Counter-Strike In my younger and more vulnerable years, I spent a lot of time getting shot in the head in Counter-Strike.
While many factors were working against me – my age, my characteristic lack of dexterity, my (for the time) toaster-level PC, and my bargain-bin 200 DPI Dell laser mouse – I never let these disadvantages stop me from padding some lucky player’s K/D ratio with my ill-fated MAC-10 rushes. When I would search through the list of servers for players of a similar skill level, I would come across a panoply of fan-made mods and maps intended to offer a respite from the endless dual grind of de_dust and cs_office, and I would occasionally take the plunge and sully my dad’s hard-drive with these bizarre creations.
Of these offerings, the most consistently-populated servers were always devoted to the act of “surfing,” a fact that boggled my pre-teen mind. When I would connect, I would see long, sloped ramps to nowhere, curling and twisting through empty space towards an unknown destination. While my opponents seemed to slide across the slope with ease, I would hurtle into the abyss every single time. No matter how loudly I pleaded with my fellow surfers to explain the trick, they would hurl obscenities at me and tell me to use F10 to deploy parachute – a button which would, in fact, abort the game. (To be fair, it was pretty funny the first time.) Later in life, I eventually figured out that holding a movement key against the slope allowed you to stick to the path, and I embraced surfing and other such “trick jumping” as a fun palate-cleanser at the end of a long night of gaming.
Charlie “Mariowned” Joyce is the apparent inventor of the first surf map for Counter-Strike 1.6. Joyce confided this in AskReddit thread where people revealed their “greatest accomplishment” that they can’t bring up in normal conversation, and he was immediately mobbed by fans of his work, and surfing in general. “It was pretty overwhelming,” he tells me. “I thought I’d just get a couple of people saying, ‘hey, I remember surfing, that’s cool.’ Or maybe, best-case scenario, reconnecting with an old buddy. But it was way, way more than that.”
“By the standards of surfing today, it really doesn’t look like much,” he says, laughing. “It’s just a ramp hanging out in the air, and we would try to launch to this tiny platform, where there was a switch that would blow up the level. It was the first surfing map, but we would mostly just shoot at each other, trying to get to that platform, for hours at a time.”
When Joyce entered college around 2008, with the subculture of surfing fully ingrained across a variety of games, including the smash hit Team Fortress 2, he began to slowly phase out of surfing as a hobby. As his small band of surfers began to drift apart, and a different community began to supplant the one he helped create, he no longer felt welcome in the scene, and he focused more on his studies. Though he would periodically check on the popularity of surfing among the various Counter-Strikes, when he posted on Reddit, he was utterly shocked at how many messages poured in from strangers desperate to express their appreciation. “I got people telling me that surfing helped them relax, that surfing helped them through rough times in their lives,” he says. “I even had a few people tell me that they were suicidal, and surfing helped them calm down. I get emotional just talking about it, I couldn’t believe it.”
The one thing Joyce did expect upon posting publicly about it was pushback from people who didn’t believe his claims: after all, this is the internet. However, besides a handful of pedants who point out that “sliding” game modes date back to at least Quake 2, the surfing community has been rather receptive to his return. “I’ve never played Quake 2,” he says. “If you go back to the first 3D FPS, you can probably slide on an incline. I didn’t even invent sliding in CS. I invented dedicated maps for what we coined ‘surfing.’ That’s it, that’s my contribution.”
Source: Eurogamer