HISTORY

First-part

Counter-Strike began development in March of 1999 as an online teamplay modification for Half-Life, with a strong counter-terrorism theme. Gameplay is fairly straightforward -- you can play as a "Terrorist" or "Counter-Terrorist" through a vast array of locations and scenarios, and the object of the game is to help your teammates win the round by either completing a goal or wiping out the opposing team. Goals are as varied as hostage rescue, bomb placement (or defusal), assassination, or escape, although many games simply come down to wiping out the entire enemy team.

Second-part

From the beginning, Counter-Strike has been spearheaded by two people: Minh "Gooseman" Le and "Cliffe". Gooseman heads up the coding and modeling departments as well as acting as project lead, while Cliffe is Counter-Strike's PR guy and website maintainer, also playing a key role in testing new maps, organizing test sessions and more. Before working on Counter-Strike, Gooseman was already well-known in the mod community for his work on the Quake 1 Navy Seals mod and the hugely popular Action Quake 2. Cliffe joined an AQ2 map site called the "AQ Map Depot", offered to create the website for a Half-Life mod idea of Gooseman's, and after a quick chat on ICQ one night, "Counter-Strike" was decided upon as the name for the project and the game we love was born.

The CPL (Cyberathlete Professional League) has taken Counter-Strike under its wing and made it the official game of its tournament events, including the much-coveted annual World Championship tournament.

jbR & Mi-rK.