Apart from the impressive demo on the front of a locally produced PC Power Play Magazine, I didn't know much about Half-Life when it arrived. That changed quickly. I was young, and impressionable.
The first taste I ever got of the Half-Life engine wasn't actually that demo. It was Counter-Strike, played during numerous lunch time sessions at school, on the LAN.
A bunch of young kids. A bunch of cables. A bunch of computers, and some code, dutifully reproduced along a bank of computers with questionable compliance to the licencing agreements.
No, this is an article about how I emotionally react to arriving at the Counter-Strike franchise in my Steam gaming library; after going through all the letters prior.
In those first days, there wasn't a lot of maps. The maps that were on repeat were Office, 747, Aztec, and Warehouse.
Each and every-one ensured you would need to use each and every weapon in various situations in order to outsmart the brats sitting not so far away from you.
This was multiplayer gaming on a level that most of us had never seen before. We were young kids, that would grow into young adults, with beaten up cars, and cheap, entry level gaming rigs that amalgamated in large public halls to get a taste of that same atmosphere again and again.
I can't remember how many times I sat in that large, open space, nary an energy drink in sight, to engage, and play in what eventually was to become Counter-Strike 1.6.
Every weapon felt balanced. Every encounter was tense. Playing without any sound at all made the game even more challenging - the computers didn't have speakers, and it wasn't a time where everyone carried around earphones or headphones.
This period of time lasted for around six months, with people playing Counter-Strike heavily until the school yard was not the most desirable place to be found during lunch-time. Instead, the hottest spots were in the computer lab. I can't remember exactly why this gathering was stopped, but it did.
Several years after this all transpired, I would go on to run a local LAN gaming competition in conjunction with the local council over a number nights in the local public library. This bought back those memories.
I never touched Counter Strike: Condition Zero, and still don't own it to this day.
Then, along with Half-Life 2, and the Source engine, came Counter Strike: Source. I remember finally having a home Internet connection, and being able to play this game in an environment where I couldn't physically see the hardware my opposition was playing on. This was remarkable, and mind blowing.
I had just gotten my first real job, had just finished high school, and I wanted two things: a 21" flat screen CRT, and a GeForce 6600GT. That card was a beast, matched with a Pentium 4, and allowed me to enjoy dust2 at absurd frame rates. Counter Strike had gone from strength to strength, and there were thousands of servers.
Mods came for the game itself - I remember losing countless hours to the Gun-Game mode - which was probably one of the pre-cursors to Battle Royale type games, albeit in a team deathmatch format, where instead of elimainating foes, you graduated to different firearms.
Then, finally, there's Counter Strike: Global Offensive, the most recent title in the series. I have not spent a great deal of time playing this game, as compared to others in the series. Here be loot boxes, competitive play, skins for guns, and a huge economy. The entire franchise continues to persist through this title, though it is not uncommon to find people still playing all variants of Counter Strike to this day.
I haven't felt the need to play Counter Strike in quite some time, in any variant, but a Steam library without at least one of the Counter Strike titles within it would seem like a very strange, bizzare, and desolate place.