Damn, that seems long ago now. I have stumbled upon a CS 1.6 fragmovie I made more than 7 years ago, and decided it would be fun to upload it, for the nostalgia it brings.
So... that was from another time, when the only Starcraft match I watched every year was the WCG Finals, but when I would not miss a single big CS 1.6, Warcraft 3 or Quake event. Well, tastes change quite a lot in 7 years...
As I'm rambling about the past, there are many people in here who have closely followed the growth of BroodWar in Korea, but some of you may not know how big CS was actually in the western world ? CPL Winter 2004 finals between NoA and EyE had up to 50k viewers on HLTV. You needed to have the game to spectate this way, so it was not open to everyone like streams nowadays, but it managed to attract big numbers anyway.
When I look back, maybe Esports didn't grow as fast as I anticipated. But it grew, for sure. And more importantly, it is here to stay, it has survived some very bad decisions from many actors over the years. We have lost CPL, ESWC is only a shadow of its former self, same for WCG, but we're still doing great.
For the future now, I would love it if a new FPS could make it big in esports, for variety, mixing games in an event can be very refreshing for spectators.
I'll leave you with a good old classic fragmovie from 2003. Damn, that was 10 years ago......
I feel for you man, used to play competetively for few years and casually inbetween something like 8 years?. I was such a hardcore movie watcher too. I've rewatched certain movies hundreds of time.
aAa 2002 movie (literally, one of the most mindblowing things i saw as a 13yo brat) Art to frag The one and only HeatoN Frag or die Adrenaline 1-2 Mindtrek Lan 20 others than 1.6 movies countless as well
Moviemaking scene was SO big in CS. Some movies got like 1 million views on Youtube many years after its release. And when they came out there was no YT (ye dark times of internet, i remember downloading a single movie for several hours with 40Kb/s)
CS was the biggest western esport pre SC2/Moba. And CS was one of the most played game before MMO rush came (Lineage/WoW).
CS is not big here cause American CS scene was somewhat little compared to Europe, where the countries like Sweden (primarily), Norway, Poland lived by it.
Im kinda happy with how it went, i saw CS got some time on national television here in Poland(mainly because of Neo/PGS success), it kinda made the fundation for new-age esports like moba or sc2. I remember seeing the documentaries of Kubski's family (Neo), it was pretty peculiar case. Not many people know that, but at the beginning Neo played with his whole family (his mother, father and sister played it). It's pretty important because his father got invited to few talk-shows and he strongly defended gaming and resisted against the popular notion of "gaming is bad" "gaming is making you aggressive etc".
Actually i have so many stories, ive been to few lans though I never really got my name recognized that much, though we kicked ass of some top polish teams and got few wins and losses vs second polish team on net, but we could never get together on LAN because it was such a pain in ass to orchestrate everything when 2 people lived at opposite sides of Poland.
I always thought that we as a clan went unnoticed in history, but it was pretty heart-warming experience for me when i went to some LAN (just for fun, as a backup player) years after my competetive time and many people around actually knew my nick.
I have so many memories from my years in CS. I remember the hours of laddering on CLanbase/ESL. Peculiar matches, weird situations and so on.
One of the funnier ones: We played 5/5 cw and suddenly 1 of my teammate go AFK, the other (his brother) says:"Fuck my dad came and said to him that he needs to mow the lawn, lol im seeing him now running with lown mower like crazy." (we couldnt afford the next Pause because it was official ESL match and only 1 Pause for 5 min was allowed or something like that).
we played 4vs5 and we won.
I started to write it and it became kinda long;
I think im gonna blog about it once in a future, there are so many stories to tell.
EPT
