The world of Counter-Strike has changed immensely over the last decade. Two versions of the game have come and gone. There’s more money. More players. The game was ported to consoles. And matchmaking changed everything.
Fortunately, memories still exist of how things were before. And 10 years ago, a 15-year-old produced just one snapshot.
The video was called AusLegacy, and it was the sole effort of Isaac “inert1a” Jan. It was a massive community collaboration at the time: people posted up links to demos on forums and messaged through timestamps and certain rounds on IRC just so they could get their time in the spotlight.
It was one of the few “frag videos” produced in Australia that also had live footage, courtesy of a national tournament held in Sydney around that time. Most of that footage was never archived properly and has since been lost, although a little bit lives on here.
“I spent endless days and nights working on it in order to generate a perfect piece,” Jan wrote in a forum thread honouring the video. “10 years later, I look back at this and realized that I lived everyday with a vision that I wanted to fulfil so I could give my life some purpose.”
It’s a fairly long video and the music is, well, for a particular taste. Which doesn’t really exist much in 2016 — you won’t find too many fans of happy hardcore in gaming circles, anyway.
Jan’s since moved on with his life, having spent the last couple of years teaching in the United Kingdom and travelling throughout Europe and the Kashmir regions. But he and the local CS community will always be able to look at this, a reminder of how things were.
As a small aside, it’s also an ugly reminder for yours truly. Good god I was fat 10 years ago.
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