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Hi folks, I'm an archivist for Counter-Strike 1.6 and stumbled upon one of Counter-Strike's oldest mysteries: there's no author for scoutzknivez.bsp. Here's a refresher on the level, It's an asymmetrical map with low gravity. Players are equipped with a scout sniper rifle and a knife. Eliminate the enemy team to win. Very simple, but difficult to master. A YouTube video of scoutzknivez being played It took over Counter-Strike 1.6 in 2003 and exploded in popularity for years afterward. Unfortunately we don't know who created it. There's no name in the level. Generally the level was never downloaded in game or off of file hosting sites with a .txt file that mappers would include with their levels outlining information about the map either. There are some theories as to why this is the case. Perhaps our anonymous mapper handed the level over to a server host and never gave them a .txt file initially. It started to spread from there and the original creator never had a chance to include it. I've tried crawling through the .bsp, decompiling it, extracting textures from it, going to old websites, downloading any active link with the title of scoutzknivez.zip without any luck. I've also added old school scoutzknivez players and sent e-mails out to various other old school players for a solid clue. So far I've yielded nothing. I'm here to ask for help as mapcore is mentioned in many of these old level's .txt files. This organization has been around for a very long time facilitating discussions around levels and their creation. If you were around in 2002-2003 and know who to ask about scoutzknivez' creator I would appreciate it! Here's a TL;DR YouTube video I made on the subject: The Mystery of Scoutzknivez TL;DR: Scoutzknivez is a level for Counter-Strike 1.6 that has no author mentioned in the map. It became incredibly popular with tons of derivative work copying it. It became so famous Valve put the elements of the map into their CS:GO game mode, "The Flying Scoutsman". Does anyone know who the original author is?

You came to the right place, Mapcore forums member RD made this map way back. Been a couple of years since he posted here

Congratz !!! Oh and on my side I'm not at Arkane Lyon anymore but at Build a Rocket Boy as Senior Environment Artist.

Hola, Happy to share that I'm now Environment Artist Senior at Blizzard https://valentinlevillain.artstation.com/

Late to this thread. A lot going on. I was not close to Zach but I remember him back in the early days of Mapcore. Painful to hear. So sorry to those close to him and his family.

Saw the news today, very sad. He was way too young. I remember playtesting his HL2DM map with a bunch of other mapcore folks, and then in the crazy small world of gamedev, randomly hanging out with him and a few other folks on a night out in Seattle maybe 6 or 7 years later. He definitely stood out among that crowd - not the typically quiet shy gamedev type but a big loud hurricane of a dude. Definitely a presence. RIP. Also gonna take his passing as a chance to wish well to all the old school folks here and thank those responsible for keeping this place going over the years. Time flies and life's too short.