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 and MS-DOSVirus. The timeline is precise enough: early 2001. Storm showed up in a Counter-Map pack on June, 2001. Not long after, Jess Cliffe — yes, that Cliffe — spotted it and 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 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. What’s certain is Daank didn’t stick around. He came back once to make de_storm2 for the Cyberathletic Amateur League. CAL never adopted it. After that, radio silence.
A few other names slip into the credits. Iikka Keränen — famous in Doom and CS circles — provided textures. “jOeSmOe” and “MattC” also appear for texture work, but no one seems to know who they were. A sound credit goes to “Zeus,” supposedly for the map’s distant thunder audio. That could be legit, or it could be a little in-joke Daank left in the hidden credits. Back then, such Easter eggs were common currency.
It’s strange: for an official map, the trail is thin. Others are documented to death; de_storm is half-fact, half-rumor.
Visually, it’s striking for the GoldSrc engine. The palette is 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.
Its design favors long sightlines. Snipers rule here. Close-quarters fights are rare. That’s death for competitive five-on-five, but in the early CPL and CAL days, when people tested oddball maps like Fang and Rotterdam, it got some Open Division play — likely just because it had the “official” stamp. It never stuck.
Today, the map still has a mind of its own. It can swing rounds without your consent. For casual modes — deathmatch, gungame, old-school zombie mods — it’s solid.
de_storm isn’t perfect. But it’s atmospheric, strange, and unmistakably its own. 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 — see if the thunder still talks to you.
Rating: ★★★★☆
