Igloo Cafe BBS

GeckoF

Sysoperator

From: Antarctica

Registered: September 18, 2020

Website

25 Years of Counter-Strike: A new Retro-CS 2.6 server!

On a day like today but in 1999, Minh Le would officially launch the first beta version 1.0 of Counter-Strike on the project's official website, at the time as a Half-Life mod of tactical combat between counter-terrorists and terrorists. Announced under a Planet Half-Life hosted website, which was once one of the largest Half-Life web portals until some stupid company took over GameSpy and destroyed all related projects & services like such website (although it was already dead around 2012 thanks to IGN).

taken from the README files cuz the original website @ Planet Half-Life wasn't archived by Wayback Machine sadly

And without thinking about it, it would become both one of the Half-Life mods (or for the normies, GoldSrc games) as well as one of the most played multiplayer FPS games worldwide, with around millions of players online even today with CS2.

As we at Arena Igloo Cafe are looking for a more classic experience (because there are already hundreds of CS 1.6 servers running on the Internet and I honestly don't like CS and "competitive games" enough (too much toxicity) to leave one there), I have decided to host a Retro-CS server instead. If you've never heard of it, it's a Half-Life mod that recreates beta versions 5.2 and 6.1 of Counter-Strike in modern versions of the Half-Life engine. It's currently running with some removed beta maps and older versions of popular maps such as de_dust, but I will probably add some popular classic custom maps made around 1999 and early 2000s in the future.

And yes, if you ask "Why don't you host a CS Beta server instead of using this mod?", the answer is that I could do that but that requires having a 32-bit machine or a QEMU VM (because those old HLDS WON/Sierra versions require it or else it will crash on 64-bit) and I don't have the resources or time to do that.

You can download Retro-CS from this link from archive.org (a patched version made by me for Steam players). As with other mods, just move the "retrocs" directory to your Half-Life installation and DONE!

Server IP is "igl01.igloocafe.xyz:27018". If you have HL on Steam you can find it on the Internet list. Other server details are on GameTracker.

Have fun and enjoy!

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