Exploring Counter Strike's Creepy & Unsettling Maps

My man's diving into the empty multiplayer maps essay. I like the feel of that

Love how old source games has this creepy atmosphere. Still play them until this day Engine limitation will always give a birth to creativity

There’s a great movie called „A Land Imagined” (2018), in which there’s a scene where the main protagonist is falling asleep while playing „Counter Strike” and, while being in spectator mode, he’s starting to nocliping through the map. This nocliping effect seeing on the monitor, added with great, hypnotizing music, created an eerie moment, as it looks like the protagonist is moving to another dimension.

Hey there, co-writer for Ghostware here! Thank you for the shoutout, the 120% increase in exposure this video generated will allow Mothership Loudspeakerz to stock up on mezze penne for the next three months.

Ghostware lead dev here, nice to have the game get two shoutouts in two consecutive videos 😎

Really goes to show the effort people put into these maps back with the limited technology of the Goldsource Engine.

On cs_estate, I remember you could turn the light on and off to piss off the counter-terrorists. And even bots knew how to use them.

yeah I had similar vibes in the old day of defeat levels without anyone in them playing at lan parties, something about the gold source engine man

I went back to Return to Castle Wolfenstein - Multiplayer last week (not ET). 20 years ago, this game had loads of players, clans, etc. Every server that is live today, is now only bots constantly playing the same levels in loops. Every time I entered a server, I'd ask "Is anyone out there?" - no response. It was like playing with ghosts.

Ah yes, the genuine Australian multiplayer experience - playing alone on a map.

3:29 unsettling reverb fart

If i recall correctly, original Counter Strike has some slight changes to first person fov and player height compared to Half-Life. It wasn't acknowledged well by mappers which results in it's weirdly warped perspective and sense of scale.

I guess GmanLives has never played No Players Online since that wasn't mentioned. That was the first game that did that whole, playing on a server alone concept and amped up the horror element. Good stuff.

In the early days of CS (and multiplayer in general), the tension really felt like horror to me. Memories of crawling around de_prodigy with a TMP trying to get the drop on people, only to get scared shitless by a dude with balls of steel running at me with an AK. Had me kicking the desk and throwing the keyboard in the air :D

That cs_estate creepy lights was a real mystery. There was nothing in the map activating upstairs lights except the lever in the transformer. The thing is the lights are turned off by default and they stay like that even if you're not alone on the map, but only ONE team must present (you can add a dozen of bots in your team and till the opposite team will have no players the upstairs light will remain dark). The secret is the transformer switching the lights is actually func_door set to "Start open" in its properties. func_door has a little secret: it resets closes itself at every new round. When there's only one team (no mater how many players in the team) on the map the game doesn't count it as a round at all. What happens is: the upstairs lights are turned off, you start the map, there's no opposite team -> another player/bot joins as the opposite team -> the game actually starts the round -> the transformer lever (func_door) closes since it's a new round -> upstairs lights turn on.

Every Source engine has that liminal feeling because maps are seemingly abandoned but you can hear the ambience around you... cars passing by, birds chirping, kids playing but there's no one there.

Oh that AK sound is Burned in my brain. That and the SSG sound is so brutal.

I'd argue the fairly recent trend of associating empty vast spaces and buildings with existential dread is at least partially a result of how overpopulated most urban areas have become in the last 2 decades. The feeling of being alone in an apartment building is largely a rarity now and feels unnatural to most people. Having grown up in Eastern Europe during the 90s I actually feel quite at peace at abandoned factories or construction sites, reminds me of a calmer more uneventful part of my life. Sometimes we just need some time alone with our own thoughts, afford to spent time on nothing :)

Halo: Combat Evolved gave me these exact same feelings as a child in both its campaign and multiplayer. So many early games are masterclasses in unsettling atmosphere.

I'm sorry, but no matter how scary, I'm still laughing at 'Oops Air - No Guarantees'