7 years ago, which is forever in internet time, my friends and I produced a ridiculously stupid show in Counter-Strike: Source called The Leet World. A show that we’re bringing back, fully animated in Source Filmmaker either late this year or early next year.

I really do say ridiculously stupid in the most affectionate way I can here. In a lot of ways it’s totally immature (especially in the earlier episodes), but I sort of look back fondly on those rough edges, and that we put out content for people to see without over-worrying about how to hone it to perfection. Over time, the show improved in basically every area, and I’m really proud of how the later episodes balanced story and character. It essentially became a Counter-Strike soap opera.

For all its ridiculousness, The Leet World actually managed to tell a decent story (albeit a silly one). At the time, it was one of the more well-watched machinimas, and many content creators have told me it was the reason they started making videos in the first place. And as absurd as it is that we decided to make hours of content using Counter-Strike: Source as the canvas, it actually lead to us doing bigger things and gave me some of the opportunities I’ve had in my career as a copywriter and a writer for Rooster Teeth.

So here are some of my favorite episodes of The Leet World, presented in a completely arbitrary order.

Season 2, Episode 3: Trial By Inferno

This is always the episode I show to people when I tell them about The Leet World. It’s a nice example of the balance we struck by the show’s end, and has a nice mix of melodrama, humor and action.

Season 1, Episode 16: Death Comes Home, Part 3

So much action. So much melodrama. I love a good finale, and we always aimed to knock our finales out of the park. I still think this is one of our best episodes, if not the best.

Season 2, Episode 7: Tempest

This is the episode where we paid off a big narrative twist we had been holding on to for awhile. It also upended the format of the show in some ways, and gave a tense, stormy stand off that was actually a pretty difficult technical challenge in terms of working in the Source engine.

Season 2, Episode 10: Wake Me Up Before You Go

When we first started making Leet World, one of our goals was to create characters viewers would really care about. We felt that if we could ever make somebody cry, we’d done our job. For a long time, we knew that we’d be having some kind of character “death” in the series. I put that in rabbit quotes because we eventually retconned it once we realized we’d be ending the show a season earlier than we thought. We figured, why not bring everybody back and give a happy ending?

Season 1, Episode 11: Wrong Side of the Hax

I think this is probably our best challenge episode in terms of pure action, and also because it had the biggest emotional stakes. Making this episode nearly broke us due to technical problems and because of just how hard it was to machinimake all of this nonsense, but I think the results turned out pretty great.