It really was wild, and I think the fact that it didn't really have commercial goals allowed the developers to experiment with some pretty "out there" ideas[1] for FPS games. When I first heard of AA and imagined the US Government making a video game, I thought it was going to be kind of inauthentic, like "How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?" But it actually didn't turn out to be too bad, when compared with FPS games of the time. Kind of an Operation Flashpoint but even more realistic. It was definitely not CounterStrike though and ultimately those kind of FPSs won.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/snp85x/comment/hw4mk...