Mariowned:

Counter-Strike surfing began around the Summer of 2004. I came across the idea for surfing in CS by accident. I made a map called ka_killbox a few months before the first surf map was made. Ka_killbox features a dead end street of a neighboring town that I grew up in. My friends and I would do sort of a destruction derby down this one street, so I decided to make this map in CS. The level featured a big street with three big houses going down the angled street. While messing around in the map one day, I slipped off the side of one of the houses and as I was falling to my death I landed near a ladder connected to the adjacent house. So during the next round, I went back to the roof and tried sliding off and landing on the ladder. Eventually I got it and thought it was awesome. I went right back into Valve Hammer, the CS level creator, and opened up ka_killbox. I took the roof of that one house and turned it into a prefab then opened a completely new file and put just that roof in. After a while of messing with the angles and positioning of all the brushes, the objects in Hammer, I finalized the main "wave". This wave can be seen in most of my maps such as surf_egypt, surf_water-run, and surf_ninja. The maps were named surf because I thought it looked like people were surfing on these concrete waves and so the name stuck.

The first surf map ever made was called surf_the-gap. It consisted of just the main wave, a platform with water on it and a button to blow up the whole map. The idea of the map was to be the first person to surf and land on the platform and kill everyone. It was very basic, but my friends and I would play that map for hours each day. Most of the beginning maps were like this. They were designed as killing maps and the original air_accelerate was 10 or default. There were some test maps that I made that were never played or even heard of from anyone else because I was still new to Valve Hammer and they didn't make the cut.

I never had a professional server, so all of the early maps were played right off a server I made from my computer. At first, surfing didn't do too well. No one knew how to surf and they would get frustrated and leave. After a while, more and more people would join my crappy server and we eventually had a following. Surfing began to take off when I created surf_egypt. It was the first surf map that I ever put any aesthetic appreciation into, but remember I was still new to Hammer so it obviously wasn't too pretty. Everyone loved egypt, well those that could atleast make it from the main wave to the second wave.

Many of my friends really supported my maps and played everyday in my server with me. My one good friend, Despair, even helped run a second server off of his computer. We began making dedicated servers and leaving them on over night and when we were at school. It wasn't until one day when I noticed in Despair's server that I was surfing way too high compared to normal on surf_christmas. I asked him if he changed the gravity, but he said no. He gave me the rcon to the server and after some snooping I noticed he changed air_accelerate to 50. We eventually found out 100 is the limit and then I began creating maps based on air_accelerate 100.

Surfing has changed so much since the early days. What began as basically preventing yourself from falling to your death to complete the level has turned into almost flying in CS today. Killing in surf maps is almost unheard of nowadays and most people now use developer 1 to get more fps to surf easier. I had a tough time changing my mind to even start mapping for air_accelerate 100.

I would have never thought surfing would get as popular as it did. I would like thank anyone who ever helped with the advancement of these maps and anyone who continues to advance them. I haven't released a map in so long that most people probably think I died. I will continue making surf maps in the future as long as people keep playing them.