A Counter-Strike Love Letter

03 Feb 2010 at 00:00:00 by Tim McDonald

So there's a Counter-Strike 2 petition floating around the internet. I'm sure you've seen it – we reported on it, contacted the petitioner for more information, signed up, discussed it amongst ourselves, and then thought about it quite a lot.

Many are the cynics who believe that this petition won't make a difference, and that Valve's numerous teams will work on what they want to, when they want to. They might be right. This doesn't change the fact that Counter-Strike 2 is something that has to appear.

There's a lot that can be done with the franchise as it is. One discussion with Andy led to a dream of a “lite” Xbox LIVE Arcade release, akin to the spectacular Battlefield 1943: strip it down, jazz it up, and use it as marketing for, say, Counter-Strike 2. I doubt this'll happen, though, as it'd massively piss off the fans. Which, it has just occurred to me, would be hilarious: accusations of raping Counter-Strike's legacy would follow, and then probably accusations of raping childhoods. Then there'd probably be accusations of raping children, because you know what the internet's like when it gets going, but that's neither here nor there.

Anyway: being that not everyone in the office is a filthy, filthy Mac user, there are a lot of fond memories of the original game floating around here. For me, it was a favoured after-school pursuit amongst a rather large group of friends, and we could be often be found on local servers, blowing great dirty holes out of each other and screaming about AWP WHORING and OMG WALLHAX FAGOTZ - happiest days of my life, I tell you, and not simply because I was the one with the AWP. There was just something about Counter-Strike. It didn't matter whether you were good or bad, because there was an almost Zen flow to the game: when you were having a bad week, you played terribly; when you were on form you were floating on air. Certainly, starting off was incredibly rough. You were playing a fast and brutal team-based game, you had no idea what was going on, and you were going to die rapidly and repeatedly because you needed genuine skill to survive. When you actually got your very first kill, there was a palpable sense of euphoria and adrenaline, and this helped keep you coming back again and again.

Weapon balance and level design were two key tenets of the game that either the dev team lucked out on, or that got fixed through constant balance tweaks. Again, it's something I've not really seen since: when I began, it was all about the M4A1 with me. On returning after a six month sabbatical, I couldn't shoot for shit with it, but I suddenly discovered the joys of the AK47. Then it was the MP5. Then the P90. Whether it was psychological or whether my play style changed so much in my absences that I needed to adopt a different killing tool, I still don't know, but no other game has since scratched this itch in quite the same way. By the same token, levels were varied and interesting - I swear that I can get to the cs_office hostage blindfolded, and I'm sure there are one or two hiding spots on maps which could still surprise long-time players. Everyone had their favourite maps as much as they had their favourite weapons, and those maps were very, very different.

Then there were knife-only rounds. No-shotty servers. DEagles-only servers. De_dust-only servers, which are the bane of every sane player's existence. Zombie mode. Low gravity servers. Counter-Strike inspired the community in a truly impressive way at least partly through the versatility of Valve's dedicated serves, and that's even without the scores upon scores of maps.

See, petition creator Sam England is right: the series needs to catch the public eye again and mods won't cut it; the days when I'd happily download Action Half-Life or The Specialists or a far more niche mod in the hopes that it'd be good are, for me, long gone, and I doubt I'm alone. Likewise, Condition Zero was arse, and Counter-Strike Online will never, ever have any impact over here. I'm pretty sure that everyone still knows what Counter-Strike is, but it's the sort of thing that lies dormant in the back of your mind until someone reminds you about it. I haven't actually considered playing Counter-Strike for months - if not years - prior to seeing this petition, and for something that was such a huge part of gaming for years and years, that feels wrong. It's also very weird knowing that there are hardcore gamers out there that didn't take part in what was, weirdly, one of the biggest cultural phenomena gaming has had in recent years.

So yeah, maybe the days of Counter-Strike as the byword for online gaming are gone and this is all a foolish dream, but sod it: Counter-Strike 2, please, Valve. Feel free to rejig it as massively as you did Team Fortress because, hell, you'll do your usual sterling work, no matter what the haters say. Just give us the one game that will remind people why Counter-Strike was king, and introduce it to a whole new userbase.

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