Amazing, for some reason it feels more than 25 years. I remember as a schoolboy downloading one of the early betas on Fileplanet, it was just like a 70MB or 100MB file. Now it's an entire industry worth millions with massive tournaments that provide a living for pro players, pundits and on screen hosting talent / casters. On top of that, the production values of these tournaments beat most traditional sports that I watch on TV.
It's amazing to have been there at the start, the summer of 1999 and 2000 I just played CS all day, all night with my bro and our friend, singing along with Pavarotti in Italy, having fun on that large rooftop in Assault, camping in Office. Other incredible maps are Train, Siege, Aztec, Nuke, Piranesi and Prodigy. I lived in those places for such a long time; I just looked up the original maps on the CS Fandom Wiki and had a trip down memory lane, great screenshots on there from the original versions!
With all that time and history the gameplay remains the same, just the player base is different than 25 years ago, and how people play today is just more competitive than back then. People navigate the maps differently sort of synthetically i.e. keeping your mouse at a certain level for a headshot, walking about in a way aiming at specific places where you KNOW an enemy would walk. Instead of in a more natural / innocent way that we used to hehe, I guess that's the sort of evolution in play style you'd expect for something that's stayed the same for decades.
I'm glad me and some mates of mine where there at the start of these games, back when it was only a few of us nerds on the internet playing Quake 2, Tribes 1, CS, BF 1942 et al. all the good times all the good gamers

\o/