About

Introduction

Founded in late 2003 by Warf!y, Steamless CS Project's first assignment was to port Counter-Strike 1.6. Warf!y examined Steam's structure and saw many possibilities to port Steam games to Half-Life. With coding experience from other projects he succeeded in porting Counter-Strike 1.6 from Steam. He decided to spread this to the world as well as to dig further into Steam and Half-Life. Later in 2003, Reaver came on board as a mapper and coder. Not too long after that, in 2005, Rguest took the Lead Developer role.

On July 31 2004, Valve shut down WON. Shortly after that, the Steamless CS Project founded a network replacement service built from scratch, by and for the community, known as WON2. Its player number slowly grew until the network became more well known by the end of 2005. Although growing rapidly for a few years after, even today, we still see an increasing number of players and servers using the WON2 network. Currently, over a 1,000 servers and between 5,000 to 10,000 players are online at any time, making it today's largest unofficial multiplayer gaming network in the world.

Goal of the Project

While some people consider Steamless CS Project and its network WON2 as 'just another illegal hacking group', it is far different from that. Steamless CS Project's activities are from the ground up legal, while we make sure to keep it that way. As such, the goal of the project is simple. We do not 'steal' software from Valve or any other software company. Nor we encourage piracy or support any sites related to such activities. The goal of Steamless CS Project is to give, and keep giving, the Half-Life community the opportunity to stay with the old system, as well as to improve and extend Half-Life as much as possible.

Next to Half-Life, we have also been focusing on other former WON games. Rguest, for example, has done some investigation on the game Silencer and managed to create a few workarounds for it. Although we mainly concentrate on the Half-Life scene, we may consider extending our development area to other retired WON games in the future.

The Media

During its existence Steamless CS Project has been mentioned at a great number of major sites. And thanks to the media, Steamless CS Project's userbase grew even more. A few examples: 3DGamers, FilePlanet, TGMOnline.it, Half-Life Fusion, CNET, PCGuru, Wikipedia (EN, DE, SV) and the list keeps going if you Google us! We would like to thank the aformentioned as they have shown no reluctance to report on Steamless CS Project. Unfortunately, there are other media out there disregarding WON2, while some even actively censor any form of input from the user community refering to us. This is misplaced fear for legal consequences and a real shame for those out there looking for a way to play their oldschool games again.

Support Us

Steamless CS Project is a non-commercial organisation, consisting of a team of hobbyists devoting their time and efforts to the gaming community. As such, it is entirely running on donations. The site and network require maintenance and we need to pay for them to continue services like WON2, as well as to keep offering our downloads, which tend to generate a lot of traffic every month. If you found this project useful, please support us by making a donation. With your donations we can:

- Buy hosting to host WON2 services, such as master servers and content servers
- Keep offering download mirrors
- Continue development on new and existing projects

No matter the amount, your donation will be gratefully accepted. Every donation brings us closer to one of the aforementioned. Donations can be done easily and completely safe through PayPal by clicking the button below. If you don't have a PayPal account, PayPal also supports donating using a wide range of credit cards or by wire transfering from your own bank account. People who donated will receive our sincere thanks and will be mentioned below, unless you want to stay anonymous of course. Thanks in advance!

We would like to thank the following donators:
[IGWPSC]Sergeant (€ 10,00) @ 18-9-2007
Lynxhaunter (€ 17,00) @ 15-6-2007
PhorcePhed (Sponsored WON2.net domain during 2004-2006)