The Counter-Strike shooter series is familiar to every computer game fan, and the current CS2 has a huge audience of players around the world. But what is truly surprising is the popularity of past versions: many still play Source, and no retro game can compare with CS 1.6 in the CIS countries. Its graphics can make your eyes hurt, there is no e-sports there for a long time, there is no online on Twitch and modest views on YouTube, but the community servers are still swelling with the number of players. Gabe Newell once said about the early versions of Counter-Strike: “It's not marketing or anything, it's just a great game.”
It all started with another cult game that came out back in 1998 — Half-Life. A year and a half later, the first beta of Counter-Strike appeared, which was worked on by two online friends: the lead developer of the modification Min “Gooseman” Lee and his assistant Jess “Cliffe” Cliff. The popularity that fell on them exceeded all the wildest expectations. Valve noticed the success of Counter-Strike, bought the project, and took the guys on staff to continue working on the game.
Currently, the daily peak of online CS 1.6 is around 15,000 users, this is only Steam without taking into account the army of Non-Steam players. Both old-timers and young people are on the servers at the same time. You can make a blunt assumption that 1.6 is only played on weak PCs, but there are many games around that run on anything. This is not the only issue, let's try to figure it out.
No need for a gaming PC
So yes, we cannot ignore the fact that you don't need a powerful computer to play 1.6, you just need a computer. Now the phrase “gaming PC” can cause tachycardia in a casual Internet user. You want more FPS and lower prices. But in fact, the prices are higher, and for high FPS, here's CS 1.6 for you.
Easy for beginners to join
Counter-Strike 1.6 has a fairly low barrier to entry. To start playing you don’t need to immerse yourself in a large amount of information. It is enough to be able to move the mouse and understand who to aim at in order to be in the general game flow.
CS 1.6 does not have a ranked match system, instead using community servers. This means that the servers are not centrally managed by the game developers, but by the conditional Petya from Magadan and Akhmed from Dagestan. It turns out that if 1.6 were a currency, it would be Bitcoin.
Usually people with different skill levels play on the same server: veterans with twenty years of experience and newcomers who downloaded the game an hour ago. Everyone plays as best they can and it doesn’t bother anyone that someone screwed up at “B”. The process is important here, not the result. Players in 1.6 have no goal, only a path.
A bunch of mods
Current modifications for CS 1.6 are created only by fans for fans. There has been no official content for a long time, or more precisely, it has not been there since the release of version 1.6. Rare official patches concerned only stability on modern operating systems and new versions of Steam.
Mods from the community change only the visual part, bringing the old graphics closer to modern realities. Using them, you can run around with absolutely any weapon skin, take the most expensive knife from CS2, major gloves and other game items. And if you want everything at once, then there are CS 1.6 assemblies, in which many mods are already combined into a single set according to some criteria.
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No rating system
The absence of a global rating table can be considered both a minus and a plus, but this distinguishes CS 1.6 from modern multiplayer games projects. As a result, mandatory responsibility to other players disappears: both to terrorists and to counter-terrorists. As for the rest, “Tab” will show who is the boy and who is the father.
Even here there are cheaters
Cheaters are a nuisance in any multiplayer game, and in this regard, 1.6 is no exception. But if in the competitive mode of CS2 there are obvious problems with punishing cheaters, and on Faceit the Smurfs rule the roost, then in 1.6 almost every server has active admins keeping order. But even the experienced admin B@LTika_9 | V0l0dya1975 is not immune from false positives, when suspicious, but actually clean, really strong players are banned. Hence the favorite pastime of skilled CS 1.6 YouTubers – ruin everyone on the server, get banned and show off in your let's play.
Atmospheric
The lamp atmosphere of computer clubs of the late nineties and early 2000s. First impressions of Assault and Mansion. The old people still remember how the BMP was launched on Siege. Well, whoever didn’t hesitate with his friend at the same PC in the “one runs, the other shoots” mode, did not have a childhood. Later Dust and the second Dust, which froze in its constant popularity and still remains the number one card with a huge margin.
Now it’s not quite like before, but it’s similar. People have changed, matured, and the game has evolved even without official support from the developer. Maybe somewhere even for the worse: some servers can be overloaded with plugins, and skins from the category of local creativity are sometimes annoying. But it still looks the same.
