The History
Counter-Strike
Counter-Strike started out as a mod on the very popular Valve game Half-Life 1. Counter-Strike is a first person shooter that uses the Gold Source engine which is a heavily modified version of the Quake World engine. There were several mods for this game but the most popular one was Counter-Strike. This mod was released on June 19th 1998 on Microsoft Windows.
Counter-Strike (or commonly known as 1.6) is a online multiplayer game where two teams of five play against each other, Terrorists and the Counter-Terrorists, When this game was a mod it went through many different beta's that really only changed small things like improvements to gameplay (sound and map tweaks). The final beta version was beta 7.1 this is the last version of the mod on half-life because on November 8th 2000 Counter-Strike left the beta stages and Valve decided to publish Counter-Strike as a standalone game. When this game was released it started at version 1.0 but there are no longer server for this version but on Moddb.
This game was loved by the community so much that it had its very own E-Sports league in 2004, this league was available to the best of the best teams in this game. People think that Counter-Strike leap forward in to a competitive scene was the main reason for its longevity and success. The lowest prize pool for one of these tournament is Rendezvous #9 with a total of $1,389,85. The most one tournament has had was in 2003 CPL Summer with a total of $200,000 with the 1st place team winning $60,000.
These are the top 25 Tournaments with the highest prize pools;
With the creation of this game Valve decided to create there own anti-cheat, named Valve Anti-Cheat or for short 'VAC'. This is a component of the Steam platform, As of July 2014, there is an estimated that over 2.2 million accounts on steam have been VAC banned on official Valve servers.
This game has sold over 11,416,994 according to SteamSpy.
Counter-Strike was loved by the community and was given 88 out of 100 from Metacritic as well as 89% from GameRankings;
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Counter-Strike: Condition Zero
The followup to this game was Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, This game was released on March 23rd 2004 and is a multiplayer game but also contains a single-player mode as well. This is the first Counter-Strike to have a single-player mode. Rouge's developer of the game, Jim Molinet, moved to Sony and the development company when bust so this left Valve with the production of the game. Later, Valve gave the rights of the game to Gearbox Software, the developers of the Half-Life expansions and other games like the popular Borderlands games, this allowed Valve to focus on their other games like Team Fortress 2.
Gearbox created a Counter-Strike that had high quality models as well as improved graphics compared to the first one or at least high quality for the time this game was released. They made some new explosive weapons, this includes a Molotov Cocktail, Tear Gas Bomb and a M72 LAW Rocket Launcher.
After a few delays, it missed the late 2002 launch day deadline and was given over to Ritual Entertainment who completely got rid of all Gearbox's work and made a single-player game with 20 unconnected missions. Due to the option of making a single-player only game they decided to enhance the AI of the original Half-Life to create an initial bot AI. The community expected a secondary multiplayer mode release in early 2003.
On the release of Condition Zero, the game was declared the gold award. However, Valve where seeing an average review score of around 60%. The gold status was revoked and the work of Condition Zero started all over again. Ritual's share of development was dropped and given over to Turtle Rock Studios who was a relatively new American company at the time. They took off where Ritual left off with ease. Turtle Rock Studios made a updated bot AI, that was beta tested on Counter-Strike 1.6 before it was released with Condition Zero. The final release contained a mirrored version of Gearbox's attempt, alongside 12 missions recovered from Ritual's single-player portion called Deleted Scenes.
Counter-Strike Condition Zero has sold 8,912,502 which is significantly less than the previous game in the series.
Condition Zero received mixed reviews from the critics with an average score of 65 out of 100 on Metacritic, it was praised for the improved bot AI but marked down on it taking so long in development and it being slightly out of date for the time;
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Counter-Strike: Deleted Scenes
Counter-Strike: Deleted Scenes is the leftovers of Ritual's contribution to the development stage, eighteen unconnected single-player missions. Some of the weapons in this game were re-animated. This includes the M4A1, AK-47, Famas and the Galil.
Counter-Strike: Source
Counter-Strike: Source was released as a beta to the members of Valve Cyber Cafe program on August 11th, 2004, it was also available to the owners of the previous Counter-Strike game, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero on August 18th, 2004 as well. Valve also released a experimental update titled Dynamic Weapon Pricing. This system determines what the prices of the weapons will be on their popularity in the previous week.
Counter-Strike: Source is the next in the Counter-Strike series, this is a complete remake of Counter-Strike 1.6 that Turtle Rock Studios created. Like in 1.6 you have two sides Counter-Terrorists vs Terrorists that fight against each other for a set amount of rounds. The way to win the round is by completing that teams objective(s), these objectives are to save hostages or explode a bombsite (A or B). You could also kill the whole of the enemy team to win the round as well.
If you are to move whilst shooting then your aim is dramatically decreased and becomes near impossible to hit anything/anybody you aim for, also when you hold the trigger down it produces recoil just like any game however, in Counter-Strike there is an element of skill involved in everything you do, from controlling your recoil to your game sense and strategy's you develop over experience. When you hit an enemy it deals a certain amount of damage depending on where you hit them, if you hit a headshot it does the most and with some weapons its a one hit kill. Then its chest that does the most, then legs and finally the feet.
This addition to the franchise brought a whopping 13,854,374 million copies of Counter-Strike Source which is the most that any of these games have gotten as of yet.
This game had very positive reviews from all the game critics with an average of 88 out of 100 from 9 critics;
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Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) is a First Person Shooter that is developed by Hidden Path Entertainment and Valve Corporation. This is the latest release in the Counter-Strike series, this game was released on August 21st 2012, and was made available to play on Microsoft Windows and OS X on Steam, Xbox 360 and a American only PlayStation 3 version. There was a Linux version that was released in September 2014. This game did contain classic features such as maps however they were revamped, as well as all new maps, character models, game modes and weapons. There were plans to do cross-platform however, due to different update times limits the cross-platform capability to just Microsoft Windows, OS X and Linux.
CS:GO began as a port of Counter-Strike: Source to Xbox Live Arcade by Hidden Path Entertainment. During the development, Valve saw the opportunity to turn the Xbox Live port into a full game and develop the Counter-Strike Franchise further. The development started for Global Offensive in March 2010 and the public got the game 12th August 2011.
CS:GO has all the traits from the previous games as it is an objective-based multiplayer game modes. Most of the game modes operate in short fast paced rounds that when a player is killed, they don't respawn until the next round begins. The players can purchase weapons and other equipment at the very start of a round, this is known as 'Buy Time' and after 20 seconds into a round this buy time become unavailable to access after this time limit. The economy is affected by the teams performance, you get money for winning, losing, getting a kill also for planting the bomb or rescuing a hostage. You also can get money deducted for certain actions such as killing a teammate or injuring a hostage. This game added new weapons that had not been in any of the other Counter-Strikes as well as other equipment, most notably the Counter Terrorists side, Firebomb.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is in my opinion the best so far! I have personally invested a lot of my time in trying to become rather 'good' and now trying to perfect my skills. This game is quite different to the previous games in this series as there are two new main features, a competitive matchmaking rank and weapon skins to personalize and customize your loadout.
The addition of these weapon skins add a different way of 'playing' this game, as these skins cost real money to purchase/open in cases this means people can eventually make profit from these via trading and some gambling website were people with the money to waste try the luck and see if the odds are in their favour. I have personally seen some of the jackpots that can pay someone's annually work wage, some people may think this is a very risky move however on the right day at the right time, it could be live changing! There is also people who purchase a very cheap weapon worth around 5p to then trade up with other players of the community, this method is highly time consuming and risky as if you make one wrong trade you could be left stuck with the traded weapon for a rather long time.
The game was released on 2012 and there has been many major tournaments where professional teams play against each other to win a huge prize pool, there has been a total of seven majors over the 3 years and each of these prize pools had been worth $250,000 which is just insane for just playing a game in my opinion.
Finally this game generated 14,689,576 million sales which is the most that this franchise has received.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive received rather good reviews from professional critics. Metacritic gave the PC version an overall score of 83 out of 100;
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Spin-off Titles
There have been a few Counter-Strikes that have been made by the community such Counter-Strike: Online 1 and 2. This game is a free to play spin-off that is available in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, Thailand and Vietnam. This game was developed by Nexon Co., Ltd they also had oversight with Valve. It uses Micropayment model that is managed by a custom version of the steam back-end. It was aimed for the Asian gaming market.
http://www.deviantart.com/tag/counterstrike http://mmohuts.com/game/counter-strike-online
One of the next Spin-off titles is Counter-Strike: Neo, this is a Japanese arcade adaptation, it is the original modification for Half-Life 1. Namco published this game and runs on Linux. The game has Anime inspired characters and is set in a futuristic version of Counter-Strike. It has single-player missions , mini-games and seasonal events to keep the community interested in playing the game without being bored.
The last spin-off title is probably the best one of them all it is a zombie-themed spin-off. In August 2014, Nexon announced Counter-Strike Nexon: Online, it is a free to play game that was developed using the GoldSrc engine. On 23rd September, 2014, an open beta was released onto Steam. The game was fully released on 7th October 2014 that features 50 maps and 20 game modes. Game critics were generally negative with criticism aimed at the poor user interface, microtransactions and dated graphics.
