Every other Nordic country has had to live in the shadow of Swedish CS' continued excellence throughout the lifespan of Counter-Strike, but at different teams all the other countries have battled for position as the second best Scandinavian country. Finland may have suffered its share of prejudice from the Swedish scene, with frequent complaints that players were online superstars or outright cheaters, but the Finns have had moments in history when they occupied that spot as the second best of the Scandinavians and made their own impact on the international scene.

My alias is Thorin and, thanks to the good folks at fragbite, I'll be writing about Counter-Strike 1.6 via this blog from now on. Up until the beginning of this month I was the Editor-in-Chief at SK Gaming, a position I had held since September of 2009. Prior to that I worked in a similar capacity, as an editor and event journalist, for sites such as Swedish community site Gamers.nu, which those of you who played CS before 2005 might remember, and North American community site ESEA. My interest in CS goes back to 2001, when CS stopped just being a Half-Life mod I had been playing and became something I was interested in competitively, in a similar vein to my prior interest in Quake.