Everyone has either played this game or hear of it, Counter-Strike was released as a half life mod over 17 years ago and quickly grew a cult following due to it's revolutionary tactical team play action, strategy and skill requirement, it revolutionized the way FPS games were played in a competitive mode, you can trace the roots of what we now know as e-sports right back to Counter-strike when it was known as CPL and WCG that had clans from all over the world meet for the first time in host cities.
Today we're going to break down the legacy of Counter-Strike and it's very very big impression left on the gaming market as a whole.
Counter-Strike 1.0-1.6
Counter-strike was initially released in 2000 as a half life mod, it was pretty different to what we know today, while releasing with basic functions such as factions, weapon purchases and game modes it wasn't until 1.5 where Counter-Strike really hit it's stride and become a global phenomenon to millions of teenagers around the world, it wasn't until 1.4 where they made maps automatically refresh at the start of each round before that you could pick up weapons you had died with in the previous round just laying around.
Counter-Strike received a relatively short beta by today's standards as the community and valve was intent on making this a success and in that regard they did succeed very much so, but like i said, it wasn't until the introduction of 1.5 that Counter-Strike really made a name for itself and 1.6 being the last version released in the original Half Life engine.
1.5 is when Counter-strike really started to make a dent in the market, it wasn't very often that mods of games got more popular than the original game back in those days but Counter-Strike inevitably did, i wish i could find the downloads/sales from that era but since this was pre-steam i only have the sales from 1.6, but 1.5 hit that sweet spot of balancing everything and making it the first true competitive PvP game.
I remember I was first introduced to Counter-Strike when i went to a net cafe at the age of 11 and saw nearly 100 people playing the same game and after a few rounds i was completely hooked, CS has a special place in my heart that's for sure but it also has a special place in my rage, still to this day at 28 there is no other game that has even come close to the anxiety and anger iv'e felt with a game, nothing worse than clutching a round then getting killed by a stray pistol bullet.
But what made Counter-Strike such an international success? well it's really a sign of the time, if Counter-strike 1.0 was to be released today as opposed to 18 years ago it would probably be a failure, why? because Counter-strike at the time it was released was revolutionary in the truest sense, there were games like Team Fortress and Death Match, but there were no real games that pitted two teams against each other over a singular objective that required different skills.
Strategy, Placement, Management and Skill were and are the building blocks of Counter-Strike, the levels were designed in a way that you had to learn the maps first, it was all well and good to be an ace shot, but it's hard to kill someone you can't see or check a corner you didn't know was there in the first place.
My best memories are on De_Prodigy, a map filled with close quarter hallways, vents and bomb sites were terrorists could very easily sneak past you and come at you from behind or flashbang around a tight corridor and murder your entire team and it still took me a few weeks to properly learn a map that by today's standards is pretty small, it's just how much detail went into Counter-Strike when it was first released.
Obviously now we have massive tournaments, online tournaments and prize pools for the game but it wasn't always the case, mostly a lan game the online portions of the game were sometimes relatively hard to find owing to the early internet back then, however as 1.6 hit and internet became faster and more stable these things began to pop up everywhere and culminated in the WCG and CPGL held in Europe.
There's a bit of argument about what the first "E-sports" game truly was but there is really no argument in saying that without Counter-Strike, the E-Sports scene we know today wouldn't of been achieved so soon or became some widespread, not to mention a lot of games wouldn't of came to fruition without Counter-Strike's advent(Looking at you Call of Duty).
The Road to E-Sports.
Like i said above Counter-strike is either THE first e-sports game or the game that e-sports has to thank mostly for it, of course this was well over a decade ago so i can't quite recall everything at that time but i do remember Counter-Strike was the first game i heard of getting paid money to play it.
To a 15 year old kid that was like having Christmas every day, getting paid to play video games? sign me up, i spent thousands of hours in Counter-Strike honing my skills as did countless others and while i settled into a more sedentary gaming life so people were taking it as far as it could go, times have changed and prize pools have grown extremely high compared to 2004 but there were some insane numbers i remember seeing.
During 2002-2005 i remember reading that the CPL prize tournament was over 100,000 dollars, i remember reading this in a net cafe, while practicing counter-strike, standing up and saying "What the holy fuck look at this" and we all marveled over how playing a video game can result in earning so much money, a few years later I distinctly remember seeing CPL was coming to Australia and we all lost our shit, sadly though this stop was cancelled :(.
But it was around that time i realized just how big the game had grown, people in America were considering hosting an event in Australia for a video game played online at the time it was mind blowing to me and still kind of is even a decade removed.
But what exactly made counter-strike shine through in a world of games? one word; Competition, the competition in Counter-strike was fierce, more so than most other games owing to the fact that the skill curve was so huge that the best players in the world were a spectacle to watch just in itself, 5 teammates cooperating and in perfect synergy for everything for 13 rounds was amazing to watch, especially if you were a player of the game.
My personal favourite player was HeatoN, a Swedish guy about my age now who played the same way I did, i thought i was gods gift to counterstrike, but the first time i watched HeatoN play i realized just how unpro i really was and how much i still had to learn, HeatoN was what is now known as a "High IQ" player, able to trick and run circles around the best players in the world on a regular basis and i aspired to that.
He became known as the "Eco Cobra" due to the fact that he seemingly played better with a simple pistol than most players played with a full kit, he also managed to play alone in a team, racking up "aces" by the thousands in the top competitions, one of my favourite Eco Aces is in this video below.
However this is only one player in a group of thousands and the skilled professionals that would come afterwards in Counter-Strike: Source and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, still thrill people to this day and give fledgling gaming enthusiasts something to aspire to.
The Legacy Of FPS.
There were other amazing FPS games out there like Quake and UT, but Counter-Strike had something special to it, based in reality, as realistic as it got back then and introduced to the world the framework of competitive team based games, many other games and FPS's incorporated a lot from Counter-Strike and I don't think it's a stretch to say that without Counter-Strike you wouldn't have the massive FPS market there is today in games like Call Of Duty, though it's impossible to say for certain.
I know personally that Counter-Strike affected my game play and how I perceived video games from a young age, it also taught me a very very valuable lesson that most games don't have anymore, to get good you have to get owned, like i said i spent thousands of hours in Counter-Strike and someone imparted that knowledge on to me that no one comes in a video game as the best, there's natural talent and skill but what makes you the best at it is practice, practice and more practice.
Everyone who reads my blog knows how critical I am of gaming today, but that was one of, if not the most important lesson i learned from Counter-Strike, was that if you want to be good at something, including in real life, you better be prepared to get your ass kicked over and over again until you adapt and learn how to be better, it was really the first video game that taught me a life lesson, but like I said, that was a subjective personal experience that you may not of got.
The Legacy of Counter-Strike is huge though, even to this day in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the baton has been passed down to the next generation numerous times and it keeps getting better and i think that that is what makes Counter-Strike one of the most important games ever in any genre, is that even after 20 years the game still hasn't hit the ceiling, people are still getting better at it, still creating new strategies and theories on the game.
Too the best of my knowledge, I don't know any other game that has been on the market for nearly 2 decades that is still getting worked on by the players to understand(except maybe EVE, fuck you spreadsheet simulator), even I personally learn new things about the game when I play and better understand the type of players in the game and i think that translates to the e-sports scene that has turned gaming into a legitimate sport with teams, rivals and coaches.
Counter-Strike is a rare game that has never changed, it has never compromised what made it huge in the first place, where the developers remain faithful to the game through every iteration of it and never insult the fans by making massive sweeping changes to it, a game that has gone through multiple generations and still remained in spotlight.
And a game i see that will never truly disappear from the market or from the minds of gamers.
