Counter-Strike celebrates 25th birthday today

The Counter-Strike series is commemorating its 25th birthday today June 19, 2024.

The popular tactical shooter series has been amassing fans since 1999 when Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess "Cliffe" Cliffe released it as a modification to Valve's Half-Live. The developer would acquire the IP, hire the creators, and officially release Counter-Strike in 2000.

In order to celebrate Counter-Strike's 25th birthday, take a trip down memory lane with us and find out what changes Valve made to the franchise over the years to ensure it would stay healthy and alive.

The first game of the franchise, Counter-Strike, came to life as a subproduct of Valve's 1999 shooter Half-Life. The developers Gooseman and Cliffe turned Half-Life into a team-based FPS in which players would be either Terrorists or Counter-Terrorists on several maps inspired in real locations around the globe.

Aside from the still popular bomb defusal and deathmatch modes, another game mode was popular back then: hostage maps. This mode consists of the Counter-Terrorists having to extract the hostages from the Terrorist base rather than defusing bombs. The game would receive numerous updates over the years, and a lot of players only remember playing the 1.6 version.

Counter-Strike: Condition Zero was also developed by Ritual Entertainment and Turtle Rock Studios, on top of Valve. Although it utilized the same engine as the original Counter-Strike—GoldSrc—the game notably enhanced the graphics of all maps, player models, and weapon models.

Besides the graphical improvements, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero most notably introduced two campaigns in the form of Tour of Duty and Deleted Scenes. But, it wouldn't pick up as both its predecessor Counter-Strike and successor Counter-Strike: Source, which definitely had more impact and are the reason we're celebrating its birthday until nowadays.

Counter-Strike: Source is a remake of the original Counter-Strike with the use of the Source game engine, hence why the game has that name. Valve and Turtle Rock Studios teamed up once again to develop this game.

The game practically kept everything we had in Counter-Strike, but massively improved the graphics and made much-needed tweaks to the core gameplay such as drastically reducing the movement speed while you're being shot at and automatically buying ammo for all their weapons, rather than forcing players to buy ammo at the start of each round.

Counter-Strike: Source also removed the infamous Tactical Shields that caused a mess in the original Counter-Strike game, and improved all the Grenades at the time—HE, Flashbang, and Smoke.

Commonly known as simply CS:GO, this game truly revolutionized the Counter-Strike franchise.

Not only Valve made much-needed graphical tweaks while keeping the identity of the original Counter-Strike alive, but it also introduced features such as official servers and a proper matchmaking system, Operations, skins, and new game modes such as Wingman and the battle-royale Danger Zone.

The skins and other cosmetics like player autographs and team logos were crucial to fund the esports scene and incentivize players from all over the world to consider going pro. The professional scene was split between Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source, and CS:GO came to unify them all in one game.

CS:GO was so popular and perfect for many players, that Valve wouldn't release a new game until CS2 in 2023. The "2" in the name stands for the use of the game engine Source 2, which is a massive upgrade over the original Source engine.

Though CS2 is essentially a CS:GO update for the most part, it did notably improve the graphics once again, and added an official competitive ladder in the form of Premier, which reminds what third-party matchmaking platforms had been doing over the years.

As for gameplay, the most notable change is how smoke grenades behave in CS2 in comparison to CS:GO. This grenade became a dynamic volumetric object that properly interact with the environment, leaving almost no gaps.

After a tumultuous start, CS2 has truly grown into one of the best Counter-Strike games of all time, and ensures the franchise will probably celebrate many other birthdays.

That's all for now. Stay tuned to esports.gg for more content about Counter-Strike's 25th birthday.