Midnight Madness has announced CS:Legacy, a fully standalone fan remake of Counter-Strike 1.6 that will be coming to Steam later this year. To celebrate this announcement, the team has shared the game’s debut in-engine trailer that you can find below.
CS:Legacy is built from the ground up with 100% custom code and game assets. The game will be using Valve’s official 2013 Source Engine SDK codebase, with its own major rewrites to the renderer, shaders and various systems.
The team plans to recreate every detail of the original gameplay, while introducing modern enhancements and major technical improvements. At the same time, it aims to keep the classic CS feel that made it legendary.
As the team noted, this will be a full game and not a mod. My guess is that it will be free to everyone. However, its beta phase will be locked behind a Patreon wall. Or at least that’s what I got from its Patreon page. Moreover, CS:Legacy will first hit Steam as an Early Access game. Again, I don’t know whether the EA version will be free or not.
For what it’s worth, the following trailer looks great. It manages to retain the art style of CS 1.6, and it looks way better than it. So, all it remains now is to see how the game will play.
And that is that. Sadly, there is nothing more to share right now. There is also no specific ETA on when we can expect it. All we know is that it will hit Steam Early Access later this year.
Enjoy the trailer and stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Weird, Valve just postponed CS Classic Offensive from releasing, it also has overall the same goal as CS Legacy, using 1.6/source movement and features with improved graphics and interface of CSGO.
It's the first time ever i saw Valve stopping a mod from release, the project was so popular they were afraid it will be a serious competitor for CS2, shame on them on doing that, especially when you know how much CS2 is plagued with cheaters, bots, and players that only have interests on skins and gambling.
Umm… ever heard of the Portal 64 and Team Fortress Source 2 DMCAs, both of which were just last year and on the very same day?
I'm sure there were other DMCAs by Valve earlier than these. And as much as I hate these elitist pieces of $h!ts and the scums of the earth (((Jewtendo))), no, the former was also DMCA'd by Valve too.
Portal 64 was made using some stuff owned by Nintendo, Valve just dodged a lawsuit by taking it down, TF2 Source 2 is direct port of the game using the same structure onto a new engine and this is strictly forbidden by Valve for their MP games, the team didn't follow the rules and they even admitted it.
Classic offensive is a different case, all the assets, maps and models have been remade from scratch by the dev team, they're just afraid because CS2 is heavily criticized by the community
It's heavily criticized by a small group of morons who think the playerbase is 50% cheaters, back in reality CS2 just broke its all time player record less than 48 hours ago https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/afb342b67c3e23b8700de12a6420de3f23427bb15916004e73e943eb7899315d.png
Bro even pros and long time CS content creators criticize it, there are legit complaints like the anti-cheat barely working, the sub-tick system that doesn't match CSGO's responsiveness, the performance that could be much better and true lack of content. Breaking records just as doing good sells doesn't determine the game's quality.
CS2 has the potential to be awesome and even greater than GO but Valve is not very focused on improving it for the moment.
See, a perfect example of what I mean. The game doesn't need extra "content", the active map pool is deliberately small so people learn callouts, angles, and smokes because the competitive mode is the primary focus of the game. And for people wanting more the workshop/community maps haven't gone anywhere.
I'd like to see DZ return as well but I'd prefer they focus on fixing fundamental issues over just jamming in a bunch of half-finished stuff over and over.
The reason pros or content creators are more likely to complain about cheaters is because they're more likely to encounter them since cheating artificially improves your skill level meaning cheaters are usually being matched against higher skilled players.
Performance is always going to be worse when you're moving off an engine that was originally built when most TVs weren't even HD, not much you can do about that. Even still, they've completely removed some visual feature from maps to improve performance. As for the sub-tick system, I agree.
The actual team making CS is minuscule compared to the size of modern game studios and yet the game still gets minor updates and tweaks on a weekly basis.
Fair enough, just don't call people who have genuine complaint morons, there are indeed morons among them as always, but there's nothing wrong in criticizing a game you liked for more than 20 years.
ad populum idiot
That's not what ad populum is you clown.
Ah it's from the makers of the classic CS PROMOD… Cool. Looks very nice btw.
Looks nice.
Well, this time, I won't complain that it doesn't preserve the "original aesthetics", since the original looked really barebones anyway. 😅
And this looks so much better anyway.
But personally, ever since I played Insurgency Sandstorm, I never went back to CS.
CS feels so arcadey, basic and repetitive compared to IS.
If the gameplay is still the same…
I don't understand why people are still crazy about CS in 2025…🤔
What I need is Insurgency 3.😌
Looks better than UE5 trash.
Damn it, that gave me nostalgia ngl.
This looks really good! I'm so looking forward to this!
CS2 has become such a bloated mess with all the skins, charms, etc. + it's so heavy on older CPUs.
CS: Classic Offensive looks really good as well…they are goin to release it standalone outside of Steam (since Valve blocked em) with their own proprietery launcher.
And valve will kill it like they have everything else. CS2 is in a terrible state too.
One thing…
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/75a2c006b7ee7e39e9f7995ae126b2de52344e9557db643798755c2e017df55f.png
"remake of Counter-Strike 1.6 that will be coming to Steam" sure it is…
dun dun dun dun its lame! dun dun dun dun….