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Counter-Strike 1.6

Development

Screenshot of NAVY SEALs. Counter-Strike's retail version was released into the world on November 11th, 2000 [1]. Mihn Le's first mod, and partial inspiration for Counter-Strike was Navy SEALs, a mod for the game Quake. Big sellers for the game were its authentic ammo management and ability to land headshots, effectivly a instant kill. Both of these features are still in the Counter-Strike games today [2]. Once Mihn joined college, he began to conceptulize Counter-Strike, going to be a mod for the hit game at the time, Valve's Half Life, supposodly spending more time working on it than schoolwork. By beta 4 (11/5/1999) Valve was assisting in development, and in April of 2000 Valve bought the rights to Counter-Strike and hired Mihn Lee and Jess Cliff, who assisted in development. Because of Valve's freeflow work model, members of the Half-Life team helped out with Counter-Strike [4]. Mihn began working on Counter-Strike 2 (which was never released) but Valve stopped the project and released the first public non-beta version of Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike 1.0 on Novemeber of 2000. Valve then put out 6 more major updates for Counter-Strike, all the way up to Counter-Strike 1.6 in September of 2003, which was the month Steam was released, Valve's digital game delivery system. In July of 2004, Valve bought FlipSide's World Opponent Network, and intergrated its technology into Steam. (Image is screenshot from Mihn Lee's NAVY SEALs [3].)

Gameplay

Dust2s MapScreenshot of CS 1.6Gameplay of Counter-Strike is simple. Both teams, Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists (called Ts or CTs (pronounced "Tees" and "C-tees") by the community) both spawn at different sides of the map at the same time. CTs spawn near bomb sites, which the Terrorists must plant a bomb at. Both teams spawn with nothing but a knife and a pistol, but other weapons can be bought in the buy menu. There are three modes in the game, Bomb Defusal, Hostage Rescue, and Assasination. though other modes are present in the games community servers. In Bomb Defusal, Terrorists must head to one of the two sites, A or B near CT spawn. If they manage to plant the bomb, they must defend it until time runs out. CTs may attempt to defuse the bomb. The round can also be won if the the opposing team is killed. In Hostage Rescue, two or more hostages spawn near T spawn. Ts must defend these hostages without harming them. If time manages to run out or the kill the CTs, they win. CTs must attempt to extract the hostages from the T spawn without harming them while killing terrorists. In Assasination, one member of the CT team is a VIP, only armed with a pistol and 12 rounds of bullets, and not being able to buy anything. He has 200 points of armor. The CTs must escort him to the escape zone or kill all Ts to win. Ts must kill the VIP or run down the round timer to win. If the VIP escapes, he recieves a bonus of $2500 for use next round, the same for the terrorist who kills the VIP. There are a total of 25 maps in the game, some being gamemode specific. de_Dust2, being a bomb defusal map, is the succesor of Dust, is the most popular map in the game and series as a whole. Other maps such as Office, Nuke, Aztec, Inferno and more have been in all subsequent games (not including spinoffs). There are only 25 weapons in the game, some being team specific. Criteria for weapons was for them to look and feel cool, but to also be realistic and for them to be weapons the faction would use in real life [6]. Equipment is also purchasable, which includes grenades and kevlar vests and helmets. (First image is a screenshot of CS 1.6 [7], Second Image is the map of Dust2 [5].)

Reception

Counter-Strike recieved favorable reviews, recieving a score of 88 on the review aggregator, Metacritic [6]. As of 2008, the game is Valve's third most popular game, selling 4.2 million retail copies, only behind Half-Life and Half-Life 2. The game has topped many lists of popular games, and in 2015 it was still on Steam's top 25 played games. As of May 9th, 2018, 9:44 PM, 5664 people are playing, with 16,601 being todays peak. All time peak was 65,188, being sometime in December of 2012, 12 years after the games initial release.

Citations

  1. https://joliesjunk.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/the-history-of-counter-strike/
  2. "Origins" https://joliesjunk.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/the-history-of-counter-strike/
  3. http://www.moddb.com/mods/navy-seals-covert-operations
  4. "Origins" https://joliesjunk.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/the-history-of-counter-strike/
  5. http://counterstrike.wikia.com/wiki/File:Dust2_overview_css.png
  6. Hodgson, David (N.d.). Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar (Uncorrected Proof). Roseville, CA: Prima Games. p. 114. ISBN: 0-7615-4364-3.
  7. http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/counter-strike
  8. https://store.steampowered.com/app/10/CounterStrike/