead I made a version of my parents house with some added ladders. Honestly it was great fun playing with my friends who had been over and knew the real life layout. Hiding in the closet or peeking out the back window into the yard for flankers was great! I miss map making. The hammer editor wasn't the best but it was simple enough to figure out, and I actually had some old blueprints of the house layout that made it easier to get things to scale. I don't think many newer games like Call of Duty have the same community spirit of community servers, community maps, etc.

cpeterso 4y ago

I worked at a high-pressure game company and I remember an engineer showing me a Counterstrike map they made of our company's office building, desks and all. It was amusing at the time, but in retrospect, maybe I should have said something to HR.

montag 4y ago

I, too, created a 3D model of my high school... a little "I am Spartacus" moment on Hacker News.

friendlyHornet 4y ago

Making maps for Half-Life and Portal is what lead me down the path to become a software developer. I was never that good a mapper but it got me into computers in general. If I had never discovered Hammer Editor on one summer afternoon in 2008, my life would be SOOOO different

nonplus 4y ago
Very similar story here.

sasawpg 4y ago

My journey started with Action Quake II mod, which was an action-movie inspired mod (complete with Lights, Camera, Action when a round starts). I wasn't too thrilled with sci-fi style FPS games, they held little appeal to me, but I easily logged a thousand hours on Action Quake. Then moved onto CS and BF2 from there. There went my high-school years!

1letterunixname 4y ago

Counter-terrorist win. ):

ambrose2 4y ago

Counter-argument, before CS (CounterStrike) the predecessor we played a ton of was multiplayer Goldeneye 64. The guns weren’t super realistic, but it also wasn’t a giant leap to CS. The big thing with CS was the online multiplayer with low lag, and it was popular enough that you didn’t have to wait long to join a room - which was a whole lot different than having friends over and playing couch multiplayer.

1letterunixname 4y ago

So many sleepless until sunrise LAN parties.

Aeolun 4y ago

I remember being so enjoyed by the inability to walk into buildings and shoot from there that I tried to build a whole map full of office buildings. Don’t think I ever got further than a single building and a parking garage though. It’d be nice to see that again now…

NovaPenguin 4y ago

It seems like this is something that happens in every high school. Our School was a Quake 1 map however.

johnchristopher 4y ago

BF recreated his house and the square in front of it in hl2. He added secret room to his house. We only ever played it 1vs1 but it's one of my top 5 FPS memories ! The fun came from walking in a setting I knew and recognizing it as "our" immediate surroundings. It was not about killing each other, though blowing up part of the furniture in the house was fun. I didn't like playing with people who were too much focused on killing+owning/taunting other players though, it was (and still is) my limit.

pyinstallwoes 4y ago

Yeah I remember having to buy half life and there wasn’t any recoil yet! Haha. Good ol’ cs_assault days.