DEVELOPER Q A
THE HISTORY OF COUNTER-STRIKE IN MINH LE’S OWN WORDS…
What was the starting point for Counter-strike?
I had previously worked on a mod called Action Quake2 that had a lot of elements that I borrowed from. Notably, it had realistic weaponry, and it was a Round-based game that didn’t have player respawning. Shortly after finishing Half-life, Valve announced they would be releasing an SDK that would allow modders to create mods for the game engine. I immediately began creating art assets such as weapons and characters. It took me several months to create an initial prototype. After a few weeks, I was contacted by Jess Cliffe who was a huge fan of Action Quake2 and had previously hosted a community website that showcased the best user-created levels for AQ2. He was quickly able to convince a few mappers to create the initial maps for our very first beta.
What were the inspirations for the game, specifically the unique combat mechanics?
The combat style of CS was a mixture of two games that I had enjoyed prior to making CS. Those games were Quake II and Rainbow Six.i loved the high adrenaline fast-paced nature of Quake II but I wanted to incorporate that into something that encouraged the tactical movement of Rainbow Six, so I settled on a movement speed that was right between those two games. One thing I really wanted to emphasise was a concept called controlled fire, which is where real special force units would usually fire in short bursts and rarely fire their weapons in full auto. I made it so the guns in Counter-strike were fairly accurate for those first few shots and then became a random mess afterwards.
Did the core design of the game and its Round-based multiplayer change during development?
I think the biggest change the game went through over the course of the betas was the introduction of the monetary system, which was introduced quite early thankfully. Also, we introduced many game modes that never really stuck with the players, such as VIP Escort or Prison Breakout. I do remember trying to implement vehicles into the game and I spent a great deal of time trying to get it right but never could properly implement it due to my poor understanding of the Half-life engine. Vehicles would have required an entirely new game mode as most of the maps in Counter-strike were far too small for vehicles to make an impact on gameplay.
Was there ever a point where you felt like you might have something special on your hands?
Not really. Everyone on the team had really mild expectations of what the general playerbase would feel towards our game. I think part of it was because we were playtesting it with a small group of friends (four or five people) and we couldn’t really see the full potential of the game until we first played on a public server with 32 players. It was incredible how much more fun it was with more players and that was the point at which we realised that Counter-strike had a lot of potential. In fact, many people these days prefer the small 5v5 nature of competitive CS, but I’m not a fan of it. I much prefer the chaotic action of 10v10 Counter-strike.