I'd argue the original mod/1.6 had a much bigger impact on gaming than CSGO.

The impact of Steam, as the first digital distribution platform for video games, is probably magnitudes bigger again.

Valve was so far ahead of the competition, and still remains there to this day.

Which is kind of a miracle, in some alternate timeline we could have ended with EA as the patron of PC gaming.

For the first time. I'm surprised it's been only 11 years. It feels like aeons ago since I got my MG2 rank playing competitive pretty much every day.

I guess I'll have to brush up my rusty AK one taps again when the new Counter Strike comes along.

Don't look at a calendar, it will be a depressing experience.

to be fair, CSGO was a failure for the first few years of its existence. so it's likely you're remembering it best from around 2016.

all I know is that I have the operation payback challenge coin, but no real memory of those maps. i do wish they'd bring back some of the operation maps... (santorini anyone?)

As it happens, I was an early adopter. I have my 10-year badge just from CSGO. I was SMFC in ~2013 (it was easy at that point in time, I get destroyed now).

The game has changed a lot. The original version of CSGO wasn't even made by Valve Software. But every map in the Active pool is either a totally new map, or is an old one that's been re-built from the ground up.

And I have a few skins and a bunch of cases left over from back then. They were worth $0.03 each back then. But the game has grown 500x so demand has increased while the cases actually reduce in supply over time...

As far as I remember CSGO did way better than CS:Source, which never really caught on until the point where it became a bit of a "retro" curiosity.

Most of the pros stuck with 1.6 instead of moving to Source (and most existing tournaments stuck on 1.6 - although notably CGS went with CS:S). In Source the movement was clunky, the sound system was awful, and the shooting & spray felt bad. The overall physics was just very strange, it felt like you were walking in honey - although did get better (a long time later).

Almost a year before CSGO official launch there was a showmatch for it and it looked awful. A bunch of small things were improved by the launch, but it was not good at all (look back at 2012 CS:GO footage and you'll be shocked). Sound was inaccurate and inconsistent, molotovs and smokes were glitchy, wallbangs didn't work in a sane manner ... it was pretty atrocious. That said, 1.6 was basically ancient and Valve (who didn't develop the game) pushed for CS:GO to be used in competitions, so it was used. Over time it was increasingly improved and there was an influx of existing (1.6 & CS:S) pro players towards the end of 2012 and early 2013; and an explosion towards the end of 2013. CS:GO came out in August 2012, but only crossed over the 100k concurrent player mark (which is the all-time CS:Source record) in ~ December 2013.

Skin betting became rampant on CS:GO after the August 2013 Arms Deal update, with sites like CSGOLounge having absolutely huge overall parimutuel pots on basically ever game. This pushed up the popularity of the game - even a small local tournament could have 10k viewers if the game was listed on CSGOLounge [and the bigger matches had millions on the line].

Eventually, years later, CS:GO was improved to the point where it could stand alone without propping up by the skin gambling - and since then it's grown much further; but in reality both CSGO and CS:S had very similar and buggy first few years.

Covid years flew past

The days were long though