In Counter-Strike’s long list of maps, there’s one most players barely remember: de_storm. No cult following. No championship highlight reels. It isn’t Dust2. It isn’t Inferno. For years, it simply sat there in the official lineup like an unmarked file in a locked cabinet — part of the game, never the star.


Valve didn’t make it. The credit belongs to a mapper who went by Daank, also known as FLiPMoDE & MS-DOSVirus. The timeline is precise enough: early 2001. Storm showed up in a Counter-Map pack in June 2001. Jess Cliffe — yes, that Cliffe — spotted it & slotted it into CS 1.3. It stayed until CS 1.6’s final release.

(Observation: that’s a four-year ride for a map nobody talks about.)

Before de_storm, Daank’s public history was almost a blank page. And yet the work screams competence.


Early-2000s mappers were still fighting Hammer Editor like it owed them money. Meanwhile, Daank built something that could hold its own — visually — against Dust2, Inferno, even Aztec. In some ways, it topped them. Maybe only de_survivor, from veteran 3DMike, matched it for pure looks.

After this, Daank made a few more maps, then vanished like an unplugged server.


Whether Valve officially owns de_storm is anyone’s guess. Odds are yes — you don’t put a map in the retail build without locking it down — but no one’s ever shown the paperwork.

Daank came back once to make de_storm2 for the Cyberathletic Amateur League. CAL never adopted it. After that, silence.

Other credits include:
• Iikka Keränen (textures)
• “jOeSmOe” & “MattC” (textures)
• “Zeus” (distant thunder audio — maybe an inside joke)

For an official map, the paper trail is surprisingly thin.


Visually, de_storm is striking for the GoldSrc engine. A palette of browns, greys, and greens under a sickly yellow sky. Mountains spike the horizon. Thunder rolls in the distance — soft, constant.

Stand still long enough and something feels off — not horror, but displacement. Like a piece of Quake fell through the cracks and set up shop in Counter-Strike.

Long sightlines dominate. Snipers rule. That’s death for competitive 5v5, though in early CPL/CAL days, it saw some Open Division play thanks to its “official” tag. It never stuck.


Today, the map can still swing rounds without warning. For casual modes — deathmatch, gungame, zombie mods — it’s solid.

de_storm isn’t perfect. But it’s atmospheric, strange, and unmistakably itself.

It never wore Dust2’s crown, but it earned a footnote in Counter-Strike history. That alone is reason enough to load it up again.



Did you ever play this map back in the day?
Maybe on a public server or some random PUG?

Whether you loved it, hated it, or barely remember it at all — I’d like to hear your experiences.
Drop your thoughts below and let’s see who else still remembers when the thunder rolled in Counter-Strike.