'I had no hesitation about working with Valve we looked at them as gods and pillars in the PC games industry,' Le says. But then Valve came knocking on the team's door. The original Counter-Strike mod was launched in 1999 with Valve acquiring the rights and taking over development the following yearĮven before the game launched into beta, Le and co didn't really think it was going to be a huge hit. At that point, we felt we were onto something big, which motivated us to make the subsequent versions really fast and put to the pedal to the metal.' We quickly saw the appeal after we released Beta 1.0 it was rough but we saw real strong gravitation towards it where we had a lot of players. I was expecting more of the same level of success - a decent number of players but nothing too mind-blowing. The previous two mods I worked on had been pretty successful but never to the point where they became something like Counter-Strike.

At the time, I had a lot of experience making those - this was my third one. 'I didn't have big plans for it,' he tells. While it's easy to look back now and see the impact it had on the industry, at its inception it was a hobby project for Le. Like many games that go on to change the direction of the industry - see also MOBAs and battle royale - Counter-Strike began life as a mod for Valve's Half-Life from Minh 'Gooseman' Le ( pictured) and Jess 'Cliffe' Cliffe.

Most moddable games 2019