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, Rguest joined the team as our low-level specialist.

On July 31 2004, Valve shut down WON. Shortly after, the Steamless CS Project created a network replacement service from scratch, later to be known as WON2. Its player number slowly grew until the network became well known by the end of 2005. At its height, between the years 2005 and 2010, over a 1,000 servers and 5,000 to 10,000 players were online at any time, marking WON2 as the 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 aim to keep it that way to the maximum extent possible. 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 in as many areas as possible.

In addition to Half-Life, we have also been focusing on other former WON games. Rguest, for example, has done some research on the game Silencer and managed to create a number of 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. Thanks to the media, Steamless CS Project's user base 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.

Support Us

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

- Buy server 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 do not have a PayPal account, PayPal also supports donating using a wide range of credit cards or by wire transferring from your own bank account. Donators will receive our sincere thanks and will be mentioned below - unless you wish to stay anonymous of course. Thanks in advance!

We would like to thank the following donators:
PhorcePhed - Donated and renewed WON2.net domain between 2004 and 2006
Lynxhaunter - € 20,00 on 3-6-2006
Lynxhaunter - € 40,00 on 15-6-2007
[IGWPSC]Sergeant - € 10,00 on 18-9-2007
Joel W. - € 10,00 on 23-12-2012
Hans - € 10,00 on 2-6-2014
Mr. Gibs - € 50,00 on 6-1-2024
DeltaLima - € 13,37 on 21-1-2024
Lynxhaunter - A long overdue special thanks for donating server hosting as well as supporting the project in various other areas between 2006 and 2009.