When Minh Le and Jess Cliffe joined forces to create an ambitious Half Life mod called Counter-Strike in early 1999, their collaboration took place over the Internet.
When, later that year, their work had a small but already loyal audience, they continued to communicate only online.
When Valve acquired the rights and released Counter-Strike the following year as a standalone game, they still didn’t meet in the real world.
This happened in 2003, a few months before the launch of Counter-Strike 1.6 and Valve’s digital sales service Steam. Then Min “Gooseman” Lee and Jess “Cliffe” Cliff finally met not virtually. By then, Counter-Strike had become a trendsetter in first-person multiplayer games. He has won numerous awards, not to mention the hearts of thousands of volunteers who have joined his e-army.
“When Valve first contacted us, Cliff and I were overjoyed.” – Lee says. “We were just happy when they offered cooperation. And then, they offered to meet! ”
Lee was born in 1977. He first became acquainted with video games in the 80s. As a child, he mastered the Commodore 64. Then, he continued to study computer technology on the IBM XT 286, and decided that his future would be connected with working on a personal computer. Lee did not pay much attention to the emergence, and the meteoric rise in popularity of Nintendo and Sega game consoles. Instead, he plunged headlong into Ultima and Wing Commander, and later, into Doom.
In 1996, Lee was torn between studying computer science at Simon Fraser University and his passion for 3D modeling, favoring the latter. During his studies, he spent most of his free time honing his programming skills, studying Internet resources devoted to computer technology. In 1997, based on the Quake engine , he made his first Navy Seals mod. In 1998, he helped release another mod – The A-Team’s Action, based on Quake 2 .
Around this time, Cliff joins the case. He worked as a public relations specialist for the Action Quake 2 website and saw the potential in the Counter-Strike project when it was still in the bare idea stage. Cliff offered his help, attracted like-minded people to the project and began to coordinate the development of levels for the game. As a result, Counter-Strike was ready before the turn of the millennium.
In 2000, impressed by the work of a loner, Gabe Newell invited Le to visit Valve’s Seattle office. For Lee, from his parents’ home in Vancouver, it was a relatively short trip, while Cliff was on the other side of the States.
“I remember that meeting,” says Lee. “It was an informal conversation, between me and Robin Walker, about the history of my game and how I see my future career. At that time he didn’t ask if I wanted to work for Valve, he just wanted to know more about me. ”
“Shortly thereafter, they contacted us by email and offered to sell them the rights to the game and continue working on Counter-Strike in-house. We did not hesitate for long, because, you know, we were already glad that they noticed us at all. ”
Lee admitted that, before Valve, Counter-Strike was a success, but there was still a lot of work ahead of it. At that time, the mod included only five types of weapons, two characters, and two maps. And at Valve, when they saw that Counter-Strike already had more players than Team Fortress Classic, they realized that Lee and Cliff were up to something serious.
Cliff agreed with Valve that after completing his studies, he will join the Seattle job while Lee will work remotely from home. When the collaboration on Counter-Strike had already begun, a turning point occurred. The community of players has declared their rights to the game: that their opinion on how to change the balance and rules in the game should be considered first. This idea was rapidly gaining popularity, and there was nothing the developers could do about it.
Since version 1.3, Lee said the perception that the game was already quite balanced was so persistent that even the hint of new changes caused a storm of protest. It got to the point where even a well thought out new idea was considered trivial. In version 1.6, the final touches were added to the game, and the team decided it was time to step back.
“By the time Counter-Strike 1.6 was released, I, Valve, everyone involved in the project, noticed that the community of players was starting to resist innovation,” says Lee. “It has become much harder to change the gameplay. I think Counter-Strike was already the perfect game by that time, and further changes will make it worse. Then we realized that our game has become exactly what it should be. ”
The developers completed their work, and deprived of their daily supervision and management, Counter-Strike with an army of its fans, left to themselves, set off on an “autonomous voyage”. With the existing in-game promotion system that gave players experience in fighting, the game was vulnerable to all sorts of shenanigans. In the absence of a player recognition system, newcomers and veterans were perceived alike, which significantly influenced the outcome of battles. Cheaters could use all sorts of tricks, such as peeping through walls – this is when a cheater could see other players behind the wall.
In response, in 2002, Valve introduced the Anti-Cheating System (VAC) to suppress inappropriate behavior in Counter-Strike online matches. To date, over 300 servers support VAC via Steam, and according to VACBanned.com over the past year, 2.4 million players have been permanently banned for breaking the rules. While the fairness of some of the penalties is questionable, this data shows how serious the problem with cheaters is.
This excitement around the game also has a positive aspect: the new maps for Counter-Strike are what keeps the game from stagnating and keeps it going. Many thousands of cards created by the gaming community itself, but of different quality, I must say, are waiting for those who visit the game servers today, each with its own traps, tricks and secrets.
“Favorite card?” – Lee wondered, – “Hmm …” – He paused for a long time, as if he had lost his thought. I double-checked to see if our Skype connection was interrupted. “There are actually several. It’s hard for me to choose one. There is one map based on Goldeneye 64 called cs_facility, which is definitely one of my favorites, I like maps that are cramped and have a lot of CQC *. Many people don’t like her, but I do the opposite: I love to sit in ambush. Another is Militia, and of course Dust. I am ready to play Dust for hours, to the point of insanity. ”
* Close Quarters Combat: A surprise attack on an enemy in a confined space, with the appropriate weapon for close to medium range combat.
Map Dust and its older sister Dust2 are the most popular Counter-Strike games in history. Their author, Dave Johnston, was still a teenager when he made them. These are maps in the style of the Middle East, with the task of defusing a bomb, presented in all versions of Counter-Strike.
Johnston currently works for London-based Fireteam, an online service provider. And until 2011, for its subsidiary Splash Damage, working for the Brink project. Thanks to the popularity of Dust, Dave had an opportunity to make his career in this direction and he took advantage of it. Now he has no idea what he would be doing now if not for Dust. Building levels for video games and getting paid for it was something he could only dream of at the age of 16.
“I remember getting my first check and my mom asked how much is there?” – says Johnston. “She thought it would be five pounds or so. And then she began to carefully study the check, checking that it was real and it was not a joke. This is how I got the payment from Valve for the Dust card. My mom thought it was a great deal. The amount was not huge, but quite enough for a sixteen year old boy! ”
After creating the first map, called Retirement Home, for Counter-Strike, Cliff and Lee contacted Johnston, asking him to make a new map for the upcoming fourth beta of the mod. Counter-Strike was then a project that was just gaining its popularity, and did not promise any benefit to the enthusiasts who participated in it. But Johnston did not think about it and readily set to work.
At this time, he was just passionate about the game Team Fortress 2, and he did not need to look for inspiration to work. Studying the official shots of the game, armed with the CS Urban Texture set and with the help of texture artist Chris Ashton, Johnston enthusiastically put together a new map of Dust.
Until the fourth beta, Johnston had no way of assessing the quality of his work. He fondly recalls the first positive review of Dust.
“I think the first hint that the map was a success came when Cliffe and Gooseman published a blog post announcing a beta release a few days later,” he said. – “A screenshot has been added to the post showing the testing process on another map. And in the chat window, someone wrote: and I want to play Dust again. And then I realized that I did everything right. It was really great. ”
A year later, Dust was on store shelves, showing off the covers for everyone to see, and more importantly, to buy. Johnston’s classmates were terribly jealous of him. Many talented guys also dreamed of taking part in the development of video games, but Johnston alone managed to do it.
Why the Dust level is still the hallmark of Counter-Strike, Johnston himself does not know. It is a simple card, easy to learn, as he himself noted, and perhaps this is the explanation for its popularity among players. You could put it this way: the card was created at the right time for the right play.
“Actually, this is an overblown topic,” he said. “Dust is just a map. And the number of new cards is constantly growing, and one day there will be one that will take the place of Dust and send it to the junkyard. ”
Lee gives the same impression of a humble person when he talks about Counter-Strike. For example, when Call of Duty came out in 2005, Lee was convinced that the days of Counter-Strike had passed, and now everyone would only play Call of Duty. The latter, of course, gained a lot of fans. But Counter-Strike, in addition to its loyal fan base, has become an eSports discipline and has garnered many years of interest, and in waves, an influx of new players.
“When we were developing Counter-Strike, I was constantly approached by esports players,” says Lee. “They kept asking to change something, add something to make the game more balanced. And I always went to meet them. ”
“I had no idea what scale esports can reach. I thought it would be one-off events. This was before we started working with Valve on CS. Then Valve took esports seriously and said: guys, we have prepared something new for you, this will make esports even more interesting. They’ve added spectator mode, the ability to get ranks and other things, making the competition a lot more spectacular. I think that’s when esports really flourished. ”
Holding back creativity is what Lee explains about his departure from Valve. After the CS 2 project, he worked for himself. In 2013, as part of an even smaller team, he released Tactical Intervention based on Counter-Strike. But the game received unflattering reviews, and only then did Lee appreciate the importance of a close relationship with the gaming community. Most Counter-Strike fans cheered Lee on, and few thought he was acting rashly while he was the founder of a new genre. He is currently working at Harry Newman’s Facepunch Studios on the Rust project.
Perhaps the main secret of Counter-Strike’s success is that its creators did not meet each other directly for the first four years of their collaboration. Their collaboration arose, figuratively speaking, online – in a place where millions of people have been constantly competing with each other for over 30 years.
Like Lee and the hundreds of fans who share his interests, I spent a lot of time playing Counter-Strike during its heyday, preferring the game to exam preparation for SQA (Qualifications Authority) – the Scottish equivalent of GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education).
Above my father’s computer desk, for many years, hangs a postcard with a quote from the writer Leo Tolstoy. It reads: “Patience and time are my soldiers.”
