I remember the original Rainbow Six came out right as I was getting done with middle school and moving onto high school. This was back when the only other realistic games about special forces were "US Navy SEALs" and "Spec Ops". So it was a tiny genre, but it absolutely captured my imagination. In fact, that was actually the origin of my username. I was signing up for Red Storm Entertainment's forums back in the day, and just had to come up with a username, so being the unimaginative guy that I was, I thought Delta Assault sounded pretty good and Rainbow-y. And I've kept it ever since.

And man, that multiplayer. So fast and fluid and completely different from the Quake and Unreal style arcade shooters of the era. Everything just felt so much more lethal and simmy, it was crazy. Of course, everybody learned pretty quickly that there was that design flaw that unintentionally made the 3 round burst more powerful and gave more DPS then full auto. Because the 3 rnd burst in the game fired all three rounds simultaneously (instead of one by one in real life), and you could fire the bursts just about as fast as you could click the mouse button, it delivered rounds way faster than the traditional full auto mode.

So everybody just played multiplayer with CAR-15s with 3 rnd burst on. That was the metagame. Sidestrafing and nailing dudes with 3 rnd bursts. It was glorious.

I think the most popular maps were Mint, Amazon, Hacienda, Oil Rig, and uh... Biolab? Mint was definitely the most popular, by a long way. Everybody would ask for more Mint. All of these maps were not exactly mirrors, since they'd just been repurposed from the singleplayer campaign, but there was an interesting dynamic where the two spawn ends were roughly balanced and nobody really had a big advantage from either starting side.

But funnily enough, I also really enjoyed the extreme long range camping maps of "Road" and "Airport", where it was basically all sniping from across two huge swathes of empty space. I think Airport had some blocks off to one side where you could take cover and possibly make your way to the other team's spawn if you were wiley enough, but Road was completely barren and just had two teams peeking around a corner sniping with M-16s. And that was fun too, especially since you could goof off and impose rules like pistols or shotties only.

The multiplayer of Rainbow Six was a huge hit, and the magazine PC Gamer's staff were such big fans of it that they even got their own map, which was some sort of city block layout with billboards. I don't remember it that clearly... but the point was, Rainbow Six had arrived, and it was here to stay as an influential multiplayer shooter.

But I think the sequel Rogue Spear was really when I got full hardcore into multiplayer. Rogue Spear after school everyday was my obsession for a couple of years, where I ended up writing down pages and pages of IP addresses (Back in those days, there were two online services: MPlayer and the Microsoft Zone, and direct IP address connection). Direct IP was the best, since you didn't have to deal with the lag and hardware resources of running a third party service in addition to the game itself.

Because they'd changed the 3 rnd burst to function properly in Rogue Spear, the best option now was full auto, and the best weapon was one that had the tightest reticle while sidestrafing. That was quickly found to be the MP5 PDW, which was the smallest and most compact MP5 in the game, but which also had the highest rate of fire of any gun. This combination of fastest full auto and the best handling made it the ultimate gun for short and medium range fights, where people would strafe, or "dance" around each other. The PDW's 9mm round itself was weak, but the sheer volume of fire was enough to offset that. Plus, the large amount of rounds helped to compensate for the lag inherent in games back then, where you'd often find enemies warping around the map in weird ways. People also had the option of tactically peeking around cover with their assault rifles, but they'd usually never beat a competent sidestrafer with the PDW. The fire rate was so ridiculously high that sometimes I actually switched over to the MP5A4, just for the A4's slightly lower rate of fire.

The maps were of course all new, and I think the technical standout of the bunch had to be "Kosovo", which was a sprawling, rainy, wartorn urban environment with a signature clock tower that nobody much used in multiplayer simply because it was the most obvious sniping spot ever. The "747" level was one that was highly featured in advertising for the game, since this was one of the first times a video game had recreated a big 747 in a level. But really, nobody much played it after the first week since the 747 itself was a really cramped and boring space to fight in, and the outside tarmac was just a big ol sniping wasteland, in a game where everybody wanted to use PDWs.

Ya know, just on a sidenote, one of the RSE forum members was this guy named Serellan, who released a mod for Rogue Spear called Snowbird's Nest, or Crow's Nest, or something along those lines, which turned the 747 level into a snow-covered mission. And this mod was so impressive to Red Storm Entertainment that they actually hired him and brought him onboard. This guy later went on to be a Lead Director on games like Bungie's Halo Reach. Just goes to show, you never know where things can lead...

My personal favorite map of the bunch was definitely "Siberian Base 1" or Sib 1 for short. This to me was like CS's Rust, it was the perfect sized map with multiple routes for combat, from a raised walkway, to flanking around the side of a hill, to hiding behind a snowbank. It wasn't overly large and confusing, but wasn't so simple that the chokepoints were always predictable. Didn't much care for "Siberian Base 2" though, that one was a lot larger and you spent a hell of a lot of time just trying to find the other team.

Another great map was "Chateau", which was supposed to be a retreat for a Russian oligarch or something. There was a two story guardhouse at one end of the map that actually made itself into a fun mode for us, because we came up with our own game of "Crackhouse Raid", where one team would hole up in the guardhouse as drug addicts with uzis and shotguns, while the other team would roleplay as the SWAT team sent to assault the crackhouse and take everyone out. Of course, I would just hole up in the closet as a crack addict with C4 planted at the door. Fun times.

There were quite a few large sprawling maps that I never cared for, like "Opera." Never ever completely figured out the layout for that. Most of the popular maps, like Nuke Silo, Train Depot, or Desal, were rather simple and had about three or four main routes that a team of 4 or 5 could cover. The worst map in the game was the last campaign mission "Nuke Power Plant" which, from best I could figure, was just them faithfully recreating the entire inside of a huge sprawling nuclear power plant. That was just no fun. Of course, being too simple and straightforward was also a bad trait, which made 747 and Oil Tanker unpopular maps.

The big update patch for the game came out with the "Bunkers" multiplayer map. This was a big deal at the time because it was the first map specifically designed for multiplayer, which meant it was a symmetrical layout and no team had any geographical advantage. The bunkers themselves were quite vulnerable and very predictable locations, so everyone actually avoided going inside them, rather going around the flanks to cross the map, or strafing around the sides of the bunkers.

Then the first expansion Urban Ops came out. This was five new multiplayer maps, as well as five old school R6 maps like Mint, Estate, and Hacienda. It felt like a breath of fresh air to get so many new maps, though I'll be honest and say that most people preferred to play the old school maps and relive the glory days of R6. I personally got really confused and never quite learned the layouts of the large new maps like "Bazaar" or "Hong Kong". Especially Bazaar. My god, that was a confusing map, full of orange and brown textures.

Then the first Ghost Recon came out, but the slower paced gameplay and lack of sidestrafing in multiplayer turned me off and I never quite got into it. Then GR2 came out only on the consoles, and that seemed real shitty.