I'd watch competitions with surfers competing to out-trick each other while judges hold up big digital cards with numbers on. Surfing does also have scope for freestyle tricking, just bouncing around playground maps doing cool stunts like in the early days. But here are the grand finals of 2019 tournament Surf's Up! To see this content please enable targeting cookies. But I don't know, organised digital sports are more interested in teams murdering each other than sweet jumps. Servers and leaderboards track times and records for completing courses. Manage cookie settingsДЄnd surf_kitsune is well cyber: To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Surf_fast channels Sonic: To see this content please enable targeting cookies. I feel bold bricolage stylings like Cosmo D games in surf_zoomathon: To see this content please enable targeting cookies. The utopian playground of surf_intra: To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Or the visceral spiral of surf_blackheart: To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settingsД¬ool caverns in surf_mesa: To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Here's surf_pantheon looking like the pre-rendered backgrounds of a 90s FMV game: To see this content please enable targeting cookies. As long as the basic shapes are in there, mappers can go wild with dressing, and newer surf maps can look amazing.

Surfing has continued across Counter-Strike, CS: Source, CS: Global Offensive, Team Fortress 2, and such - games with those lovely weird Valve physics. Our pals Eurogamer talked with him about it last year, so head there if it's history you're after. That led to the map surf_thegap, then surf_egypt, then surfing really popped off. It's a funny old thing, started by mapper Charlie 'Mariowned' Joyce after finding a weird slippy roof in a daft murderbox map he made. But with careful movement and the right angle, you can find yourself slipping around like greased lightning. Manage cookie settingsДЇall a few metres in Counter-Strike and you'll usually grunt and be near-death. Because we're talking about something which grew up in the noughties, we cannot help but run into the Drowning Pool's bedroom door-slamming anthem, Bodies: To see this content please enable targeting cookies. So let's do that, for now.ДЇirst, a brief bit of surfing to demonstrate. And people race surfing! Or you could go freestyle and hit cool tricks to wow judges! Maybe you could even do synchronised routines! Or, like with the X-Games, you could think it seems too much effort and just watch YouTube videos and coo approvingly. It's the freestyle skating to proper CS's baseball, using a movement glitch to skid, glide, and soar through maps filled with abstract shapes. Look, competitive Counter-Strike is nice and all, but on the 20th anniversary of v1.0 I do find myself consumed with dreams of a wholly different CS skill: surfing.

Counter strike source surf map