Most of the times when I'm not programming, I'm playing games. I have been playing Counter-Strike (CS) for a long time, and Counter-Strike: Source (CS:S) is my most played game on Steam, with a total of 1866 hours on record. When Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) came out, I naturally transitioned to it. I have been playing for a long time with Ricardo "UNREAL" Sousa, who is a Level Designer/Game Dev/3D Modeler/Source Engine Expert (his words, not mine — more like Source Engine Mapping Expert). He has done lots of maps for the different versions of CS.

Before CS:GO came out (early 2012), Ricardo watched a video on YouTube (included below), from Flashdeck Animations, which is kind of a joke about the game. However in this video they joke about having a bomb strapped to the chicken, and have the Counter-Terrorists chasing the chicken to try to defuse the bomb.

He tried to implement this idea in a map, here is a video of the initial test map:

This was the first implementation of the map, but the Flashdeck Animations guy shared the video, which was awesome. When he told me that idea, he wanted me to turn this into a mod to actually be able to play any map as chicken defusal map, which we did. Well, at least we started... It gained some traction, and rechyyy (a popular YouTuber) made a video about it.

This test, was a very early test of the mod, which allowed to spawn chickens with the bomb strapped in their backs, and played some effects when the bomb was supposed to explode. However, it was the foundation for the mod, which gained some attention from the community. I don't know exactly why the project did not go forwards as intended, because it was some years ago, but Ricardo told me it was related with the AI of the chicken, which would not allow the chickens to run uphill. The chickens were really dumb. And still are. They run into the corners of the map/into each other, and get stuck really easy.

I suspect I was the one that did not want to move forward with the project, because Ricardo published a chicken defuse example map, in 2013, and states that "I made it into a map for the lack of scripters interested". This map was visited by nearly 30 thousand people, and has 15 thousand subscribers, which is great! Again, this map was shared by Flashdeck Animations. Sadly, it no longer works correctly.

While researching for links to do this post, I found an implementation of the mod for CS:S (which I haven't tried), which was also inspired by the Flashdeck Animations video, and supposedly allows a dead terrorist player to control the chicken. I don't know how well that works. I also found some other YouTube videos about the topic (I will not link these because they were re-uploads from other YouTube channels, and I did not find the original videos).

Everything considered, it was a great project with some traction behind it, however, in the end it is just another project that was not finished. It could have been something played by a lot of people, even though it is not really very competitive and more of a fun game mode. Maybe someone, someday will make a good chicken defusal mode. I will certainly give it a try (play the mod, not implementing it!).

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I am thinking about doing some more posts like this one, so if you enjoyed this one, or have any question, hit me up on twitter @AndreBaltazar.