Counter Strike is still an iconic game two decades later. And now you can play it for free in your browser

In 1999 Minh Le and Jess Cliffe were excited about ‘Half-Life’, but wanted to turn the game around and make it a full-fledged FPS. For this they took advantage of the virtues of the GoldSrc engine that was integrated into the video game.

His ‘mod’ was called ‘Counter-Strike‘, and it was so successful that Valve ended up hiring these two programmers and buying the rights to the game. The rest, as they say, is history.

Over time, the Counter-Strike 1.6 version appeared, which purists still consider the best ever. In fact, the appearance of ‘Counter-Strike: Source’ caused a schism in the community of players of this video game, which was divided when deciding which of the two versions should be played in competitive online mode.

The truth is that ‘Couter-Strike 1.6’ has maintained its aura despite being a game with more decades of life. The graphics may be far inferior to what we currently enjoy in other titles, but that doesn’t even matter too much for the thousands of players who still enjoy it in competitive mode thanks to online servers available all over the world.

Now a project apparently originating in Russia has made ‘Counter-Strike 1.6’ available without installing anything, directly in the browser. The operation is simple: once we connect to Play-CS.com we will see a list of servers, and we will be able to connect to them to play a game directly from the browser.

In our brief tests —from macOS Ventura with Firefox, in fact, we have verified that indeed the operation is surprisingly good, although it helps that we connect to servers closer to Spain, such as those in Germany.

The game has a more commercial part and follows the ‘freemium’ model in which you can play for free, but then you can pay to set up a private server that you can enjoy, for example, in a more private way.

What is surprising is once again that a game like this, which required a relatively powerful machine when it was released, can now be played entirely in the browser as if we were playing it on a conventional PC. ‘Counter-Strike’ lovers will surely appreciate this option.