With nearly 20 years between 2004 and now, it’s wild to think back on the golden era of first-person shooters that was about to begin. In June of 2004, the original Half-Life was released as Half-Life: Source. The game brought a new engine with it in the form of the Source engine, an evolution of the GoldSrc engine, which was Valve’s previous proprietary engine. Seven months later, Valve would release Half-Life 2, which would eventually bring to life updated versions of what were originally Half-Life mods with Counter-Strike: Source – which was initially bundled in with Half-Life 2. And in September of 2005, Day of Defeat: Source was released.

Although it never reached the heights of Counter-Strike: Source in terms of player count, Day of Defeat: Source is an incredible game! The game takes place in World War II, which was super common at the time, but rather than focusing on a single-player campaign, the game was designed entirely around the multiplayer component, much like its brother series in Counter-Strike. Players would play on either the Allied or Axis sides and were tasked with capturing points on a map, or defending objectives while the other team was out to destroy them. Maps were entirely in the European theater of the war, dropping the player into places such as Italy and France.

I bought the game right around Christmas 2008. I had bought a new PC and finally got around to playing Half-Life 2, as well as Left 4 Dead. This spawned a love for Valve’s games that has continued to today, which led me to buy Day of Defeat: Source on the Steam sale. There weren’t a ton of servers, but the community-ran servers that did exist were all wonderful. There was one in particular that I ran into while on the search for a populated server with a decent ping, and the server I landed on was run by some folks from Texas called TeamPlayerGaming. They were immediately welcoming, which is always a plus, but the sense of friendship that was always present was unlike anything I’d ever experienced in a first-person shooter before.

Unfortunately, the TeamPlayerGaming server has been gone for many years now, but in the time when it was up, we played nearly every night. A call would go out on the forums, and we would do our best to populate it with people we gamed with, or with brand new faces. Around that time, I joined a Day of Defeat: Source – and to a lesser extent, a Counter-Strike: Source clan: C²C^ |NZB|, aka the Coast 2 Coast Nasty Boys. I also became a server moderator for the TeamPlayerGaming server, which was just about the coolest thing that could have happened to me at the time.  

For five years now, there have rarely been months where the game’s population has hit over 1,000 on any given day. The player count has stayed relatively consistent over the past year, and I’ve been lucky enough to count myself among those players. Many of the servers that remain, but more importantly have a good ping for me, are realism servers. These servers add a layer of depth that isn’t present in the base game. You have to call for a medic in order to bring your health back, you can bleed out, and you can call for ammo. These servers typically sport a very active community that reminds me of the one I was able to find when I used to play with TeamPlayerGaming.

While it seems that Day of Defeat: Source has been relegated to Valve’s forgotten multiplayer games alongside Ricochet and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, it remains an experience that I look forward to every time I boot it up. Other games have tried to do what Valve did with this game, but none have ever scratched the same itch for me. With every sale that Valve puts their complete works on sale, I see a bunch of new folks buy the game, and I hope that one day they’ll boot it up. My favorite multiplayer experience of all time is waiting to welcome them in with open arms, although I will be running directly at them with a grenade in hand.