THE MAKING OF. . .

COUNTER-STRIKE

From university-dorm hobby project to Valve’s billion-dollar money factory

By Ed Smith

Format PC

Developer Minh Le, Jess Cliffe, Barking Dog Studios, Valve

Publisher Valve

Origin Canada, US

Release 2000

Minh Le is the creator of the most popular game on Steam, a game which, by some estimates, generates multiple billions of dollars in revenue every single year. And yet, at almost 50 years old, he’s still working full time. By his own admission, he doesn’t have enough money to retire. “I do have some regrets,” Le says. “A lot of the people who I still keep in touch with at Valve, I kind of notice that they’re really well off financially.”

But let’s start at the beginning. In 1994, Minh Le was in his mid teens and had just got a copy of Doom, complete with its level editor. “It just felt really addictive,” Le says, “being able to go behind the curtain and see how games got made.” It was a precarious start. “My Doom levels didn’t meet with much success,” he remembers. Nevertheless, the aspiring software engineer now had a better sense of how he wanted to spend his life.

In 1996, he started studying computer science at the Vancouver campus of Simon Fraser University. The courseload and contact hours were flexible, and Id had just released Doom’s 3D spiritual successor, Quake. In addition to videogames and visual design, Le’s third fascination was with the modern special forces; he especially loved to read about the British SAS and French GIGN. Weaving development hours between his classes, he created a military shooter mod for Quake called Navy SEALs, in which the maximalist, cartoonish weapons and characters were reskinned to look more realistic. This wouldn’t be the last time that one of Le’s hobby projects attracted the attention of a major developer. “Id Software contacted me and wanted to put it in this package that included a lot of other mods,” he explains. “They sold this pack and shared the revenue with all of us. That was the first time I made money out of making a mod.”

It was also what led Le to Action Quake 2, a fan project, then in development, with overtones of Hong Kong action cinema. “I thought their guns were kind of shitty,” he recalls, which led him to approach the AQ2 team with an offer to help improve their weapon models. But what at first glance seemed like a straightforward variation on vanilla Quake was in fact a totally different kind of multiplayer shooter, and something Le had never seen before. “Roundbased gameplay,” he explains. “When you died, you didn’t respawn. It was the first time I played a game that had that feature. It made people play differently than if they were playing Quake. You had a fear of dying.”