What the 32-bit cutoff took away, and what replaced it
Steam's own page for Counter-Strike still advertises a macOS version with a minimum of OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.3. The same page carries the notice that retired it: from 15 February 2024 the Steam client stopped supporting 32-bit games on macOS, and the Mac build of this game is a 32-bit application. The listing survives; the thing it points at does not run on a current Mac.
Play now — free, no downloadBrowse serversApple removed 32-bit application support from macOS several releases ago, and Steam followed with a dated cutoff of its own. Neither decision was about this game specifically. Counter-Strike 1.6 was simply one of a large number of older titles whose Mac builds nobody was going to rewrite for a twenty-five-year-old product.
This is worth understanding rather than working around, because it explains why guides written before 2024 describe a route that no longer exists, and why a Mac download page for the game is not evidence that the download works.
The route that works is running the WINDOWS build through a compatibility layer. CodeWeavers, who make CrossOver and maintain a public compatibility database, rate Counter-Strike 1.6 as "Runs Great" with a last-tested entry against macOS 26 on CrossOver 26. That is the vendor's own rating for their own product, which makes it about as good as third-party compatibility information gets.
The free equivalent is Wine, which CrossOver is built on. It takes more setup and has no support behind it, and for a game this small and this old it generally works.
On an M-series Mac you are asking a compatibility layer to translate a Windows x86 binary for an ARM processor. That works, and it is doing considerably more than it was on an Intel Mac. For a game designed to run on a 500 MHz processor there is enormous headroom, so the practical result is usually fine.
It does mean that troubleshooting advice written for Intel Macs may not transfer cleanly, and that a problem you hit is more likely to be a translation-layer issue than a game issue.
The game also runs as a web page through WebAssembly, which sidesteps the entire question: no 32-bit binary, no Wine prefix, no architecture translation, and nothing to install. It runs the same on Apple Silicon as anywhere else because the browser is doing the work.
You join the same public servers as everyone else. What you do not get is a local install, your existing configs, or anything that depends on files on your own machine.
Several results for this question are download aggregators offering a Mac version. Given the 32-bit cutoff, what those can supply is either an old build that will not launch or a repackaged installer from a publisher you have no way to check.
If you want the game locally on a Mac, buy it on Steam and run it through CrossOver or Wine. That is one accountable source and one well-documented compatibility layer, rather than an executable of unknown provenance.