How I got into First Person Shooter (FPS) video games.

---

This is the second part of my two part series explaining how I got into playing FPS games from the start until where I am at today.

You can read the first part Here

As this is my first long blog post, any thoughts or feedback are appreciated so please let me know in the comments.

---

After a year or so at the start of high school, I went to a different Internet café called ARENA with some friends.
The place was always packed full of people, we had to sit on a waiting list sometimes for over an hour just to get a computer.
Most of the people there were playing Counter-Strike and DOTA.

I spend a lot of my school holidays there playing counter-strike with friends and eventually became really good friends with the owner of the café.
He introduced me to the competitive scene in Counter-Strike, which I had no idea existed at the time, as all I used to do is play on the public servers and see how many frags I could get with out getting killed.

He showed me his CS team of 4 other players that he played with, and I learnt that they used to compete against other teams and sometimes even win prizes.
I was really interested in the idea, so I decided to make my own team with some of my friends from school and some people I used to play with in the public servers.

We ended up playing at a local LAN in my hometown where everyone would bring his or her own computer, which was called a BYOC LAN.
My team ended up having to go against the best team in the state at the time called “cflow” as we were the lowest seed team at the LAN.
We got totally wrecked and didn’t win a single round the whole match.

Cflow CS Movie by Summ

After the game, I was really astounded at how good the other teams at the LAN were.
I wanted to be as good as they did, so I asked my friend at the internet café how I could get better and be able to beat the other teams.
He showed me what I need to work on, the different positions to use and a lot of different ways to outplay the other players.

I spend hours watching different teams play, and eventually figured out how to watch teams from other countries play each other.
The first demo of teams from other countries was a match on de_train in CS1.5, the teams that were playing were a French team called aAa, and a Swedish team called SK.

I then started to watch demos of teams from all around the world, using a website called Gotfrag.

After a few months I made a team with some people that I met through CS from my local state and we went to another local LAN tournament.
This time we beat quite a few teams and ended up coming 2nd
I was amazed at how much I had improved from my last result, so I kept going to all the local LANs from then on.

SAGA LAN CS1.6 Video by Spiff

After the local scene died down a bit in my state, it was still as strong as ever in other states in Australia.
I decided that I should try and play with people from other states, to learn different ways to play, which would ultimately improve my game.
I ended up traveling interstate by myself quite a few times to play in local LANs in other states with teams from Melbourne and Sydney.

I had some good and some bad results throughout, but I was learning a lot and meeting a lot of new people in the scene.
I ended up getting invited to play with a lot of different teams interstate, and in a few of them I qualified and went to the National tournaments where all the top teams went to compete against each other for big prize pools or for trips overseas to compete against the worlds best.

Counter-Strike Source came along during this time, and I didn’t really like it much as I was having a really fun time playing in all the teams and at the LANs interstate in CS1.6

My local CS1.6 scene in my state had almost fully died out, but the CS:S scene was huge and had heaps of local BYOC LANs every 3 months or so.
I ended up going to my first one with a few friends from CS1.6 and we ended up coming 2nd in the whole 32 team LAN only losing 16-12 to the best team in the state at the time.

After that experience I went to quite a few of the CS:S LANs as I loved the competitive aspect of them and I didn’t have many CS1.6 LANs that I was going to interstate at the time nor did I have much money to be able to either.

Since then CS:GO had come out, and there wasn’t any LANs anymore for CS:S or 1.6 in my state. So I made some of my own LANs where I organized the servers for the game, ran the tournaments and played in them at the same time.
I did this for CS1.6, CS:S and then for CS:GO.

It was extremely hard with CS:GO as the way the game servers had to be run was much more difficult compared to the other versions of CS, especially since I was organizing 16 team competitions while also playing in them at the same time.

I have since done LANs for other games such as Overwatch at AVCON which is another big step up from the smaller local tournaments I have run in the past.

Short video showing the AVCON Overwatch tournament

Throughout the time of doing these LANs and playing in competitions around Australia, I have had a heap of fun and I have met some awesome people, like @dblstr

The way I see gaming going today is really exciting, and an awesome time to be apart of it, especially in eSports.
I can’t wait to see what the future has in store for gaming as a whole and I can only see it getting bigger.

Thank you for reading my two part series on how I got into FPS gaming and my journey through Counter-Strike and eSports.

I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I had writing it.

Julienghost