After more than 10 years, the first major venture to turn gaming into a profession has shut its doors.

Effective immediately, the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) will cease operations. Therefore, all CPL events currently scheduled for 2008 are hereby canceled.

The CPL was launched in June 1997 with the pioneering mission of promoting and sanctioning video game competitions as a professional sport. For ten years the CPL events experienced increased growth – commencing with a small LAN event in Dallas, Texas, and culminating in world-class competitions across five continents.

However, the current fragmentation of the sport, a crowded field of competing leagues, and the current economic climate have prompted the CPL to suspend its pro-tournament operations. The CPL regrets that this news will disappoint those that were planning on attending the summer and winter events this year.

Many thanks to all of the sponsors and partners that helped CPL establish the groundwork for professional video game competitions. Their vision and pioneering spirit should always be remembered.

Counter-strike existed and thrived before the CPL, and I played CS competitively before it, as well.  But CPL brought CS competition into the spotlight.  While never really getting enough press and fans beyond other CS players and game sites, the CPL did generate a worldwide buzz that carried over into other games. They also helped establish a rulebase and a legitimacy for it being almost a sport.  I only competed in CPL events in it’s first couple years, but I remember them fondly.  It’s sad to see this phase of gaming die.

I wish I could remember where I find these. There should be a tag on each picture that stores where you downloaded it from. This one reminds me of xkcd, so it may be from there.

They have pulled me back in.

As many times as I quit CS is the exact same amount of times I eventually come back to playing it. In honor of my recent collapse into playing Counter-Strike often over the last few weeks, and inspired by the Creamaid widget below, here’s some memories of competitive CS I have had over my many many years of addiction to this game.

The first fondest moment that comes to mind is the first CoFR Intramurals. CoFR is a gaming group I have been in almost as long as I have been playing CS. We got together mainly to play for fun without having to deal with random smacktards, by having our own private servers and restricting membership to mature people over 25.

After many months of pure fun playing, many of our competitive natures were building and finally we decided to have a totally internal competition. Not for prizes or anything, but just enough to slake our competitive nature without slagging or excluding anyone. Every CoFR that wanted to play could and would. We semi-randomly assigned teams. To be fair we identified those who obviously had more “skill” than others, and either made them team captains (if they wished), or made sure they were distributed fairly to the teams. I don’t recall exactly how many teams we had, but it was at least six.

We were to play a “regular season” and play pretty much every other team, and then have a playoff of sorts. This was several years ago, so forgive me if I forget or misrepresent details. I know we all did team captain writeups after most matches, so I will look for that and edit this post as necessary later.

I volunteered to be team captain, and I don’t exactly remember why, but I was offered it and took it. I participated in the “draft” and gathered my group of ragtag players. Our team was kt. The Knights Templar. We all had the same outlook. We didn’t really want to practice, and we only half-heartedly contributed to smack-talk on the forums. No, we just wanted some good games with relatively improv strategies. Honestly, I didn’t think we were going to do that well, but I knew we were going to have fun at it.

Until the first game. We had some general strategies such as: save for money as a team, and call positions and enemy whereabouts. But largely we relied on individuals to play improvisationally. I think the map was de_train and from the pistol round on we were slaughtering. We won the game with a sizable advantage and we carried that high into every other game we played. After that game was won, we steadily mounted our wins with only one loss, until the playoffs. We won with no practice (even though we tried to a couple times, it just never worked out), sometimes with not all our members showing up, little strategy, and usually half the team was a little tipsy.

During the season, we had to play against Running with Scissors. A team who had strategy, practice time, as well as a couple members who actually competed in CS regularly. They were undefeated. We pretty much figured we were toast. I thought: well, even though this will probably end our winning streak, we have done better than expected in this season, and we weren’t going down without a fight.

And so we did. Fight that is, not go down. The map was de_aztec, one of the most popular and one of my favorites. Also, it is one of the maps in cs that has been analyzed the most from every tactical mind that has played it. We knew this and we decided early to try and establish an early lead by eschewing armor and having everyone buy deagles or armor the first round. This goes counter to the usual strategy of saving for bigger guns later. We were CTs. We knew that the CTs have a bit of an advantage in the map, especially if they opt to largely defend. We decided to shake it up and go on a rush offensive from the very beginning.

The key moment in the game came early. That very first round, our star deagler was Shay. A gamer that many times in casual play will use a deagle for most of the game, neglecting the larger weapons. We all rushed together and stormed the bridge. Amazingly, Shay racked up 3 kills in the first round! She almost wiped the other team out single-handedly (there are 5 to a team). And while we mopped up the rest, our early advantage was capitalized on the rest of the map. We never gave in or let up and finished the map as CT with a 10-3 score. At one point we were 8-1, and we couldn’t believe it. Here’s the screenshot I still have of that moment.

This was a sizable advantage, but our strength all season had been defense. Now we had to switch to T, the attacking side.

We decided to foolishly do the exact same thing the first round. We were going to all buy deagles, rush the bridge, and try to take them by surprise. While not being pretty, it worked! We won the round and some money by managing to kill off the other team. But it was one-on-one at the end. Honestly, I don’t remember too much of the game beyond that except that we traded off winning and losing which kept both teams in the poorhouse for the whole game. Most battles were decided with pistols or submachine guns, with few exceptions. We were afraid of being shutdown by the AWP when they managed to save for one, but every time they did, we managed to make them lose it, albeit at great cost to our own.

We finished the T side with a win, 8-5, securing the match and a very unlikely win. The team captain of RwS was definitely known as one of the best players we had in CoFR and he received much ribbing for his one and only loss in the regular season. But again, it was all lighthearted.

We went on to the playoffs, and then the championship. Of course, the championship turned out to be a rematch between us and RwS. The intramural games had lost a bit of steam towards the end of the regular season, many people dropping out due to time constraints or lack of desire. Our team and most others had several replacements, and we even had to play some games shorthanded. Still most of us wanted to see it through to the end. While showing our mettle to its fullest, we were not the same team as before, and we did lose that final game.

While not getting quite as much press as the previous matchup against them, this final game of the Intramurals was still alot of fun. CoFR went on to have several more intramurals before the interest in CS for us as a group dwindled away. We never really got into a game as much as CS, so I’m not sure if things like will ever occur again for us as a group. But, I hope so.