Exploring the Legacy of Dust Maps

Dust2 is more than just a map in a video game. Given the countless collective human hours spent inside of it, it feels closer to something like a real place. A place that I could probably draw a map of with a higher degree of accuracy than my childhood home. But what is it about this map that still resonates with people almost 25 years later? DE Dust and Dust 2 are not only great maps, they're relics of a renaissance and community contribution to video games. A time when the original Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, and Dota were all released within a few years of each other. It was a time of unbridled creativity among map makers and modders. When classics like CS Tire stood toe to toe with bizarre maps like DE Rats or The Simpsons House. When a teenager could cobble together a map like D.E. Cobble, and it would instantly be canonized into Counter-Strike's map rotation. Among the countless maps that emerged out of this period, the one that looms largest over the history of Counter-Strike is almost certainly Dust 2, which is why its humble origin story is so fascinating. So to tell that story in his own words, we tracked down the original designer, a man who hasn't worked in the games industry in over a decade. It's easy to assume that a map this legendary was designed by a seasoned veteran. But the story of Dust 2 begins before there was a DE Dust, before there was a Counter-Strike, before there was even a Half-Life. It begins with a kid named Dave Johnston making Wolfenstein 3D maps in his bedroom after school. So I grew up in the 80s. My dad worked at British Telecom. communications firm UK, Great Britain, and he was a soft engineer. In the 80s and early 90s, he had a tendency to bring home computers, kind of little 8-bit Micro-processors, you know, the simplest things, but I got into computers very, very early, and especially the Atari ST, which is where I learned most of my console computer skills when I was about seven, eight, nine, ten. Through that, I got into BBSs, and I discovered Wolfenstein, amongst other games on BBSs I played. So that was my first niche 3D game I played, and I think I was hooked instantly. And these BBSs, they also included map editing tools. So I started my first map editing journey making Wolfenstein 3D maps, which was basically just playing Minesweeper. You just kind of click squares on screen to create walls or give it a wall or create doors. And it wasn't until I was about 12 or 13 that I discovered Doom for real. I managed to get a copy totally legitimately from a school friend. And again, I was obsessed with all the WODs I could download from BBSes. racking up the most enormous phone block for my parents, who thankfully were very forgiving. Year before I knew it, I was making Doom maps, and I think I released my first Doom map on the internet in 1997 or so. And at that time Quake and Quake 2 had just come out, one after the other, and so I was starting to... Move from Doom, which was 2D, much like making vector graphics, which you can have done on the Atari, to doing the full 3D work. And my first attempt to do a 3D map in Quake was just impossible. I just couldn't do it. I thought, I'll just give up mapping now. Thankfully, I revisited it a few weeks or months later and tried again. I started to get the hang of it, started to make a few Quake maps just for myself. Never finished a single one. I'd just make one or two rooms here and there. At the same time, I got hooked onto Team Fortress, the original Quake World Team Fortress, and then Quake 2 CTF, and I was completely into the kind of playing mods and then trying to make maps for them. When Quake and Quake 2 came around, Ben Morris had designed another tool called Worldcraft. That was a paid for thing. I couldn't afford it. I was just a 16 year old. So I had to use other tools. So for Quake Initial I used Quool and also the official QuakeEd. That's cool. It's great. it worked really well, but it limited it to 300 brushes. I think Dust ultimately had about 700, 800 brushes, so I couldn't have created a Dust style map with pool. And then when Half-Life came around, it included Worldcraft for free, because they basically hired Ben Morris to work on the editing tools for them. And yeah, I mean, at the time, editing was all about creating brushes, which is just these big solid blocks in the world, trying to join them together to make sure players couldn't escape texturing them. appropriately, it wasn't a huge deal, the textures were flat, there's no, they're just diffuse textures, there's no like specular or shininess or even sounds in some cases, there's just these big sort of things. The sky was just a skybox, there's just six pictures floating in the sky and compiling on my, I think I had a cell one. 300 or something at the time, even before that, Pentium 2, 2.3.4, wait, compiling a map the size of dust took maybe an hour, two hours. So the iteration process was slow, but at the end you got this beautifully lit map. I mean, by today's standards, so primitive. But back then it was the most incredible thing, especially for someone who'd come from Doom, which already seemed amazing at the time, and from Wolfenstein. And again, each step seems so... Such an impressive improvement on the previous one. And then, of course, in 1998, was it? Half-Life came and that kind of just changed everything. It came with free mapping tool, Worldcraft, which I already knew. There were always new textures, there were always new functionality. When I finally was hooked on making Half-Life maps, and then, what, a year later, after that, Camp Strike came out. And yeah, that came with textures and I took to the game and started making my very first CS map, which was the Waterworld Retirement Home for Beta 3. And thankfully, it was deemed good enough to be accepted. And that led on to the whole Dust and Dust 2 and that entire journey. At the time, I was basically with the Half-Life textures, and I'd seen all the Counter-Strike maps, and I was like, almost all of them were very Half-Life-ish. They had all these kind of Half-Life-y textures, and to me, it felt odd to be a terrorist or a counter-terrorist in Half-Life. That didn't fit right. So when I saw this Z-Strike, the one in the beta 2, I was like, ooh, it was new stuff I can build. I can build buildings and things that are more familiar to me rather than this science fiction. Half-Life universe. I think I used to try and stick to that red brick texture that was all over the Retirement Area map. That texture I could just fill with urban textures that I felt I could use and be a bit more creative with. I wasn't so constrained by what I'd seen in Half-Life when I was making Half-Life maps. I was trying to stick to the things they'd established. But with Seastracks it was my freedom to do anything I wanted really. There's no prior art. And that was really freeing. I didn't know where I was going when I started them. I had to make like a wall, then another wall, then a floor, a door maybe, and find out I didn't have an entire map in front of me. This one just happened to look like a big, old, kind of say beat up building with a big courtyard. And yeah, just like the kind of oldish look to it. That was very different to Half-Life. So CS Tire ended up being incorporated into the third beta of Counter-Strike. Yeah. Yeah, because you were really young at the time. So I'm very curious what that was like for you. Yeah, I was must have been 15. I must have been 16 by then. I'd finished all my exams from that summer. I just had the summer waiting to start sixth form in the UK. So I just had time to play and do what I wanted. I didn't know Jess or Gooseman at the time. I was just a member of the CS mapping forum. I thought, I know, I think this map might be good enough. I'm going to upload it and see what people think. Worst case, I'll get some critical comments and improve it. Best case, maybe they'll think about including it in the game. And I think by the next morning, I'd had a reply from Jess saying they wanted to include it in Beta 3. And it is in testing. I moved a long route from the CT spawn away to the T spawn. And yeah, I think... I don't think at the time I quite appreciated what just happened. There's a slightly weird map that I'd made, certainly different to all the other maps in the game, that they somehow deemed acceptable to put in this little mod. I thought, okay, we'll take it. And then before I knew it, that map was being played. I was playing it online with other people, just an amazing feeling. That's when Jess came back to me and said, Dave, do you want to maybe make another map? We've got a text writer you can work with. which was Chris uh Macbeth Ashton and then that whole led on to the whole Dust thing which some people may know about When we talk about a map as iconic as dust, it's easy to imagine that it's the product of some mythical map maker toiling away on their masterpiece. But the truth behind the map is far stranger and more interesting than that. It's the product of an impatient kid seeing early screenshots of Team Fortress 2. I was a massive fan of the original Quick Worlds Team Fortress, and so when I found out that Valve had brought the Team Fortress team, I was excited. And so when I got Retired at Home into Counter-Strike, that was around the same sort of time that I think Valve released... another charge of screenshots of team fortress 2 at the time and those were the ones that included this golden kind of beautiful lit world a very sort of sandy with a tank and some military marching through this um this environment i thought wow that's okay now you've got my attention i was so excited to play two portraits when it suddenly solidified in my mind that was the next thing i had to play but of course yours being delayed and the restates was far from out so when jess said you know i've got i've got possession um got megaman he's gonna make some textures for you for another map i was like oh okay this is a perfect opportunity for me to try to replicate in what i've seen in these in these team fortress two uh screenshots and it was was super cheeky of me that was like such a looking back that's quite a horrible thing for me to have done to try to replicate these screenshots and still watch you know the masters of art been working on with map makers and texture artists they've probably been put so much time into those screenshots and perfect for release onto the web and there's me this the old teenage guy from uk who's gonna kind of come in and sweep in on on their on their glory and try to make it myself I circled in the screenshots the textures I wanted. He came back a few days later and said, here you are, and a few extra ones. And I started recreating those screenshots for myself, which is a useful area that represented the counter-terrorist spawn in D-Dust. That was all I had to work from, was that area. But yeah, it was amazing to be able to get that area created and be able to walk around it and experience it and think, I'm in TF2, I'm actually playing a game that hasn't been released yet. And it just felt so fun. In the past, when I was making Doom maps, I'd really enjoyed making maps of my school or my home. And just having that kind of freedom to explore in an environment that you normally have freedom to explore was exhilarating. This was similar. I was able to explore an environment I'd seen in a screenshot. That I wouldn't get to experience myself for a long time. I could do it today. I could now run around and see where it went. And then, of course, at that point, I... went up screenshots because it only had like five screenshots of one area so that worked out okay i've now got the start of my map jess and mac man are now expecting me to make a map out of this where do i go from here um i knew goose and jess were trying to make a new game mode for Counter-Strike called Diffusion, where you had to plant a bomb in one or two spots and the other team would have to defuse it. To me, I play a lot of CTF so I thought these two are quite similar so I thought, I know, I can make a CTF style map with these textures. I started to extrapolate that initial CT spawn area out. I didn't know it was a CT spawn at that point, I just knew it was an area. I started thinking, where could this go? And I then developed that area into an underground pit. And there's a little road that came out the front of the CT spawn and went left and down where the D-Dust underpass is now. That went down further into the underground, yeah, underground pits. It was already dark, I think there was a tomb or something down there, a few windows. I didn't know what I was doing. I think at this point I was really exploring the exploring textures that I'd had, trying to make out what would work or didn't work, and trying to establish a theme and a style for that. When I did the underground bit, it didn't work. I decided that this map had to be above ground, had to be bright and colourful. I know I spent a lot of time with the underpass, because that was a sort of design that I thought would be fun. I've played other CS maps, I've played Siege a lot and Assault a lot, and I think I was picking up little bits on those and trying to put them in here. I love being a sniper in Camp Strike, so I thought this underpass would be a fun place to snipe. And then, well, I thought, okay, I've got this sniper section, and what about people who don't like to snipe? What about people who love shotguns? Which is me, the other HSM designer. And that's how I created this sort of tight bit in the middle, these little corridors. And then the other side, around the T spawn, again, I just, I thought, okay, I need to tie this together somehow. And I just, kind of tried to copy the style I got from the CT spawn, which I still didn't know was CT spawn, it was just another area, I became the CT spawn, I just copied that style, wrapped it around, and once the entire map was sealed, and you couldn't just fall out, you couldn't escape, I then started to think about where these things could go. I think I already knew that the underpass would be a flag or a bomb in the CT parlance, and the other bit on the other side would become a bomb spot, and then you team, you decide. That seemed to make sense, and that was the map I... presented to jess who then said great awesome thank you put to testing and then he came back and said actually could you move that bomb spot from the underpass to where the zt spawn i thought okay sure sure that's that to me that seemed really weird but again i'll just judgment and that was like that was the version that shipped in at beta 4 yeah and before i knew it i was waking up that must have been saturday sunday morning uh downloading beta 4 for the very first time And finding tons and tons of servers playing D-Dust and thinking, oh god, it's actually happened. People playing my map for real. Some are still playing Retirement Home, but most are playing Dust. And yeah, that's where things took off. The very first time I thought maybe I'd hit on something good was when I saw a screenshot. I can't remember if it was in IRC or ICQ or even on the Counter-Strike website. But it's a screenshot of them playing all the new maps that are released. And at the bottom... and there's someone in chat saying, could play the dust map again? And all the people say, yes, please, yeah, that one, that one, I like that one. I was like, okay, people actually like this. And that's the first kind of feedback I've seen from actual people playing these maps. Yeah, it's amazing. And jumping into service and no one knowing that I was the creator and just playing with them and being able to recreate these scenarios that I had played in my head when designing the underpass or designing the CT's wall a little bit. I was thinking about all the great patients I've done to stop lines of sight being too long or interviewing each other. And just seeing those work in practice, I think was mind-blowing. It was so satisfying and so unreal. weird that this thing was happening. But at the same time I'm playing this first you know, first few hours off dust and thinking oh yeah this timing is not right or I'm getting to the CT, I'm getting to the middle bit too fast as a counter-terrorist or too slow as a terrorist or this thing I'm getting caught on this and getting caught on that. You know, immediately I was already trying to find the flaws and see how I could be improved and so that's why the subsequent beaters 5.6 and 6.5, they're always little changes. to them out, breaking walls, moving crates, making things brighter, darker, moving in the sunlight around, just trying to adjust these little circumstances that I'd either spotted or got caught in myself that are not fun to be in. For the first dust, the main choke point was in those corridors in the middle. So I'd literally spawn from the frontmost spawn point of each team and run that shortest path I possibly could and see if my watch would be timing it and just seeing at what points, how far I could get. before I could possibly see an emergence of Winifred on the team. And so I think for Dust, that was around 11 seconds in most cases. And I did push those horns back and forth over subsequent releases to get that balance just right. Once this map is out there and it's popular and you're seeing screenshots of it and people talking about it, you're the person who made it, but in a sense now it belongs to the Counter-Strike community or something. Yeah. It must have felt very different to be working on the maps once they were out there. Oh yeah, absolutely. I knew every small change I'd make would be breaking someone's strat that they were going to make in the next game, or could be introducing an issue, someone else. It was, yeah, to have a sense of ownership, also responsibility. I was like, somehow I'd given these people an experience that they were enjoying, and that was, you know, for my small 16 year old head, that was mind blowing. I was like, my head was floating like this. Andy, it's just incredible what's happening. But at the same time, I knew I had to make it better. I had to prove I knew what I was doing. I still felt like a bit of, I don't even belong. I was just, you know, this boy who made a map and also not professional at all. I was a complete, complete amateur. But I knew that, yeah, I had to do things right now. I had to do things properly. I had to do things as professionally as I could and try to adhere to the standards I'd seen other mappers at the time extol. But at the same time, it was like... so excited and so happy that this map has been received so well. I had no idea what would happen next. I didn't know if it was just a flash in the pan, if it was going to last more than a few days, weeks, months, years. I think I was just trying to enjoy it the best I could at the time and playing that version of the game and that version of the map as much as possible to just really experience it and get that... get enjoyment that i was trying to put into it not again you alluded to this a little bit but um dust was one of the like first maybe the first major diffusal map it's hard for people i imagine now who got into counter-strike later especially to decouple counter-strike from diffusing a bomb it's such an iconic part of playing counter-strike now uh yeah could you talk about like i don't i'm not sure what the right question is here just like what did you imagine that would be a big deal did it feel like that was an intriguing game mode to you did you feel like it would blow up no that's not a pun So the original game title of Counter-Strike was Hostage Rescue, and at the time that failed. It felt so revolutionary because all the other mods for Quake and Quake 2, even Half-Life at the time with Science and Industry, they were all kind of CTF or variations of CTF, often with extra functionality like grappling hooks or super weapons and things. So Counter-Strike seemed fresh. I knew the other ones like Action Quake and Action Quake 2 and Action Half-Life even, but it also had a bit more creativity to them. But I think it's more interesting you having actual scientists at the time chasing you, and running, coming after you to find freedom. So that was new, that was different, that was very unique to what it has from other games. So when Diffusion came along, again that was a bit like CTF. You had two teams with their distinct objectives, that felt a little bit like... a little bit of a backwards set, but at the same time it played more strongly into the Counter-Strike theme of terrorists counter-terrorists. Of course, they're more likely to blow up things and steal scientists here and there. So that made more sense. By the time Counter-Strike had reached retail, we all knew it was happening, so it wasn't such breaking news to me. I can't even remember if I went into a store and bought it, or if I just bought it online. I don't know what it is. I'm pretty sure that Valve sent me at least one copy of it in the post, so I already had a copy. For it to reach retail, I had to hand over the rights to the map to Valve, which was uniquely itself to be paid money for this thing I'd spent time on. That was possibly the more... exciting and interesting and most unexpected thing about the whole whole affair and the thing of putting on on shelves that was just logical consequence of being paid and thinking successful so i definitely really i really appreciated the time quite how monumental that was i think i do wish i spent more time at the time like just appreciating this this game it works on it's a cardboard box on the cd yeah in in game or whatever yeah the local shop was that time yeah i definitely really really sunk in um Bye-bye. If you didn't know the whole story of Dave's mapmaking journey, the unprecedented success of DE Dust might seem like the obvious high point. But while he was struggling to come to terms with the fact that lightning never strikes twice, those of us with 25 years of hindsight know that his biggest success was right around the corner. So at this point I'd made Dust and I'd made Cobble, both of which were in Counter-Strike in rotation. So I'd established myself, I was pretty happy, but I think I was also pretty sure that I'm not going to get a third map into the game. That's ludicrous. Excluding Waterworld Diamond. A fourth map into the game, that would be ludicrous. So I started to toy around with making another Dust map, and I'm pretty sure between Dust and Dust 2... I had tried making new dust-ish maps with the same texture set, and they just haven't gone anywhere. I had to make a few walls, make a doorway, and it was just kind of losing interest. Moving on to the next thing. For whatever reason, with the next dust map, I found a scrap of paper, doodled the design, which I never did for any other map. All my previous maps, I just kind of winged it. I just made up the mental arm. For Dust 2, I just started designing something with paper. Thankfully, that design... is one that I found the courage, maybe, is what I wrote, to actually get into the computer and get it from start to finish. And it was a design that more or less roughly reflected what was on paper. There's some significant changes, especially to the CT spawn, I think. But overall, the layout was more or less there. And, yeah, I thought, OK, this design is completely different to dust. It's completely different to cobble. This is... fast too tight it's a bit ugly in places it's a bit too angular it's got like sharp edges and sharp corners it's got a spiral it's got rocky bits this is just this is just silly this is not a map that anyone's going to want to play who likes dust or couple and so i thought okay well i've made it now and around that time i had an email from joe market from gamehelper.com and he said you you wanted me to make a map for them i thought i've got this dust-ish map yeah he said okay I think that's probably music to me. That's possibly the best thing you could possibly hear from me. I've got this Dust style map. I did sort of tell Jess about it and again Jess said it's a copy. I sent him D Dust 3. Before it was released, I called it Dust 3 and he said this is great and suggested a bunch of changes to the bomb spots. Again, just like Dust 1. Do you remember where those original bomb spots were before the sites were A and B where they are now? Yeah, so um In the... there's a tunnel called Suicide, I think now, in Dusty. At the end of that tunnel, from the Terror Spawn, you jump down off the road, go through Suicide, and on the left, there's a doorway. In that doorway, there used to be a room, much like... It's a very dark room. It's kind of similar to the Underbanks in Dust 1, and in there was a bomb spot. The other bomb spot was possibly on the right in the little dip along Long A. That weird dip that happens at the end of Long A for no reason. I think it may have been there. I'm pretty sure I moved it around a few times, honestly, trying to find the right location. I do remember at the time, yeah, I had learned from Dust. I was trying to incorporate some Dust-ish elements and that hallway was based in the hallway in Dust 1. So I was trying to incorporate some of that into Dust 2 without it being a direct copy. And that was always the hallway that I was getting down with the shotgun in. more SMG. That just appealed to me. I think at this point I had developed a sense that there are different play styles. People like to play different guns, different visual weapons. Long A is the part that did not match my paper design because by the time I got to adding that bit in Worldcraft, I'd run out of room. I had like no space at all to create what I wanted to create. So I was squashed up against the very edge of the universe in Half-Life terms and That area just became long. I think I was trying to make sure that there were no ridiculous signs of sight. There's no positions where a player could get in where they were drawing too much of that because that would slow down their experience. That would drop their FPS. So I think I was more concerned about the FPS then in performance than the actual gameplay. But that's also why it's quite tight because I had to kind of go around and dogleg a little bit. Again, that area was, I would have preferred to push out a bit more like the terrorist spawn in Dust1, with those kind of balcony bits and more stairs and things, but yeah, I was just squeezed. But I think this is one of those times where having a restriction actually forced you to be a bit more creative and find ways to work within those restrictions. And again, somehow, I squeezed in a little passage right around from what would become the CT spawn through to the CT spawn. I did have a, there was a pool, like a pond in Dust2 at one point, on there, so just outside the CT spawn. That was creating bad sightlines and things, so I turned it into a solid wall instead. Yeah, there's always little things that just, again, just having this sense and sort of feeling that these aren't quite right, or aren't necessary, I need to pan them back and get rid of them, because Dust isn't a detailed map. That texture set doesn't lend itself to high fidelity detail. It's, yeah. more blocky and so I was trying to stick to that so I always the most valuable part to me when making that was the first time I got to run around it in 3D and run around jump around crouch do all the kind of maneuver that I expect players to do. And that is the point where I always find sightlines that are incorrect or scary or weird or overpowered or opportunities to add different defences or offensive positions to give opportunities, as I've got the break in the wall for the B bomb spot. Those are all me trying to think, OK, I'm in this position. What can I do from here? And what do I need to look for? How am I safe? How am I unsafe? And trying to make sure... make sure that every part of the map had some advantage, but also yet some disadvantage and tried to bounce those as best as I could. It was mostly based on feel. Again, I'd run around in many other kind of spider descents that this feels a bit wrong or a bit weird. Okay, why is that? What am I missing here? What needs to be changed, added on route to balance that discomfort in my head out? Just like when you're playing Counter-Strike Reveal, you're always kind of aware of where the enemies could come from. and what you can do from your position, where you can hide, what opportunities you have. Again, that pit, I think it was just me wanting to find a way to hide as a sniper and just duck in and try to pop out at people planting bombs and things. I think I was basically trying to play the map in my head at the same time as creating it and trying to cover all these bases. Yeah, that's the best way I can describe it. I feel like if you were trying to design the most optimized, like, competitive play eSports map, Middoors would be the first cut, because it's like, you can fucking, you can get your head blown off just, like, setting up at the beginning of the match. Did you have a sense that Middoors was going to be, like, this lightning rod of controversy? Absolutely not. I have no idea whatsoever. I didn't even consider the fact that from the terrorist spawn, you could see right down there. That's the sort of thing that normally I think I would have liked to have spotted before I finished that. In that case, that one spot I did not spot. And so had I spotted that, maybe those mid doors would have been different. Maybe I would have shifted them across or lowered them or done something more creative there. But I knew it was a dust map, needed some double doors somewhere. So there's some there and some for the bomb spot. I did not ever anticipate that the ones were on the very center of the map, where everyone's going to go to all the time. would cause such controversy and pain and suffering. And dice in some cases, but mostly pain and suffering. And those doors were, yeah, principally just to stop people singing too much. Yeah, I'm glad. I kind of have those, of course, controversy and fun and interesting skirmishes every year. Again, I was never good in my life. enough of Counter-Strike to really appreciate all the strats and things that arise out of just small things in the map like that or where the doors are this way or that way or where a single crate can be asked over that go door that aware. Comparing the Counter-Strike Ars.Dark designing for in the late 90s to the counter-strike of today in 2024 i think 25 years between those and the strategies and approaches and the level that that professional players have to think of now is like so many layers of what i was free with at the time i was just thinking can i make a shot can i jump from here to there without killing myself can i throw a grenade yeah okay that's fine i i was never yeah i don't know all the other things that could emerge out of these simple amounts i was making Despite his initial concerns, Dave's follow-up to Dust went on to become the iconic Counter-Strike map, and by all accounts, one of the most famous video game maps in history. And nobody was more surprised by this fact than David Johnston himself. It's hard to overstate the reach of Dust. I mean, like, Dust 2 has been recreated in every FPS imaginable that has map tools. It's been, there's like Minecraft mods that are Dust 2. It must be surreal for you. Like, does it, what does that, what does that feel like? Do you, I feel like it would make me like dissociate. What does it feel like to watch this thing that you, it must be like having a child go off on its own. Like, what is that like? Yep, absolutely. I mean, I mean. I see dust in CSGO and CS2 these days, actually. I think, oh, that's actually cool. I'm glad that's so successful. But I actually remind myself, oh, that's my fault. I did that. I created the game. I set off. I planted that seed that has become this enormous thing that now hundreds of other professionals have poured thousands of hours and possibly millions of dollars into renovating over the years for different versions of the engine and versions of the game. To think that. that was all because of me sat in my parents'house. on a crappy old Pentium 2, 2, 3, 3, trying to do something in my spare time. Dust and dusting and cobble aren't my maps anymore. They're owned by the community and people who keep playing them and keep them alive and enjoy them and play them professionally. Yeah, I'm not responsible for them anymore. That's also quite a belief. I don't need to worry about them. They're just taking care of themselves. It's nice. And I do wonder how long they'll keep on going for. Will they still be played in like 10 years'time? 50 years time. Will they be on like a golden record shot into space someday, you know? Like Elvis Presley songs, dust to, you know, all the high points of human culture. Yeah, possibly. Or maybe we will be like, oh, we've fed up with these things now. Let's just banish them. We banned. Luckily Dustin does do more. Everyone's stuck with mansion from now on. That's the map we're going to focus on. But the story of Dust 2 begins before there was a DE Dust, before there was a counterstri-Hold on. Counterfuck. Before there was a counterfuck. My favorite mod. It's a not safe for work mod. But the story of Dust 2 be-Okay, I got this. But the story of Dust 2 begins before there was a DE Dust, before there was a counterstrike, before there was even a half-life. It begins with a kid named Jave-Jave Donston. God fucking dammit. Dave Dunst, purveyor of counter fuck. God dammit. He's the mod of counter fuck. Jesus Christ. Alright, hold on. God dammit.

But what is it about this map that still resonates with people almost 25 years later? DE Dust and Dust 2 are not only great maps, they're relics of a renaissance and community contribution to video games. A time when the original Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, and Dota were all released within a few years of each other.

It was a time of unbridled creativity among map makers and modders. When classics like CS Tire stood toe to toe with bizarre maps like DE Rats or The Simpsons House. When a teenager could cobble together a map like D.E.

Cobble, and it would instantly be canonized into Counter-Strike's map rotation. Among the countless maps that emerged out of this period, the one that looms largest over the history of Counter-Strike is almost certainly Dust 2, which is why its humble origin story is so fascinating. So to tell that story in his own words, we tracked down the original designer, a man who hasn't worked in the games industry in over a decade.

It's easy to assume that a map this legendary was designed by a seasoned veteran. But the story of Dust 2 begins before there was a DE Dust, before there was a Counter-Strike, before there was even a Half-Life. It begins with a kid named Dave Johnston making Wolfenstein 3D maps in his bedroom after school.

So I grew up in the 80s. My dad worked at British Telecom. communications firm UK, Great Britain, and he was a soft engineer.

In the 80s and early 90s, he had a tendency to bring home computers, kind of little 8-bit Micro-processors, you know, the simplest things, but I got into computers very, very early, and especially the Atari ST, which is where I learned most of my console computer skills when I was about seven, eight, nine, ten. Through that, I got into BBSs, and I discovered Wolfenstein, amongst other games on BBSs I played. So that was my first niche 3D game I played, and I think I was hooked instantly.

And these BBSs, they also included map editing tools. So I started my first map editing journey making Wolfenstein 3D maps, which was basically just playing Minesweeper. You just kind of click squares on screen to create walls or give it a wall or create doors. And it wasn't until I was about 12 or 13 that I discovered Doom for real. I managed to get a copy totally legitimately from a school friend.

And again, I was obsessed with all the WODs I could download from BBSes. racking up the most enormous phone block for my parents, who thankfully were very forgiving. Year before I knew it, I was making Doom maps, and I think I released my first Doom map on the internet in 1997 or so.

And at that time Quake and Quake 2 had just come out, one after the other, and so I was starting to... Move from Doom, which was 2D, much like making vector graphics, which you can have done on the Atari, to doing the full 3D work. And my first attempt to do a 3D map in Quake was just impossible. I just couldn't do it.

I thought, I'll just give up mapping now. Thankfully, I revisited it a few weeks or months later and tried again. I started to get the hang of it, started to make a few Quake maps just for myself. Never finished a single one. I'd just make one or two rooms here and there.

At the same time, I got hooked onto Team Fortress, the original Quake World Team Fortress, and then Quake 2 CTF, and I was completely into the kind of playing mods and then trying to make maps for them. When Quake and Quake 2 came around, Ben Morris had designed another tool called Worldcraft. That was a paid for thing.

I couldn't afford it. I was just a 16 year old. So I had to use other tools. So for Quake Initial I used Quool and also the official QuakeEd.

That's cool. It's great. it worked really well, but it limited it to 300 brushes. I think Dust ultimately had about 700, 800 brushes, so I couldn't have created a Dust style map with pool. And then when Half-Life came around, it included Worldcraft for free, because they basically hired Ben Morris to work on the editing tools for them.

And yeah, I mean, at the time, editing was all about creating brushes, which is just these big solid blocks in the world, trying to join them together to make sure players couldn't escape texturing them. appropriately, it wasn't a huge deal, the textures were flat, there's no, they're just diffuse textures, there's no like specular or shininess or even sounds in some cases, there's just these big sort of things. The sky was just a skybox, there's just six pictures floating in the sky and compiling on my, I think I had a cell one.

300 or something at the time, even before that, Pentium 2, 2.3.4, wait, compiling a map the size of dust took maybe an hour, two hours. So the iteration process was slow, but at the end you got this beautifully lit map. I mean, by today's standards, so primitive.

But back then it was the most incredible thing, especially for someone who'd come from Doom, which already seemed amazing at the time, and from Wolfenstein. And again, each step seems so... Such an impressive improvement on the previous one. And then, of course, in 1998, was it?

Half-Life came and that kind of just changed everything. It came with free mapping tool, Worldcraft, which I already knew. There were always new textures, there were always new functionality. When I finally was hooked on making Half-Life maps, and then, what, a year later, after that, Camp Strike came out.

And yeah, that came with textures and I took to the game and started making my very first CS map, which was the Waterworld Retirement Home for Beta 3. And thankfully, it was deemed good enough to be accepted. And that led on to the whole Dust and Dust 2 and that entire journey. At the time, I was basically with the Half-Life textures, and I'd seen all the Counter-Strike maps, and I was like, almost all of them were very Half-Life-ish. They had all these kind of Half-Life-y textures, and to me, it felt odd to be a terrorist or a counter-terrorist in Half-Life.

That didn't fit right. So when I saw this Z-Strike, the one in the beta 2, I was like, ooh, it was new stuff I can build. I can build buildings and things that are more familiar to me rather than this science fiction. Half-Life universe.

I think I used to try and stick to that red brick texture that was all over the Retirement Area map. That texture I could just fill with urban textures that I felt I could use and be a bit more creative with. I wasn't so constrained by what I'd seen in Half-Life when I was making Half-Life maps.

I was trying to stick to the things they'd established. But with Seastracks it was my freedom to do anything I wanted really. There's no prior art.

And that was really freeing. I didn't know where I was going when I started them. I had to make like a wall, then another wall, then a floor, a door maybe, and find out I didn't have an entire map in front of me.

This one just happened to look like a big, old, kind of say beat up building with a big courtyard. And yeah, just like the kind of oldish look to it. That was very different to Half-Life.

So CS Tire ended up being incorporated into the third beta of Counter-Strike. Yeah. Yeah, because you were really young at the time.

So I'm very curious what that was like for you. Yeah, I was must have been 15. I must have been 16 by then. I'd finished all my exams from that summer. I just had the summer waiting to start sixth form in the UK.

So I just had time to play and do what I wanted. I didn't know Jess or Gooseman at the time. I was just a member of the CS mapping forum.

I thought, I know, I think this map might be good enough. I'm going to upload it and see what people think. Worst case, I'll get some critical comments and improve it. Best case, maybe they'll think about including it in the game.

And I think by the next morning, I'd had a reply from Jess saying they wanted to include it in Beta 3. And it is in testing. I moved a long route from the CT spawn away to the T spawn. And yeah, I think... I don't think at the time I quite appreciated what just happened. There's a slightly weird map that I'd made, certainly different to all the other maps in the game, that they somehow deemed acceptable to put in this little mod.

I thought, okay, we'll take it. And then before I knew it, that map was being played. I was playing it online with other people, just an amazing feeling. That's when Jess came back to me and said, Dave, do you want to maybe make another map? We've got a text writer you can work with.

which was Chris uh Macbeth Ashton and then that whole led on to the whole Dust thing which some people may know about When we talk about a map as iconic as dust, it's easy to imagine that it's the product of some mythical map maker toiling away on their masterpiece. But the truth behind the map is far stranger and more interesting than that. It's the product of an impatient kid seeing early screenshots of Team Fortress 2. I was a massive fan of the original Quick Worlds Team Fortress, and so when I found out that Valve had brought the Team Fortress team, I was excited. And so when I got Retired at Home into Counter-Strike, that was around the same sort of time that I think Valve released...

another charge of screenshots of team fortress 2 at the time and those were the ones that included this golden kind of beautiful lit world a very sort of sandy with a tank and some military marching through this um this environment i thought wow that's okay now you've got my attention i was so excited to play two portraits when it suddenly solidified in my mind that was the next thing i had to play but of course yours being delayed and the restates was far from out so when jess said you know i've got i've got possession um got megaman he's gonna make some textures for you for another map i was like oh okay this is a perfect opportunity for me to try to replicate in what i've seen in these in these team fortress two uh screenshots and it was was super cheeky of me that was like such a looking back that's quite a horrible thing for me to have done to try to replicate these screenshots and still watch you know the masters of art been working on with map makers and texture artists they've probably been put so much time into those screenshots and perfect for release onto the web and there's me this the old teenage guy from uk who's gonna kind of come in and sweep in on on their on their glory and try to make it myself I circled in the screenshots the textures I wanted. He came back a few days later and said, here you are, and a few extra ones. And I started recreating those screenshots for myself, which is a useful area that represented the counter-terrorist spawn in D-Dust. That was all I had to work from, was that area. But yeah, it was amazing to be able to get that area created and be able to walk around it and experience it and think, I'm in TF2, I'm actually playing a game that hasn't been released yet.

And it just felt so fun. In the past, when I was making Doom maps, I'd really enjoyed making maps of my school or my home. And just having that kind of freedom to explore in an environment that you normally have freedom to explore was exhilarating. This was similar. I was able to explore an environment I'd seen in a screenshot.

That I wouldn't get to experience myself for a long time. I could do it today. I could now run around and see where it went. And then, of course, at that point, I... went up screenshots because it only had like five screenshots of one area so that worked out okay i've now got the start of my map jess and mac man are now expecting me to make a map out of this where do i go from here um i knew goose and jess were trying to make a new game mode for Counter-Strike called Diffusion, where you had to plant a bomb in one or two spots and the other team would have to defuse it.

To me, I play a lot of CTF so I thought these two are quite similar so I thought, I know, I can make a CTF style map with these textures. I started to extrapolate that initial CT spawn area out. I didn't know it was a CT spawn at that point, I just knew it was an area. I started thinking, where could this go?

And I then developed that area into an underground pit. And there's a little road that came out the front of the CT spawn and went left and down where the D-Dust underpass is now. That went down further into the underground, yeah, underground pits.

It was already dark, I think there was a tomb or something down there, a few windows. I didn't know what I was doing. I think at this point I was really exploring the exploring textures that I'd had, trying to make out what would work or didn't work, and trying to establish a theme and a style for that. When I did the underground bit, it didn't work.

I decided that this map had to be above ground, had to be bright and colourful. I know I spent a lot of time with the underpass, because that was a sort of design that I thought would be fun. I've played other CS maps, I've played Siege a lot and Assault a lot, and I think I was picking up little bits on those and trying to put them in here.

I love being a sniper in Camp Strike, so I thought this underpass would be a fun place to snipe. And then, well, I thought, okay, I've got this sniper section, and what about people who don't like to snipe? What about people who love shotguns? Which is me, the other HSM designer.

And that's how I created this sort of tight bit in the middle, these little corridors. And then the other side, around the T spawn, again, I just, I thought, okay, I need to tie this together somehow. And I just, kind of tried to copy the style I got from the CT spawn, which I still didn't know was CT spawn, it was just another area, I became the CT spawn, I just copied that style, wrapped it around, and once the entire map was sealed, and you couldn't just fall out, you couldn't escape, I then started to think about where these things could go.

I think I already knew that the underpass would be a flag or a bomb in the CT parlance, and the other bit on the other side would become a bomb spot, and then you team, you decide. That seemed to make sense, and that was the map I... presented to jess who then said great awesome thank you put to testing and then he came back and said actually could you move that bomb spot from the underpass to where the zt spawn i thought okay sure sure that's that to me that seemed really weird but again i'll just judgment and that was like that was the version that shipped in at beta 4 yeah and before i knew it i was waking up that must have been saturday sunday morning uh downloading beta 4 for the very first time And finding tons and tons of servers playing D-Dust and thinking, oh god, it's actually happened. People playing my map for real. Some are still playing Retirement Home, but most are playing Dust.

And yeah, that's where things took off. The very first time I thought maybe I'd hit on something good was when I saw a screenshot. I can't remember if it was in IRC or ICQ or even on the Counter-Strike website.

But it's a screenshot of them playing all the new maps that are released. And at the bottom... and there's someone in chat saying, could play the dust map again? And all the people say, yes, please, yeah, that one, that one, I like that one.

I was like, okay, people actually like this. And that's the first kind of feedback I've seen from actual people playing these maps. Yeah, it's amazing. And jumping into service and no one knowing that I was the creator and just playing with them and being able to recreate these scenarios that I had played in my head when designing the underpass or designing the CT's wall a little bit. I was thinking about all the great patients I've done to stop lines of sight being too long or interviewing each other.

And just seeing those work in practice, I think was mind-blowing. It was so satisfying and so unreal. weird that this thing was happening. But at the same time I'm playing this first you know, first few hours off dust and thinking oh yeah this timing is not right or I'm getting to the CT, I'm getting to the middle bit too fast as a counter-terrorist or too slow as a terrorist or this thing I'm getting caught on this and getting caught on that. You know, immediately I was already trying to find the flaws and see how I could be improved and so that's why the subsequent beaters 5.6 and 6.5, they're always little changes.

to them out, breaking walls, moving crates, making things brighter, darker, moving in the sunlight around, just trying to adjust these little circumstances that I'd either spotted or got caught in myself that are not fun to be in. For the first dust, the main choke point was in those corridors in the middle. So I'd literally spawn from the frontmost spawn point of each team and run that shortest path I possibly could and see if my watch would be timing it and just seeing at what points, how far I could get. before I could possibly see an emergence of Winifred on the team.

And so I think for Dust, that was around 11 seconds in most cases. And I did push those horns back and forth over subsequent releases to get that balance just right. Once this map is out there and it's popular and you're seeing screenshots of it and people talking about it, you're the person who made it, but in a sense now it belongs to the Counter-Strike community or something.

Yeah. It must have felt very different to be working on the maps once they were out there. Oh yeah, absolutely. I knew every small change I'd make would be breaking someone's strat that they were going to make in the next game, or could be introducing an issue, someone else. It was, yeah, to have a sense of ownership, also responsibility.

I was like, somehow I'd given these people an experience that they were enjoying, and that was, you know, for my small 16 year old head, that was mind blowing. I was like, my head was floating like this. Andy, it's just incredible what's happening. But at the same time, I knew I had to make it better. I had to prove I knew what I was doing.

I still felt like a bit of, I don't even belong. I was just, you know, this boy who made a map and also not professional at all. I was a complete, complete amateur.

But I knew that, yeah, I had to do things right now. I had to do things properly. I had to do things as professionally as I could and try to adhere to the standards I'd seen other mappers at the time extol. But at the same time, it was like... so excited and so happy that this map has been received so well.

I had no idea what would happen next. I didn't know if it was just a flash in the pan, if it was going to last more than a few days, weeks, months, years. I think I was just trying to enjoy it the best I could at the time and playing that version of the game and that version of the map as much as possible to just really experience it and get that... get enjoyment that i was trying to put into it not again you alluded to this a little bit but um dust was one of the like first maybe the first major diffusal map it's hard for people i imagine now who got into counter-strike later especially to decouple counter-strike from diffusing a bomb it's such an iconic part of playing counter-strike now uh yeah could you talk about like i don't i'm not sure what the right question is here just like what did you imagine that would be a big deal did it feel like that was an intriguing game mode to you did you feel like it would blow up no that's not a pun So the original game title of Counter-Strike was Hostage Rescue, and at the time that failed.

It felt so revolutionary because all the other mods for Quake and Quake 2, even Half-Life at the time with Science and Industry, they were all kind of CTF or variations of CTF, often with extra functionality like grappling hooks or super weapons and things. So Counter-Strike seemed fresh. I knew the other ones like Action Quake and Action Quake 2 and Action Half-Life even, but it also had a bit more creativity to them. But I think it's more interesting you having actual scientists at the time chasing you, and running, coming after you to find freedom.

So that was new, that was different, that was very unique to what it has from other games. So when Diffusion came along, again that was a bit like CTF. You had two teams with their distinct objectives, that felt a little bit like... a little bit of a backwards set, but at the same time it played more strongly into the Counter-Strike theme of terrorists counter-terrorists. Of course, they're more likely to blow up things and steal scientists here and there.

So that made more sense. By the time Counter-Strike had reached retail, we all knew it was happening, so it wasn't such breaking news to me. I can't even remember if I went into a store and bought it, or if I just bought it online.

I don't know what it is. I'm pretty sure that Valve sent me at least one copy of it in the post, so I already had a copy. For it to reach retail, I had to hand over the rights to the map to Valve, which was uniquely itself to be paid money for this thing I'd spent time on. That was possibly the more... exciting and interesting and most unexpected thing about the whole whole affair and the thing of putting on on shelves that was just logical consequence of being paid and thinking successful so i definitely really i really appreciated the time quite how monumental that was i think i do wish i spent more time at the time like just appreciating this this game it works on it's a cardboard box on the cd yeah in in game or whatever yeah the local shop was that time yeah i definitely really really sunk in um Bye-bye.

If you didn't know the whole story of Dave's mapmaking journey, the unprecedented success of DE Dust might seem like the obvious high point. But while he was struggling to come to terms with the fact that lightning never strikes twice, those of us with 25 years of hindsight know that his biggest success was right around the corner. So at this point I'd made Dust and I'd made Cobble, both of which were in Counter-Strike in rotation.

So I'd established myself, I was pretty happy, but I think I was also pretty sure that I'm not going to get a third map into the game. That's ludicrous. Excluding Waterworld Diamond.

A fourth map into the game, that would be ludicrous. So I started to toy around with making another Dust map, and I'm pretty sure between Dust and Dust 2... I had tried making new dust-ish maps with the same texture set, and they just haven't gone anywhere. I had to make a few walls, make a doorway, and it was just kind of losing interest.

Moving on to the next thing. For whatever reason, with the next dust map, I found a scrap of paper, doodled the design, which I never did for any other map. All my previous maps, I just kind of winged it. I just made up the mental arm.

For Dust 2, I just started designing something with paper. Thankfully, that design... is one that I found the courage, maybe, is what I wrote, to actually get into the computer and get it from start to finish. And it was a design that more or less roughly reflected what was on paper.

There's some significant changes, especially to the CT spawn, I think. But overall, the layout was more or less there. And, yeah, I thought, OK, this design is completely different to dust.

It's completely different to cobble. This is... fast too tight it's a bit ugly in places it's a bit too angular it's got like sharp edges and sharp corners it's got a spiral it's got rocky bits this is just this is just silly this is not a map that anyone's going to want to play who likes dust or couple and so i thought okay well i've made it now and around that time i had an email from joe market from gamehelper.com and he said you you wanted me to make a map for them i thought i've got this dust-ish map yeah he said okay I think that's probably music to me. That's possibly the best thing you could possibly hear from me.

I've got this Dust style map. I did sort of tell Jess about it and again Jess said it's a copy. I sent him D Dust 3. Before it was released, I called it Dust 3 and he said this is great and suggested a bunch of changes to the bomb spots.

Again, just like Dust 1. Do you remember where those original bomb spots were before the sites were A and B where they are now? Yeah, so um In the... there's a tunnel called Suicide, I think now, in Dusty.

At the end of that tunnel, from the Terror Spawn, you jump down off the road, go through Suicide, and on the left, there's a doorway. In that doorway, there used to be a room, much like... It's a very dark room. It's kind of similar to the Underbanks in Dust 1, and in there was a bomb spot.

The other bomb spot was possibly on the right in the little dip along Long A. That weird dip that happens at the end of Long A for no reason. I think it may have been there. I'm pretty sure I moved it around a few times, honestly, trying to find the right location.

I do remember at the time, yeah, I had learned from Dust. I was trying to incorporate some Dust-ish elements and that hallway was based in the hallway in Dust 1. So I was trying to incorporate some of that into Dust 2 without it being a direct copy. And that was always the hallway that I was getting down with the shotgun in.

more SMG. That just appealed to me. I think at this point I had developed a sense that there are different play styles.

People like to play different guns, different visual weapons. Long A is the part that did not match my paper design because by the time I got to adding that bit in Worldcraft, I'd run out of room. I had like no space at all to create what I wanted to create.

So I was squashed up against the very edge of the universe in Half-Life terms and That area just became long. I think I was trying to make sure that there were no ridiculous signs of sight. There's no positions where a player could get in where they were drawing too much of that because that would slow down their experience.

That would drop their FPS. So I think I was more concerned about the FPS then in performance than the actual gameplay. But that's also why it's quite tight because I had to kind of go around and dogleg a little bit. Again, that area was, I would have preferred to push out a bit more like the terrorist spawn in Dust1, with those kind of balcony bits and more stairs and things, but yeah, I was just squeezed. But I think this is one of those times where having a restriction actually forced you to be a bit more creative and find ways to work within those restrictions.

And again, somehow, I squeezed in a little passage right around from what would become the CT spawn through to the CT spawn. I did have a, there was a pool, like a pond in Dust2 at one point, on there, so just outside the CT spawn. That was creating bad sightlines and things, so I turned it into a solid wall instead. Yeah, there's always little things that just, again, just having this sense and sort of feeling that these aren't quite right, or aren't necessary, I need to pan them back and get rid of them, because Dust isn't a detailed map.

That texture set doesn't lend itself to high fidelity detail. It's, yeah. more blocky and so I was trying to stick to that so I always the most valuable part to me when making that was the first time I got to run around it in 3D and run around jump around crouch do all the kind of maneuver that I expect players to do.

And that is the point where I always find sightlines that are incorrect or scary or weird or overpowered or opportunities to add different defences or offensive positions to give opportunities, as I've got the break in the wall for the B bomb spot. Those are all me trying to think, OK, I'm in this position. What can I do from here?

And what do I need to look for? How am I safe? How am I unsafe? And trying to make sure...

make sure that every part of the map had some advantage, but also yet some disadvantage and tried to bounce those as best as I could. It was mostly based on feel. Again, I'd run around in many other kind of spider descents that this feels a bit wrong or a bit weird.

Okay, why is that? What am I missing here? What needs to be changed, added on route to balance that discomfort in my head out? Just like when you're playing Counter-Strike Reveal, you're always kind of aware of where the enemies could come from.

and what you can do from your position, where you can hide, what opportunities you have. Again, that pit, I think it was just me wanting to find a way to hide as a sniper and just duck in and try to pop out at people planting bombs and things. I think I was basically trying to play the map in my head at the same time as creating it and trying to cover all these bases. Yeah, that's the best way I can describe it.

I feel like if you were trying to design the most optimized, like, competitive play eSports map, Middoors would be the first cut, because it's like, you can fucking, you can get your head blown off just, like, setting up at the beginning of the match. Did you have a sense that Middoors was going to be, like, this lightning rod of controversy? Absolutely not. I have no idea whatsoever. I didn't even consider the fact that from the terrorist spawn, you could see right down there.

That's the sort of thing that normally I think I would have liked to have spotted before I finished that. In that case, that one spot I did not spot. And so had I spotted that, maybe those mid doors would have been different.

Maybe I would have shifted them across or lowered them or done something more creative there. But I knew it was a dust map, needed some double doors somewhere. So there's some there and some for the bomb spot. I did not ever anticipate that the ones were on the very center of the map, where everyone's going to go to all the time. would cause such controversy and pain and suffering.

And dice in some cases, but mostly pain and suffering. And those doors were, yeah, principally just to stop people singing too much. Yeah, I'm glad. I kind of have those, of course, controversy and fun and interesting skirmishes every year.

Again, I was never good in my life. enough of Counter-Strike to really appreciate all the strats and things that arise out of just small things in the map like that or where the doors are this way or that way or where a single crate can be asked over that go door that aware. Comparing the Counter-Strike Ars.Dark designing for in the late 90s to the counter-strike of today in 2024 i think 25 years between those and the strategies and approaches and the level that that professional players have to think of now is like so many layers of what i was free with at the time i was just thinking can i make a shot can i jump from here to there without killing myself can i throw a grenade yeah okay that's fine i i was never yeah i don't know all the other things that could emerge out of these simple amounts i was making Despite his initial concerns, Dave's follow-up to Dust went on to become the iconic Counter-Strike map, and by all accounts, one of the most famous video game maps in history. And nobody was more surprised by this fact than David Johnston himself. It's hard to overstate the reach of Dust.

I mean, like, Dust 2 has been recreated in every FPS imaginable that has map tools. It's been, there's like Minecraft mods that are Dust 2. It must be surreal for you. Like, does it, what does that, what does that feel like? Do you, I feel like it would make me like dissociate. What does it feel like to watch this thing that you, it must be like having a child go off on its own.

Like, what is that like? Yep, absolutely. I mean, I mean.

I see dust in CSGO and CS2 these days, actually. I think, oh, that's actually cool. I'm glad that's so successful. But I actually remind myself, oh, that's my fault.

I did that. I created the game. I set off.

I planted that seed that has become this enormous thing that now hundreds of other professionals have poured thousands of hours and possibly millions of dollars into renovating over the years for different versions of the engine and versions of the game. To think that. that was all because of me sat in my parents'house.

on a crappy old Pentium 2, 2, 3, 3, trying to do something in my spare time. Dust and dusting and cobble aren't my maps anymore. They're owned by the community and people who keep playing them and keep them alive and enjoy them and play them professionally. Yeah, I'm not responsible for them anymore.

That's also quite a belief. I don't need to worry about them. They're just taking care of themselves. It's nice. And I do wonder how long they'll keep on going for.

Will they still be played in like 10 years'time? 50 years time. Will they be on like a golden record shot into space someday, you know? Like Elvis Presley songs, dust to, you know, all the high points of human culture. Yeah, possibly.

Or maybe we will be like, oh, we've fed up with these things now. Let's just banish them. We banned.

Luckily Dustin does do more. Everyone's stuck with mansion from now on. That's the map we're going to focus on. But the story of Dust 2 begins before there was a DE Dust, before there was a counterstri-Hold on. Counterfuck.

Before there was a counterfuck. My favorite mod. It's a not safe for work mod.

But the story of Dust 2 be-Okay, I got this. But the story of Dust 2 begins before there was a DE Dust, before there was a counterstrike, before there was even a half-life. It begins with a kid named Jave-Jave Donston. God fucking dammit. Dave Dunst, purveyor of counter fuck.

God dammit. He's the mod of counter fuck. Jesus Christ. Alright, hold on. God dammit.

Transcript for:Exploring the Legacy of Dust Maps

Transcript for:
Exploring the Legacy of Dust Maps