Counter-Strike (commonly abbreviated to CS) is a tactical first-person shooter video game which originated from a Half-Life modification by Minh “Gooseman” Le and Jess “Cliffe” Cliffe.
The game has been expanded into a series since its original release, which currently includes Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, Counter-Strike: Source, Counter-Strike: Anthology and Counter-Strike on Xbox.
Counter-Strike pits a team of counter-terrorists against a team of terrorists in a series of rounds.
Each round is won by either completing the mission objective or eliminating the opposing force.
The latest incarnation of the game, Counter-Strike: Source, is based on the Source engine developed for Half-Life 2.
History
The game is currently the most played Half-Life modification in terms of players, according to GameSpy.
On 24 March 1999 Planet Half-Life opened its Counter-Strike section.
Within two weeks, the site had received 10,000 hits. On June 18, 1999, the first public beta of Counter-Strike was released, followed by numerous further “beta” releases.
On April 12, 2000, Valve announced that the Counter-Strike developers and Valve had teamed up.
Counter-Strike 1.0 was released around Christmas 2000.
On January 25, 2003, a world wide competition was held by Valve and hosted by Dell.
Numerous Dell desktops and laptops were awarded in the competition which attracted over 10,000 participants.
The competition was held over a two week period, with the winner being announced on February 15 on Valve’s website.
On 15 September, the current version, 1.6, was released.
In 2004, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero was released.
It contained a single player campaign and bots, as well as other changes.
Counter-Strike was originally played online through the WON gaming service, which was shut down in 2004,forcing players to switch to Steam.
The non-Steam version of Counter-Strike (version 1.5) can still be downloaded from sites such as FilePlanet.
Due to the closure of WON, part of the player community responded by creating their own WON network, dubbed WON2.
In March 2007, Valve implemented mandatory advertisements through Steam in official maps and in the game’s GUI overhead.
Customers have expressed frustration with the ads, including an over 200 page thread on Valve’s official forums, saying that they violate original terms of service and distract from the game. The thread was later deleted by an unknown moderator.
As of February 2008, Couter-Strike Online is only available in South Korea and is now in open beta test.
It is being developed by Nexon Corporation with oversight from license-holder Valve Corporation, and is an attempt to increase market share of Valve’s games in the Korean gaming market.
Legacy
Counter Strike is famous for the culture surrounding it, which includes everything from professional gamers and leagues, to excessive cheating and disruptive behavior.
Certain professional teams (such as SK Gaming, alternate aTTaX, mousesports and fnatic) have come to earn a living out of it, while other clans and community based groups neither lose nor earn money via member donations which are self-sustaining in return for administrator rights in servers involved in the community.
Counter-Strike remains extremely popular to this day.
There are currently professional online leagues supporting Counter-Strike, such as the Cyberathlete Amateur League (CAL), and CyberEvolution, a pay-to-play league.
Various LAN tournaments are held throughout the world, with the largest being the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL), the Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC), the World e-Sports Games (WEG), and the World Cyber Games (WCG).
Championship matches in these events are televised with commentary and analysis.
Half-Life and other contemporary games took full advantage of hardware graphics acceleration in the late 1990s, replacing earlier software-rendered games such as Quake.
The continued popularity of Counter-Strike has meant that older video cards such as the 3dfx Voodoo3, ATI Rage 128, and Nvidia RIVA TNT2 remain useful.
There have been a multitude of games claimed by their developers, reviewers and fans to be “Counter-Strike killers,” but none have seriously been able to dent its overall popularity.
Server statistics in 2002 showed that Counter-Strike servers outnumbered their Battlefield, Unreal Tournament 2003 or Quake III first-person shooter counterparts at least 3 to 1.
However, as criticism of Condition Zero showed, the GoldSrc engine has already been surpassed by several generations of newer engines.
Even Counter-Strike: Source has been criticized for not progressing the gameplay enough and failing to take full advantage of the Source engine.
In China’s northern port city Tianjin, some police officers have used Counter-Strike as a tool for tactical training.
———-
ecoFRAG | DanN` nL
CAL – I/M
CEVO – I/P
Toronto’s Winter LAN Turnement 2004
www.fragdominant.com/
