NIDZUMI+

My name is Martin Gaston and I have a problem with Counter-Strike…

It was brilliant. I couldn’t play it now, but back in the year 2000 I was stalking up and down the corridors of dust, cbble and office for at least four hours a day. Some necessary context: I was 13, we’d just got the internet as a family, and I came to the game too late to have fond memories of the time when the M4A1 had a scope.

I remember my first day with the game. It took me hours to even get a single kill; I ended up eventually catching someone by chance with a stray shotgun shot. I was trying to play it like it was DOOM. A couple of days later I realised shotguns were terrible and learning to fire the M4A1 and AK47 would be a necessary step, and that’s where my love for the game started proper. It was the first shooter I’d ever played that demanded three-round bursts, which took me ages to wrap my head around but was something I found fascinating. It was also the first game I ever took online.

Time helped me get better, but I was never exceptional. Though I could usually hold my own, and still have a screenshots folder of some of my most spectacular scores. I was a very active player for the best part of two years, and crudely popping that into a calculator comes up with 121 days spent playing. Round that down to an even 100 and it’s still a mammoth chunk of my adolescence.

There was never a bad time for it. Terrible day at school? Wait until 6pm (internet was free when it was off-peak) and play some Counter-Strike. Good day at school? Wait until 6pm and play some Counter-Strike. If I was lucky I’d have some evening plans with friends, so would fit some Counter-Strike around that; if I was unlucky I’d be forced to do some homework, which would serve as an undesirable filling – the sausage and egg of my day-to-day, perhaps – between two hefty chunks of delicious Counter-Strike bread.

I’d used to say it didn’t consume me, but looking back I realise it definitely did. I used to think about tactics at school, doodling out crude interpretations of the maps when I was ignoring lessons and using my pencil to work out potential vantage points and strategies. In retrospect it’s amazing I ever made it to university. I’ve flirted with other game addictions over the years, such as when I played World of Warcraft for about three days in a week and, upon realising what I’d done, uninstalled it immediately and promised to never touch another MMO ever again. But no other game has have ever affected me like Counter-Strike, and I doubt any game ever will; my adult life makes demands of me that mean such complete adulation towards a videogame is an impossibility. Part of me will always miss it.

Sometimes I tell people how many hours I’ve pumped into the game, and they always look at me like they’re expecting me to follow on with a speech about how it was all a horrible mistake. I’ll never regret spending my evenings with fellow schoolmates on our favourite servers. I fondly remember the times I’d spend chatting with friends in-between rounds as my character took a brief respite by sprawling out, dead, over the floor; taking about girls, school, the future and how much more Counter-Strike we’d be playing that night.

The Priory is a six part series recalling personal tales of Video Game addiction. Stay tuned every Friday from the 29th of January up until the 5th of March for more fond or regrettable memories that are all too relatable. Click here for the rest of the series.