For this video I got in touch with de_train’s original maker, Christopher Mair, who kindly
provided me with a lot of fascinating information about the map and the early stages of Counter
Strike’s development. He was one of the owners of Barking Dog Studios,
who were already working on other Valve games such as Team Fortress and Deathmatch Classic.
They comprised of 40 employees altogether but were split into two teams; Catdog being
the larger side that worked on Homeworld Cataclysm at the time, and Popdog being the smaller
FPS team that were called in to help with Counter Strike when it ran into some trouble.
You see, Minh, AKA the Gooseman was employed by Barking Dog Studios at the time. You may
also know that he was one of the original makers of Counter Strike and was responsible
for developing it during the early betas. However, he was struggling to balance the
game’s development with his own education, so the FPS team at Barking Dog Studios was
called in for Beta 5 to assist him in fulfilling his vision of what the game should become.
Here’s an early overview for Beta 5 that they worked on- though this plan later changed
a bit. They essentially reworked the code and provided the game with new weapons, maps
and models. Chris (known under the alias, ‘Cancerboy’) was the lead designer of
the Popdog segment of Barking Dog Studios and de_train was his map.
He immediately knew that he wanted a train theme. Barking Dog Studio’s offices at the
time were located in Gastown, Vancouver, with a view right into the train station. Indeed,
many of the map’s textures were taken straight from the station, located just behind the
company’s offices. At the time he was inspired by Unreal Tournament
and wanted the map to be based on a moving train, with the teams fighting inside and
on top of the carriage of a train as it tore down the tracks- it’s worth noting that
this wasn’t originally intended to be a defuse map! However, he quickly ran into difficulties
with the project, mostly from Counter Strike’s more realistic style which made it difficult
to situate the gameplay on a train with convincing scale. He got it working but unfortunately,
it didn’t perform well in playtests. With half the development time used up on
this original idea, he made the difficult decision to scrap it and to start again. In
just 15 minutes he had sketched this layout, which was the basis for the new version. You
can already see the similarities with the final map, but at the same time there are
also a lot of differences. With a train station being a viable target,
he wanted this new train map to be based on the defuse gamemode type, which had only been
out for weeks at this point. His plan was to have two bomb targets that the terrorists
could get to and to set up quickly. Compared with Dust, which was rather open, he wanted
Train to be more about close-quarters combat with many chokepoints and with less emphasis
on sniper action. He also wanted to ensure that the sites were close enough that the
CT’s would still have time to rotate from one to the other once the bomb had been planted.
This sounds fairly obvious now but remember, the defusal gamemode was first released only
a month and a half before Train was. The first playable version was built in a
single day. Each day for the following 3 weeks before release the map would be developed
further, with textures for it being created by Cory Lake, an artist at Barking Dog Studios
at the time. Near the end of every day they’d render the map and would playtest the latest
version with Popdog’s 10 employees, sometimes extending the invitation to the whole company.
Development on Train was unusually fast and came together very naturally, Chris describes
the process as ‘channeling design’ rather than ‘creating it’.
Soon it was ready to be released as part of Beta 5, which launched 2 days before Christmas,
1999. The other map Barking Dog Studios worked on at the time was cs_backalley, which you
may remember was also featured in CS:GO for a while as part of Operation Vanguard. However,
Christopher doesn’t get the credit for this one. Instead, Backalley’s development was
attributed to Jamie Mactaggart, another member of Barking Dog Studios.
Due to complications with Backalley’s development, the team didn’t quite make the target and
they spent Christmas time in crunch mode. Counter Strike was then officially bought
by Valve and Minh employed by them. Barking Dog Studios then became Rockstar Vancouver
and produced the Bully games, as well as Max Payne 3.
Back to de_train. The map contained a number of audio cues to give players hints as to
where the enemies were. The jet engine would activate if somebody was in the sniper nest
in middle. There’s also a secret sound around the aptly named Ivy, though it plays on a
timed delay. A member of Barking Dog’s Catdog segment, Chris Stewart, designed the Popdog
logo which can be found sprayed on the side of some of the carriages, with the text ‘Pop
Dog’ next to it. This bit of the map is still known as ‘Pop Dog’ to this day;
it’s an obscure reminder of the company that originally made this map. Oh and if you
hide under the carriage in the original you’ll hear a muffled sound of a dog barking.
The map had a bug where the train’s wheels didn’t quite touch the car, leaving a tiny
pixel gap that players could use to cheat by seeing and shooting through. At the time
Valve didn’t have access to the map file and they contacted Chris, informing him that
players were cheating on it! He gave them access to the map to allow them to make changes
to it, as it had become a popular competitive map by this point.
The map didn’t get a Condition Zero version. Instead, it only includes the original again.
Which makes my life easier. Since now we can move to the Source version!
Chris was consulted by Turtle Rock for this version of his map, with this being the last
time he had a say in his map’s development before Valve took over completely.
This wasn’t one of the originals for the game, though. It wasn’t added until the
25th of February, 2005, 3 months after the game came out. I always thought of it as quite
a pretty map, full of rounded shapes and pretty details including a dead guy near T spawn,
similar to that in Nuke’s at the time. It was always a popular pick for those massive
40-man Teeside servers for some reason. I decompiled the map and looked for Eastereggs.
You know, like popdogs or what not. Couldn’t find any. Source’s version of Train seems
fun-free. And you know how many updates it got? 2. The
first was the following month, which updated a few clip brushes, and the second was a year
and a half later where it became the 4th map to receive the HDR lighting update, after
Nuke, Militia and Dust 1. It then all seems to go quiet until the Orange Box update where
all of the maps got this feature. Maybe then it got another update of sorts. I don’t
know. Don’t really care. Let’s move onto CS:GO.
The transition to our FAVOURITE version of the game was sort of a middle-sized update.
As in, it wasn’t a total overhaul, clearly they ported the CSS version across but bothered
to take some time to clean up some areas, to replace the worst textures and to add some
prettier lighting and effects where needed. I noticed a few Russian decals and details,
which the Source version lacked. The train carriages were all updated with boxier designs
that provided more solid leg cover. But they could still have been better. But at least
now they weren’t things for players to crawl underneath, which simplifies things somewhat.
Oh and bombsite A was shifted from this train here to the middle of the outside area and
had a load of extra barrels added for cover. An extra balcony bit was added to the other
side of the site as well. All in all, it became very complicated when compared to Source.
The beginning of Train’s journey within CS:GO is somewhat complicated. There are signs
that it received updates before the game’s official release, based on playtesting during
the beta stage. If you really, REALLY want to see how bad this was back then you can
enable CS:GO’s Beta in Steam like so. In early betas there was a T spawn intersecting
a pillar, inaccurate radar and worse ladders and bot pathfinding around the sites.
At the game’s release however, there were 3(!) different versions of the map at the
same time. There’s the standard Train, shorttrain, which was for demolition mode and contained
only a small bit of the map for people to play on, and Train_se. This stands for Simplified
Edition. It was a short-lived idea by Valve to have a version of each map for competitive
play. These simplified the graphics to improve visibility and framerate. As I said, this
was wasn’t used for long because I guess they discovered that having multiple versions
of every map was a hassle to keep updated and they just decided to try and combine the
best of both worlds into a single version for everyone to play.
You can see from these comparisons that the SE lacks ANY sort of distant fog at all to
help visibility and features no background sounds, overhead cables or smoke coming out
of the chimneys (which I assume is to improve FPS). But there’s one more use for these
old maps: since the BIG Train update in 2014, which I’m sure you’re aware of, the original
radar overview has been lost, overwritten by the newer version with the same name. Or
at least, I thought it had been. However, since Train_se has a slightly different name
it retains the old radar style, helping to preserve a bit of CS:GO history that nobody
particularly cares about. Any way. The earliest versions of Train are
a bit fuzzy since the workshop only came to Steam after CS:GO was released. According
to the upload number THIS is the oldest version of the map, but unfortunately you can’t
subscribe to it since it’s reserved for the ‘official version’. Which is obviously
now the new Train. So the earliest version of the map we have access to and can play
if we want is this one, which was in the game up till August of 2013, meaning that according
to the patchnotes this already has less fog, better grenade collisions and other minor
improvements over the original, original version that we can no longer access.
The August 2013 update contained many useful changes, all listed here. This is the final,
definitive version of the old map design, so if you want to experience what the map
used to be like before the BIG UPDATE then subscribe to this one. Most of it was to simplify
cover and to improve visibility and clipping. But I think that even when making these improvements,
Valve knew that they only served as temporary fixes to tide the map over until its BIG UPDATE
over a year later. On the 1st of July, 2014, CS:GO got a large
update. Train itself wasn’t updated, but was involved in several ways. For a start,
they introduced a Reserve Maps Pool and placed Train in it, hiding it out of sight of the
main game somewhat. This was also the release date for Operation Breakout and a new penetration
system for the game which Valve demonstrated in this guide… which sneakily included a
screenshot of an unknown map which people soon identified as being a new version of
Train! Things went quiet for 5 months, when suddenly
in December 2014 (Almost 2 years ago, I might add) the new version of Train was released!
This was EXCITING! Sure, we had had completely new maps before, like Overpass. We had been
given new versions of maps from earlier games, like Cbble and Vertigo. But this was the first
time that a map already included in Global Offensive had had a complete face-lift! And
clearly by doing this, Valve signed an unwritten contract to do the same to every other map
in the game that had remained almost the same since Source. Like Nuke and Inferno.
But there was a problem.
GAME BREAKING. You could use these birds to
escape from the level’s confines! I mean, as bad as this exploit sounds it didn’t
change gameplay too much. Most rounds the pigeons didn’t even spawn and even when
they did and were exploited against their will, it only let terrorists explore the area
along T spawn, so it didn’t really help them to win the round at all. But that’s
besides the point! This map was broken! …within just a day or so Valve updated the
map to remove a few bombstuck points and a one-way wallbang. They changed the clip brushes
on the crates at bombsite A a little bit as well. Look at them go. Oh and sadly, they
also removed the pigeons. But their legacy won’t be forgotten, since Valve erected
a new sign to remember them by with the text underneath saying ‘Don’t step on birds’.
This is how Valve admits to mistakes, guys. In dark-humoured signs embedded around their
levels. But that first update was just a knee-jerk
reaction to the pigeon stomping and a few day one bugs. About a week later it got a
more substantial update to change gameplay somewhat. Ladder room was widened, T spawns
were pushed back to delay their rushes, a few more C4 stuck spots were removed and collision
models on train bumpers were updated. There was a pixel exploit here, that let CTs hide
from view whilst sniping terrorists attacking bombsite B. This was blocked up as well. In
this video here, a Youtuber pointed out that the sun angles were all wrong - be sure to
subscribe to him, he’s awesome. In response to this Valve updated the sun’s position
in the sky. Thank you Valve. Train got another update the following month
in January 2015 with ‘optimisations’ and a longer T spawn buyzone so that they could
buy stuff on the move. But the focus of this update was the introduction of the Chroma
case and new knife finishes. This whole major train renovation caused an
unexpected complication: shorttrain was removed for a while which made getting one of CS:GO’s
achievements impossible! This was fixed at the end of March, along with the largest update
this new map would see. Just before April of 2015, it was promoted
from reserves to active map pool, replacing Nuke as it went away for a facelift. On top
of this, the map received a number of gameplay-changing adjustments based around AdreN and C0tton’s
suggestions. I finally noticed what can be described as
‘optimisations’, notably removing props, like the TV that was in sniper’s nest, weeds
in connector and a lot of the details around bombsite B. I guess the map looks less pretty
as a result but I doubt anybody cares that much.
Bombsite A saw some of the largest changes to gameplay. The site was moved towards CT
spawn and a new train carriage added to make the majority of combat more close-ranged.
The grabber on the crane was moved out of the way even more. I mean, it wasn’t obstructing
vision even from sniper nest but I guess it could have blocked grenades in some situations.
But is that really such a bad thing? I dunno, all I know is that they moved it. This site
is so different now that you’d pretty much have to relearn everything from scratch.
T entrance to A got some changes. The left hand side got widened to give them more room
to maneuverer and a pallet got placed here to allow them to contest the tops of train
carriages. The dumpsters in ivy were moved, CT spawns
were ‘prioritized’ and… collisions at the tops of ladders got removed? This is an
interesting one, I couldn’t find any difference in bombsite A at least, though the ladders
here have since become known as a problem that Valve has yet to fix, often disrupting
movement as you try to latch onto them. So clearly this ‘fix’ didn’t solve everything.
Since this update there have been 2 more minor ones, the first fixing yet another ladder
bug near bombsite A and filling in the train grooves so grenades can’t get stuck in them
and inflict 0 damage. From what I could see, the grooves were already filled in but I noticed
the train carriages had a lot more clipping, so maybe they meant the grenades would get
stuck under these and not cause damage. Or not.
The latest update was in October of 2015, over a year ago, which fixed a spot where
C4 could get stuck on A site and an unintentional boost in the same area. I’m assuming it
was this spot here. Lol. And this brings us up to date with Train’s
long and illustrious history, as one of its most popular defuse maps since early in Counter
Strike’s history. Who knows what’s next for it?
As for Chris, well he’s now in charge of his own gaming studio known as Hellbent Games
who have 20 employees and have been around for over a decade. You can check them out
in this video’s description. He’s still good friends with Valve and its employees,
as well as the legendary Gooseman who he still meets with sometimes. He looks back at his
time on Counter Strike very nostalgically, missing the days where it was a simple case
of building and shooting and shooting and building. But Train’s legacy lives on and
in surprising places; Chris has a tattoo of Barking Dog Studios on his shoulder, for example.
And here’s the car he now drives about in! Thank you Chris for helping me with this video
and for documenting a bit of the game’s history that could otherwise have been lost
forever.