Global Retake
December 5, 2025Out of all of the different servers that i've run, Global Retake is easily the one that i'm the most proud of. For those of you who don't know, the whole point of "Global Retake" is to make playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as easy as possible, as even though the tools for it still exist, it was made really difficult to wrap your head around due to Counter-Strike 2 trying to bury it as much as possible.
I had the idea for Global Retake simmering in my head for a very long time, but i initially never got around to doing it due to how intimidating it sounded to host servers without the use of Steam Networking. That was the whole reason i started the TrueQuickplay movement, as it was so easy to create servers for TF2 after Valve quietly added the option with the SDK update that it pretty much brought back Vanilla Quickplay lobbies. Without that, i needed to figure out what Port Forwarding meant, and for a very long time that completely put me off.
...That was until i was reached out to by a YouTuber known as NNinja1255 who initially tried to add me during the TrueQuickplay era to hand me over a zip he used to make hosting TF2 servers easy for him. This gave me the idea to try doing the same thing with CS:GO, so i hopped on a video call with them and tried to figure out the inner workings of this server launcher pack.
After a few days, i was able to launch a local server for Global Offensive, so i was obviously getting somewhere. However, i was still trying to get it to appear in csgo_gc's server list. (I was using a mod called "csgo_gc that my friend CSIW6 introduced to me that not only spoofed the item server but also gave a clean server browser that doesn't feature any CS2 servers. The GitHub page can be found here.)
I looked into why it wasn't showing up, and i was greeted by that old enemy of mine... Port Forwarding. I took some time to learn how it worked, and to cut a long story short, it was really easy. It's literally as simple as going into your Default Gateway and looking for the "Port Forwarding" option. Can't really get much more simple than that, can you?
After that, i made a tutorial, released the zip with all of the necessary steps on ModDB, made a Discord server for Global Retake alongside a Clan Tag (as i use Discord Nitro, so it only took me 1 extra boost to be able to afford it) and waited.
It didn't take long for the server to fill up. It's easily been the most successful of the community servers that i've run, as even though it's not the biggest by numbers just yet, everyone's joined the server solely due to their love for CS:GO, and i wouldn't have it any other way.
If you want to join the Global Retake Discord server, you can do so by clicking the link here.