Video Game of the Year by Jordan Minor

Author:Jordan Minor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2023-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

INSURGENTS

Counter-Strike began as a multiplayer Half-Life mod. Cocreators Minh “Gooseman” Le and Jess Cliffe used the game’s GoldSrc engine to create not a lofty single-player sci-fi journey but a grounded and endlessly replayable competitive shooter game. However, something Counter-Strike did have in common with its parent game was a design much smarter than the rest of the market, even if those designs served very different shooter styles.

In Counter-Strike, two teams of five—one team of terrorists and one team of counterterrorists—compete to complete objectives where only one can emerge victorious. You either have to disarm a bomb or plant a bomb and guard it until it explodes. Rescue hostages or prevent them from being rescued. Assassinate someone or keep them alive. Win a round, or at least kill some enemies, and you get money to spend on better guns and equipment to take into the next round. Trade your basic knife and pistol for beefy assault rifles and C-4 explosives. By giving you larger tasks to think about beyond just shooting everyone in sight, Counter-Strike forces you to play with purpose. Being on a team encourages you to synergize, to talk to teammates on voice chat, as you come up with tactics.

Throughout 1999 and early 2000, Le and Cliffe put out various Counter-Strike betas. PC modders value community, and famous level makers contributed to the project as Le and Cliffe incorporated fan feedback. The game grew so popular that you could easily mistake it for an official Valve product. In 2000, Valve made it officially official when it bought Counter-Strike and hired Le and Cliffe to work on the project full-time, blurring the line between mod and full-blown game. Counter-Strike wished upon a star and became a real boy, and one of the most popular competitive shooters ever with millions of fans.

Hard-core gamers love Half-Life. It . . . probably should’ve gotten its own chapter. Valve’s PC shooter mastery continued in Half-Life’s (still unresolved) episodic sequels as well as the brilliant, hilarious, physics-based first-person puzzle game Portal. Like a first-party company using its highest-quality games to sell consoles, Valve’s games now primarily exist to make some other product or service seem more valuable, from the Steam digital marketplace to the Valve Index virtual reality headset. Valve and PC gaming stay joined at the hip.

Counter-Strike, however, represents Valve as a company better than we realize. Valve’s other multiplayer shooters, the cooperative zombie survival shooter Left 4 Dead and the colorful class-based team shooter Team Fortress, became smash hits in their own right. It’s not a shooter, but Dota 2’s origins also come from a mod that Valve turned into an official game with staggering esports success.

The company savvy enough to see Counter-Strike and bring it into the fold is the company that has kept its finger on PC gaming’s pulse for more than two decades. Valve is rich and private enough to do whatever it wants. What Valve wants to do is not release too many games but release smart, enduring games. No PC shooter has proven smarter or endured longer than Half-Life: Counter-Strike.

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