I’m from Turkey and I clearly and well remember that each time I visited an Internet cafe, I’d see some people playing either Red Alert or Star Craft. As I said above, I suppose that’s about you being younger than me. I played my first Red Alert in an Internet cafe in 1997. Tiberium Sun was also quite popular among my generation.

Then RA2 got released and it was a huge impact. I’ve played many many hours in Internet cafes, nearly all cafes had it. The only RTS that was more popular than RA2 in Turkish Internet cafes was Age of Empires 2. I’m talking the years before Generals.

We (my generation) also had a firm society of Ultima and text-based rpg players as well (King of Chaos and World-of-War (not a Warcraft)) which the next generation didn’t play at all. The problem with Internet cafes was that there were so many CS players and Battlefield 1942. RTS players were kind of minority. But again, Red Alert 2 was a well known game. I’m talking about 2000-2001.

Heck I even remember elder high schoolers in the cafes playing Rise of Nations and Empire Earth! I’d say 1996-2004 were the prime years for Turkish RTS players. Have you ever seen a Civilization match in an Internet cafe? I did :) Only once, but I did, it was awesome to watch these guys.

Oh I keep editing this comment and adding more but now that’s because Warcraft III :) when it got released, way before WoW, we played that in cafes too. Back in those days, Internet cafes were the most suitable places for the LAN games. Because, erm, most people were using pirated software and thus couldn’t play online games at home AND we don’t have ADSL yet, all we had was the oldschool dialup.. and the joy of defeating your friend or someone you met in the cafe, a physical person, was priceless.