I was there! (not on that ICQ chat though). We were huge Half-Life mods players: playing on our LAN with friends on maps like "small" (a little house) and whatnots. Then one day my brother gave me a phone call, ecstatic:
"You've got to come see this NOW: there's a new mod for Half-Life that is in beta". That and
Diablo 2 (came out in 2000?) pretty much became our lives.
My Celeron II 300 Mhz and the GPU I had back then weren't that great at playing Counter-Strike at 99 fps (IIRC it was the max it could do back then), so to bump the framerate up I had a "low polygons" mod: terrorists and counter-terrorists would look not unlike lego figurines. Less polygons, more frames.
