Counter-Strike is a unique game and discipline in which anyone can succeed. And we are talking not only about e-sportsmen, but also about organizations, and tournament operators, and studios, and bookmakers, and in general everyone involved in the competitive scene of the shooter. Everyone wants to grab a piece of the pie called CS, and lately the carve-up has clearly intensified. Cybersport.ru tells how it turned out that it is in CS at all levels that there is the toughest competition among all esports disciplines, how players resist the imposed maintenance orders, and why sooner or later Valve will have to decide which side it is on.
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Counter-Strike has grown despite Valve for over a decade
Why is Counter-Strike so competitive on all fronts? Historically, the original game and its esports scene evolved independently – Valve had little to do with it.
Suffice it to recall that CS was originally an unofficial mod for Half-Life, which was released by two young students Min Lee and Jess Cliff in 1999. It wasn’t until the modification became popular that Valve acquired the rights to it and hired both programmers on the staff.
Min Li is one of the fathers of Counter-Strike. Photo: VentureBeat
In the early 2000s, Valve released patches for Counter-Strike, and in parallel with this, the esports shooter scene grew apart. It is now the overwhelming majority of developers who immediately crush esports in their titles, in those days the community itself was engaged in the competitive scene. The attractive simplicity of the CS game mechanics has made the shooter popular all over the world.
“Created by the people for the people” – there is no better description for Counter-Strike. Quite quickly, the shooter migrated from the basements of computer clubs to larger events. It was thanks to CS that tournament operators grew in due time – the Swedish DreamHack and the American Cyberathlete Professional League. You need to know the latter at least for the cpl_mill and cpl_strike maps, which the CPL created specifically for their tournaments. The first was eventually transformed into the famous Tuscan, and the second is known as Mirage. Over time, tournaments began to take place all over the world. Valve had nothing to do with them, but the company should be thanked at least for the fact that it simply did not interfere.
Competition in the discipline began to grow already at that time. In the early years of Counter-Strike’s existence, the most status tournaments were the CPL championships (the largest were held twice a year) and the World Cyber Games (once a year), then the French Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC) appeared, and a few years later – Intel Extreme Masters from ESL.
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