Best CSGO Vaporwave Skins – A Return from 2020 to your Childhood Fever Dream
(7 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of vaporwave. Unless you weren’t online for the last nine years. In 2011, music producer Vektroid made the streaming spotlight as Macintosh Plus with the album Floral Shoppe, making a very niche music genre into a global aesthetic phenomenon. Dreamlike, eerie compositions riding on downtempo backgrounds and squeezing the most psychedelic juice out of 90’s nostalgia with its shopping mall music and dial-up tones. It also followed with a collage-based aesthetic hyperbolising the beginnings of digital artwork and pulp design.
It’s no wonder that some CSGO Workshop users introduced this aesthetic to the design of weapon skins in CSGO—it’s a discernable visual style that can convey a peculiar feeling. It’s also no surprise that gamers find that genre of art a nice, chilled-out alternative to the usual hyper-fast technological beat of dubstep and similar music.
In this article, we’ll look at several worthy skins that evoke the warm annoyance mood with their design and try to show their situation on the market.
Most ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃCSGO Vaporwave skins
Below are five examples of the best CSGO Vaporwave skins along with short descriptions and a price range.
M4A4 | Neo Noir ネオノワール
We’ve talked about this skin before in an article about Clutch Case skins. Its name isn’t an accident, as neo-noir is a style not only in visual arts but also in storytelling. What’s more, it evokes the mood of a genre brotherly to vaporwave, namely outrun. The skin’s design wears off very quickly with rising float, so its lower wear levels are quite cheap. Nevertheless, selling a Factory New StatTrak Neo Noir might get you more than $330.
AK-47 | Neon Revolution ネオン革命
Talking about flashy… Having this skin equipped is enough to make your foes go blind. Neon lights are a very 80s-to-90s thing, but apparently the punk design style doesn’t speak volumes to CSGO players. In my personal opinion, this skin looks even better when it’s worn down. However, the market is often closed to discussions about style. Battle-Scarred Neon Revolution skins go as low as $21. On the other hand, StatTrak Factory New skins are rare enough to go around for about $200 if you’re lucky enough to get one from a Gamma 2 Case.
MAC-10 | Neon Rider ネオンライダー
There’s something about the lonesome rider stereotype that translated from the Western Era to the nineties action movies and has been incredibly neatly interpreted in the outrun movies and games. The masked rider on this MAC-10 resembles one of Hotline Miami’s protagonists, The Biker. Apparently the neon hard-boiled mood of HM series transitions better to Payday 2, where crossover items are much more lively. Neon Rider barely reaches $40 on the global market in its cleanest versions.
P250 | See Ya Later じゃあまたね
This one fits the Vaporwave Cs Go Skins tag from the perspective of 90s kids’ childhood nostalgia. It looks a bit like those plastic toys you could buy almost anywhere. One can also set it parallel to kids’ TV action animations with anthropomorphic animals like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or SOS Croco. CSGO players seem not to be massive cartoon fans, as See Ya Later skins cost from $4 to $12 in regular versions and from $12 to $50 in StatTrak versions. Still, it’s quite a lot for a toy gun.
AWP | Oni Taiji 鬼太地
Mentioned before in several articles, including an overview of Operation Hydra Case, Oni Taiji is a good contender for a modern AWP classic. The juxtaposition of the traditional hand-painted samurai fighting a demon and a touch of violet ambience perfectly fit the vaporwave mood of estranged Japanese exports embedded in shopping mall kitsch. Regular copies of this skin don’t go below $40 in its worse wears, while Factory New StatTrak is a $400 ride.
Initiation Tape for Vaporwave Skins in CSGO
There’s no single case that would guarantee you a drop of several different vaporwave CSGO skins. The skins named above can be found respectively in these cases.
- M4A4 | Neo Noir – Clutch Case
- AWP | Oni Taiji – Operation Hydra Case
- AK-47 | Neon Revolution – Gamma 2 Case
- P250 | See Ya Later – Spectrum 2 Case
- MAC-10 | Neon Rider – Chroma 2 Case
These are all Covert skins, so they are the rarest finds from their respective cases. It takes some time (and some keys) to spin the wheel enough to loot any of them.
How often do they come to Hologram Plaza
Three factors are crucial in the uncommon occurrence of Vaporwave Skins in CSGO. Generally speaking, vaporwave is a niche aesthetic that only appeals to some, hence the supply of such skins are limited. In more detail, these skins mentioned above are high tier skins which drop less often, thus existing in a smaller volume in the global market. Finally, they are an acquired taste, and since they are all older skins, aside from Oni Taiji, they have most probably found their preferred users and change ownership only on occasion.
Do CSGO Vaporwave skins require Foreign Bank Aviation?
As there is not much variance of these skins in terms of wear and alternate versions, they are available at a fair price even in the original marketplace of Steam Community Market. Of course, you can browse third-party marketplaces for an occasional bargain – try looking for the above beauties in Skinwallet Market’s catalogue.
Selling them would also come down to posting a Steam sell offer and waiting for a willing customer or browsing boards and discussion groups to see if anyone’s searching for CSGO vaporwave skins and contacting them directly. Also remember, that if you need cash money fast, you can log in to Skinwallet and say farewell to the neon lights for a quick profit.
NTSC Memories
This trip around the aesthetic nostalgia manifesting in weapon skins served to determine best vaporwave CSGO skins and see how are they are placed in the global skin market in 2020. The five featured skins are Covert ones and represent the most worthwhile finds for collectors in that style. Of course, there are other skins that have this floaty, dreamy atmosphere with a touch of neon around them, but probably too many and too subjective to mention all of them. As a poet in slow motion once said, “it’s your move”. Choose your quirk and go for it!
