The teenage days are sorely missed when we sat for hours in front of the desktop and played video games. Our generation surely had a craze for video games over today’s obsession with social media. Over the past decade, the world of gaming has gone through a lot of changes. But, there are still some games that bring back the nostalgia among us.
Counter-Strike celebrated its video gaming twenty years anniversary this year. The series was first launched in 1999 only for Windows OS. The first game was created when a couple of university students brainstormed to create something unique. The series of these shooter video games are very popular among the kids. The major developers of Counter-Strike are Minh Le and Jess Cliffe.
Minh Le
Born into a family in Vietnam, Le immigrated to Canada at a very young age. He went to Simon Fraser University and acquired a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. Le showed interest in software development, 3-D animation, graphic designing and gradually delved into the gaming world.
He created his first mod, NAVY SEALs in 1996 followed by Action Quake 2. While developing Action Quake, Le came across Cliffe and got the idea of Counter-Strike. Counter-Strike was developed as a mod for Half-Life and the beta version was first released in June 1996.
Jess Cliffe
Cliffe completed his education from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is a reputed gaming website designer and gained popularity after co-creating Counter-Strike. In 1997, Cliffe designed a gaming website called Jedi Knight Multiplayer Addon Group. After a year, Cliffe started working on the website for Action Quake 2 and came in touch with Le. Eventually, Cliffe and Le became a team and worked hard to launch Counter-Strike.
Within a year, after launching the fourth beta version of the game, Counter-Strike was acquired by Valve Corporation. Valve Corporation is the owner of Half-Life. Along with buying the game, they hired the two developers as well.
History of Counter-Strike
Counter-Strike is all about first-person shooting games and over these twenty years the uniqueness is still conserved. The game has powerful weapons, that is, guns creating a more attracted animation for the shooters. Counter-Strike game provided a more realistic gaming environment and implemented specific patterns for shooting. Le, in one of his interview, said that it is more about the code of the game than Photoshop.
The developers didn’t have anything specific in mind to where to take Counter-Strike. That is basically the advantage of open source and hence welcoming new concepts and ideas. Both the developers wanted to make a strong game community and hence none of the levels was pre-decided. Gamers from the community built them, submitted them and the best one would be picked up as the new version.
New Versions
After Valve acquired Counter-Strike, the game was re-launched in 2000. Since then a lot of new versions have been released. Soon after this release, Counter-Strike: Source was released which used the source engine of Half-Life 2. A lot of modifications came into play which to some extent created a gap between the two generation players.
To cool down the virtually heated up situation for bringing modifications, both Le and Cliffe tried hard to bring balance. They made some changes related to weapons in the games but the strategy backfired terribly. After a few months of experimentation, the developers had to remove DWP (Dynamic Weapon Pricing) from the games.
After a huge gap of four years, a new version of the game, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was released. And, this time it was released for Windows, PlayStation 3, OS X and Xbox 360.
The current era
The community of Counter-Strike is growing bigger and stronger every day. Currently, the community consists of around 600,000 players and it’s definitely not going down in the near future. With modifications being added continuously, competitive gaming is also getting more popular. In 2011, the Counter-Strike series sold around 25 million copies of the game.
SeparatorThe community of Counter-Strike is growing bigger and stronger every day. Currently, the community consists of around 600,000 players and it’s definitely not going down in the near future. With modifications being added continuously, competitive gaming is also getting more popular. In 2011, the Counter-Strike series sold around 25 million copies of the game.
Witnessing the popularity of competitive gaming, some organizations like IEM (Intel Extreme Masters) started hosting big Counter-Strike tournaments. And, big means literally a generous amount of prize money like $130,000. These tournaments attracted more gamers and Counter-Strike finally went outside the European markets. With this remarkable amount of success, the future of Counter-Strike is truly unpredictable.
Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more