Daniel Shepherd Unit 3 Research Techniques for the Creative Media Industries: Task 3 Video Game Documentary

Script;

Counter-Strike: (1.6)
I have been asked to create a short documentary explaining the history of my favourite game which is Counter-Strike.

Counter-Strike or commonly known as, '1.6' started out as a mod for one of Valve's games called, Half-Life. There were several mods for this game however Counter-Strike: was the most popular which was released on June 19th 1998 for Microsoft Windows. This game is a first person shooter that was developed on the Gold Source engine which is a heavily modified version of the Quake World engine.

Counter-Strike is a online multiplayer game where two teams of five fight against each other. The teams are known as, Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists. When this game was a mod it went through many different beta's, these beta's where just improvements to gameplay and updating the maps to make the game more fun to play. As of November 8th 2000 Counter-Strike left the beta stages and Valve decided to publish this game as its own franchise.

The game was loved by the community so much that in 2004 this game had its own E-Sports league. This league was only available to the best of the best of the game. People think that Counter-Strikes leap forward into the competitive scene was the reason to the games success.

Valve created an anti-cheat that was released with Counter-Strike called Valve Anti-Cheat. It is there to try and prevent unfair gameplay and to punish those who are trying to play by their own rules. As of July 2014, it is estimated that over 2.2 million accounts have been VAC banned on official Valve severs.

This game has sold over 11,416,994 according to SteamSpy.

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. Rouge's developer of the game, Jim Molinet, moved to Sony and the development stopped so this left Valve with the production of the game. Valve gave the rights of the game to Gearbox Software.

Gearbox created a Counter-Strike that had high quality models as well as improved graphics compared to the first one. 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. They remade 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.

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. They made a updated bot AI, that was beta tested on Counter-Strike 1.6 before it was released. The final release contained a mirrored version of what Gearbox's did, alongside 12 missions recovered from Ritual's single-player portion, named Deleted Scenes.

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 the lengthy development and it being slightly out of date for the time;

Counter-Strike Condition Zero has sold 8,912,502 which is significantly less than the previous game in the series.

Counter-Strike: Source

Counter-Strike: Source is the next in the Counter-Strike series, this is a complete remake of Counter-Strike 1.6 and was created by Turtle Rock Studios. 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.

Just like in 1.6 you have two sides Terrorists vs Counter-Terrorists that fight against each other for a set amount of rounds. The way to win the rounds 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.

This game had very positive reviews from all the game critics with an average of 88 out of 100 from 9 critics;

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.

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 game was released on August 21st 2012, and was made available to play on Windows and OS X on Steam, Xbox 360 and a American only PlayStation 3 version.

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 port into a full game and develop Counter-Strike further. The development started for CS:GO in March 2010 and was released to the public on August 21st, 2012.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive in my opinion the best so far! 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 try their luck and see if the odds are in their favour.

The game was released in 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.

Finally this game generated 14,689,576 million sales which is the most that this franchise has received.

Just before we move onto the spinoff section, I ask 20 people to answer a question, "Which Counter-Strike is your favorite?"

This is the feedback I got;

4 people said 1.6
0 people said Condition Zero
7 people said Source
9 people said Global Offensive

Counter-Strike Spinoffs

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 certain places . 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.

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.

Video:

Development Log;

I started off by making a script, you can see this above the video, this make it easier to match the video to what I'm saying as well as the pictures that pop-up during the video. I made sure that my voice is 8 minutes log to be suitable for the assignment breif.

After placing all my voice tracks into Premier Pro I got all the background gameplay from Youtube, all the links are below, the reason I got all the videos from Youtube is that my pc isn't good enough to record gameplay as it is getting old now. I matched all the video part to my voice then added transitions to add a small effect when change from one game to another.

Next I placed pictures to help to show people watching what I'm talking about. I also used a variety of different motion effects on these pictures that change how the image appears on the screen. I also added a image of the Valve Anti-Cheat logo that I merged with a hitmarker sound from any Call Of Duty game when I am saying "2.2 million accounts have been VAC banned". I did this just as an added effect to make the watcher laugh however as a way to resemble the accounts being banned. You can see this below;