How did two modders build Counter-Strike in 1999?
Minh Le and Jess Cliffe started work in January 1999 on a total conversion of Half-Life, the Valve shooter that had shipped two months earlier. Le built the models and the weapons from Vancouver. Cliffe ran the website, the community and the publicity from Seattle. Neither of them worked in the games industry.
They needed tools first. Valve released the Half-Life software development kit on April 7, 1999, which handed outside developers the code to build their own game modes on the engine. The first public beta of Counter-Strike followed on June 19, 1999, distributed as a free download through fan sites and mirrors.
The design ran against everything else on the market. Rounds were short, players who died stayed dead until the next round started, and the money a team earned in one round paid for the weapons it carried into the next. No respawns meant no running at the enemy to see what happened. That one rule turned a deathmatch engine into a game about patience, sound and information, and it is the rule every tactical shooter since has borrowed.
Why did Valve buy a free Half-Life mod?
By early 2000 the free mod was doing something Valve's own multiplayer could not. It was keeping servers full night after night, and it was doing it on Valve's engine, with Valve's engine required to play it. Buying the mod cost the company very little next to what it protected.
Valve hired Le and Cliffe in 2000 and acquired the rights to the intellectual property. Version 1.0 shipped on November 9, 2000, and Sierra Studios put a boxed copy into North American stores on November 14, 2000. The free download now had a price and a publisher.
The bet paid off. Valve told Game Informer in November 2008 that the Counter-Strike series had sold more than 25 million units. Its own lifetime retail figures, published that December, put the original game at 4.2 million boxed copies, behind only Half-Life and Half-Life 2 in the company's catalog, and those totals excluded every copy sold through Steam.
Le has never second-guessed the sale. "They have done a great job of maintaining the legacy of CS," he told PC Gamer in 2024, speaking around the game's 25th anniversary.
How did Counter-Strike turn LAN matches into prize money?
The Cyberathlete Professional League built its business on the game. Its 2001 Winter Championship in Dallas put up a $150,000 prize pool for Counter-Strike and is now counted as the first Major, the tournament format that still organizes the competitive calendar. The Swedish team Ninjas in Pyjamas won it.
That prize pool mattered because nothing else about the game was expensive. It ran on hardware students already owned, it charged no subscription, and a five-man team could practice over a home connection. Weekend LAN events across the United States and Scandinavia filled rooms with players who had learned the same handful of maps down to the pixel.
Other games got to competition first. id Software's Quake had tournament players by 1997, and StarCraft built televised leagues in South Korea. What Counter-Strike added was a five-a-side team sport, an economy that made a lost round strategically useful instead of just lost, and a spectator view that made sense to somebody who had never played it.
Why did pros refuse to leave Counter-Strike 1.6?
Counter-Strike 1.6 landed in September 2003, the same month Valve launched Steam, and the update moved players off the old World Opponent Network servers onto the new client. It also added the Galil, the FAMAS and a rebuilt interface. Plenty of players hated the forced migration and stayed angry about it for years.
Valve followed in 2004 with Counter-Strike: Source, a rebuild on the Source engine with better lighting and physics. Competitive play largely ignored it. Movement felt different, weapon spray behaved differently, and teams who had spent four years learning one set of mechanics were not going to relearn them for nicer shadows. Valve's retail numbers put Source at 2.1 million boxed copies by December 2008, half the original's total.
So 1.6 stayed the tournament standard for most of a decade. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, built with Hidden Path Entertainment, shipped on August 21, 2012 and finally moved the scene across, partly because Valve backed it with real money and partly because the generation that had memorized 1.6 was aging out of competition.
Is Counter-Strike still around in 2026?
Yes, and it is bigger than it has ever been. Valve Corporation still owns the series and still develops it in house. The current version is Counter-Strike 2, announced on March 22, 2023 and released on September 27, 2023 as a free download built on the Source 2 engine. It did not launch alongside Global Offensive. It replaced it, and the older client stopped being playable the day the new one shipped, which is why the changeover annoyed so many people.
The scale shows up on Steam's own charts. Counter-Strike 2 reached an all-time peak of 1,862,531 concurrent players on April 12, 2025, and it has averaged more than 800,000 concurrent players through 2026, which keeps it at or near the top of the platform every day of the week.
Free arrived earlier than most people remember. Valve cut the price of Global Offensive to zero on December 6, 2018 and moved the revenue to cosmetics, the weapon skins that sell and resell on the Steam marketplace. Le is blunt about what that changed. Players, he told Edge magazine in 2025, "play it just to collect skins".
What happened to Minh Le and Jess Cliffe?
Le eventually left Valve to make his own games, and has said publicly that he partly regrets going. Tactical Intervention, the shooter he started afterward, took years to reach release and found almost no audience. He joined Facepunch Studios in October 2013 as an animator on Rust, left in February 2018 and moved to Pearl Abyss that April. His current project, a cooperative shooter called Alpha Response, entered early access in late 2024.
Cliffe's exit was not his choice. Seattle police arrested him in February 2018, and Valve suspended his employment while the case went forward, as PC Gamer and Shacknews reported at the time. He has had no role in the series since.
Neither man owns any of it now. The rights went to Valve in 2000 and stayed there, so every version that followed, including the one pulling close to two million players on a good day, belongs to the company that hired them rather than to the two people who built the thing in 1999.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who created Counter-Strike?
Counter-Strike was created by Minh Le and Jess Cliffe, who began building it as a free modification of Valve's Half-Life in January 1999 and released the first public beta on June 19, 1999. Valve hired both of them in 2000 and bought the rights to the game, and Valve Corporation has owned Counter-Strike ever since.
Is Counter-Strike 2 free to play?
Counter-Strike 2 is free to play. Valve released it on September 27, 2023 as a free download that replaced Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which had itself been free since December 6, 2018. Valve earns its money from weapon skins and cases traded on the Steam marketplace rather than from selling the game.
Can you still play Counter-Strike 1.6 in 2026?
Counter-Strike 1.6, the 2003 version of the original 2000 game, is still sold on Steam for $9.99 and still has community servers running in 2026. It ships without bots, so you pick a server from the in-game browser rather than starting a match offline. It is a separate purchase from Counter-Strike 2, which is free.