In June 2001 Computer Gaming World’s Jeff Green checked the server lists on GameSpy and found “ten times as many COUNTER-STRIKE servers running as servers for the next game on the list”. The game was not the work of a big publisher. It was a free modification of Valve’s Half-Life, made by a university student, Minh Le, known online as Gooseman, and his partner Jess Cliffe. “Here are all these huge multinational game companies, investing millions of dollars,” Green wrote, and then “some guy named ‘Gooseman’” gives away a mod that “becomes the online gaming sensation”.
Fast facts
- Creators: Minh “Gooseman” Le and Jess Cliffe.
- First release: June 1999, a free beta for Half-Life.
- Owner: Valve, which bought the rights in 2000.
- Retail: a stand-alone boxed version from Sierra from late 2000, while the mod stayed a free download.
- Premise: two teams, terrorists and counter-terrorists, fight rounds with objectives such as hostage rescue.
- Later games: Condition Zero and Counter-Strike: Source (2004), Global Offensive (2012), Counter-Strike 2 (2023).
Two modders
Le and Cliffe had worked together before, on Action Quake 2, a semi-realistic mod for Quake II, and Le had made Navy SEALs, a counter-terrorism mod for Quake II. “I came up with the idea for Counter-Strike from my fascination with terrorism and the various ways in which it’s fought across the globe,” Le told Retro Gamer. He wanted to capture the teamwork of real counter-terrorist units. Cliffe, still at high school when the work began, spent his days painting houses to save for college and worked on the game at night.
Their accounts of how long it took differ. Le remembered spending about two years on the first version, which hurt his grades at university. Cliffe told Computer Gaming World that the first beta came out about four months after Valve released its software development kit for Half-Life: “We were very adamant about being one of the very first mods out there.”
That first release, in June 1999, was small. As Le recalled it: “It consisted of one mission mode, which was hostage rescue. It also had two character models, which many people complained about since they looked far too similar. The arsenal consisted of around six guns and had, I believe, three maps.” Le did the design, the programming, the characters and the guns. Cliffe ran the website and dealt with the players, and recorded many of the game’s voices. Players supplied the maps: “All of the levels were developed by people from our community,” Le said. He and Cliffe picked the best for each new beta. The website’s advertising brought in, he said, “a lot of revenue”, until investors pulled money out of the internet after the dot-com boom.
What it was like to play
At the start of each round the players buy weapons and equipment, then try to complete or prevent an objective, such as rescuing hostages. A player who is killed stays dead until the next round begins. Computer Gaming World described it for new buyers as a game in which the two sides have “access to different weapons and equipment”, and called it the benchmark for “realism vs. gameplay”. Money mattered: saving it in one round bought better equipment in the next.
Green, a deathmatch player, found it hard. “The more realistic weaponry means it’s much harder to aim but much easier to die,” he wrote, “and the goal-oriented missions require you to study the maps, plan with your teammates, and think.” In his first game he shot a teammate by mistake, learning that the game had friendly fire. On good servers “with actual grown-up people” he had a blast, though “I was dead most of the time”, and watching the rest of the round in spectator mode was often more fun for him than playing.
Valve buys the game
During 2000, as one Computer Gaming World reader put it, “Cliff and Gooseman went from guys making a game for themselves into partners with Valve”. Le and Cliffe sold the rights to Valve in 2000, and the game left beta that November. Sierra put a stand-alone boxed version in the shops at the end of the year for players who did not own Half-Life, although, as Computer Gaming World noted, “COUNTER-STRIKE itself will still be available as a free download”. Le worked on further versions, first under contract at the developer Barking Dog and then at Valve, up to version 1.0. He then started on a new Counter-Strike built with Valve’s next engine, but Valve shelved it, and he left to found his own studio. Cliffe became a full-time designer at Valve.
The free game still sold. In December 2003 Computer Gaming World reported Valve’s figures: more than 100,000 people playing at any moment on average, 88 per cent of the online action-game market, and “more than 1.5 million copies in boxed form, even though you can download the same thing for free”. Supporting that many players was one of the reasons Valve built Steam. An Xbox version, developed by Ritual Entertainment and published by Microsoft, came out at the end of 2003.
Tournaments
Counter-Strike became a team sport early. In late April 2001 the Brazilian magazine SuperGamePower reported from São Paulo on the Virtua CPL Latin America, run by the Latin American arm of the Cyberathlete Professional League, where about 400 players from Brazil, Argentina and Germany competed. Fifty teams played for a first prize of R$10,000, and the German team SK (Schroet Kommando), sponsored by Intel, ABIT and ELSA, won after losing only two of the 57 rounds it played over three days. “We train up to four hours a day, but we always know it’s a game,” said SK’s 18-year-old leader, Jap. The runners-up from Brasília said they had thought they knew how to play, and found out they did not.
Valve later backed its own championships. The first Valve-sponsored Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Major was played at DreamHack Winter in 2013, with a prize pool of $250,000 (see esports origins).
Later history
The original game reached its final version, 1.6. Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and Counter-Strike: Source, which reworked the game for Valve’s new Source engine, both came out in 2004. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, made without Le, followed in August 2012, and in 2013 Valve brought the original game to the Mac and Linux. That year Retro Gamer noted that Counter-Strike was still among the ten most played games on Steam every month. On 27 September 2023 Valve replaced Global Offensive with Counter-Strike 2, built on its Source 2 engine and free to play.
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 203, June 2001, p. 136, Jeff Green, “Greenspeak”: the June 1999 debut; ten times as many servers; “Gooseman” and the multinational companies; realistic weapons and planning; friendly fire; being dead most of the time and spectator mode.
- Retro Gamer issue 119, October 2013, pp. 84–87, “The making of: Counter-Strike”: Le’s inspiration and the two years; the June 1999 release and its contents; Le’s and Cliffe’s roles and Cliffe’s voices; community maps; advertising revenue; saving money between rounds; the sale to Valve in 2000 and the end of beta in November 2000; Barking Dog, Beta 5 and Valve; version 1.6; the shelved sequel and Le’s own studio; Global Offensive made without Le; the top ten on Steam; platforms PC, Mac, Xbox and Linux.
- Computer Gaming World issue 233, December 2003, p. 107, “The creators of Counter-Strike”: Valve’s player and sales figures; Jess Cliffe on high school and painting houses, Action Quake 2, Navy SEALs, the four months after the SDK, and working on the Xbox version and Condition Zero.
- Computer Gaming World issue 197, December 2000, p. 183: Sierra’s stand-alone Counter-Strike and the continuing free download.
- Computer Gaming World issue 199, February 2001: letters (“partners with Valve”); the retail Half-Life: Counter-Strike (Valve Software, Sierra Studios), its two sides, hostage rescue and “realism vs. gameplay”.
- Computer Gaming World issue 200, March 2001, letters: Counter-Strike “has now gone retail”.
- SuperGamePower issue 87, June 2001, p. 46: the Virtua CPL Latin America in São Paulo; SK’s win, sponsors and Jap’s quote; the runners-up EmB.
- Official Xbox Magazine (Australia) issue 26, April 2004: Counter-Strike on Xbox, developer Ritual Entertainment, publisher Microsoft.
- Hyper issue 123, January 2004: review of the Xbox version.
- Edge issue 144, January 2005: Steam and the support costs of Counter-Strike (see the Valve entry).
- Wikipedia, “Counter-Strike (video game)” and “Counter-Strike” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): the retail version going gold on 9 November 2000; the Xbox release in November 2003; Condition Zero and Source in 2004; the Mac and Linux ports in 2013; Global Offensive on 21 August 2012. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Strike_(video_game)
- “A new age dawns: Counter-Strike 2 is live on Steam, replaces CS:GO”, PC Gamer, September 2023 (web, secondary): the release of Counter-Strike 2 and the end of Global Offensive. https://www.pcgamer.com/counter-strike-2-released/
- Wikipedia, “Counter-Strike Major Championships” (web, secondary): the first Valve-sponsored Major at DreamHack Winter 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Strike_Major_Championships