In the late 90s, the combination of Quake 3: Arena and Unreal (and in a different sense, Unreal Tournament) changed everything. Not only was the cutting-edge technology far more accessible than it had ever been, but the price and utility of hardware accelerators had improved significantly. On top of that, the cost of internet connections was coming down and many households were able to purchase unlimited, monthly dial-up accounts.

It was a good time to be a gamer. But during the incessant battle between Unreal Tournament and Quake 3, one franchise quietly reared its head with a modification that would blow both of them out of the water.

First released in 1999, Minh Le and Jess Cliffe's labour of love would become one of the most iconic PC games of all time. Selling over 27 million copies nearly a decade later, Counter-Strike became the poster child for the power of modifications and ushered in a new era of team-based combat.

"I was inspired to make [Counter-Strike] shortly after working on a mod called Action Quake2," Le said in an interview 12 years ago, "I was really eager to work on a military-style mod (similar to my very first mod, Navy SEALS Quake 1) and was about to do a Navy SEALS 2, but found out someone already did it... so I decided to do Counter-Strike... having worked on two mods in the past, really allowed me to work efficiently on CS."

Not long after the beta's initial release, Le began working at Valve, which absorbed the game and pushed it to a retail release in 2000. Le left the company several years later to create Tactical Intervention, a Counter-Strike-esque game that was released a fortnight ago.

"I was actually kind of surprised it became so popular because, I was constantly reading the forums and people were bitching and that kind of thing. It's hard to get a feel for 'Is this game doing well?' because look at all these whiners," Le told Joystiq earlier this year.

Despite having moved on to new projects, Le still gets asked about Counter-Strike. It's understandable, considering Tactical Intervention set out to rewrite many of the problems ingrained in modern military shooters - many of which can be traced back to Counter-Strike.

It's also inevitable considering the game's exhaustive legacy. Le has admitted that he never expected Counter-Strike to last as long as it did. But then, eSports wasn't a word in the gaming scene until Counter-Strike rewrote the book.





Counter-Strike's massive popularity took the infrastructure spawned by the Quake community and turned it into a global behemoth, creating the phenomenon that is electronic sports, also known as eSports. The game's popularity was helped by the fact that it was readily available at LAN parties, which was still the premier form of multi-player gaming until broadband became more ubiquitous.

Once high-speed internet began to spread, the community and interest in the team-based shooter had become so large that people were attracted to the game because of its following. Players all over the world were enticed by the possibility of being able to travel for tournaments and win money, with many (myself included) lured by the adrenaline on display in videos like the ones above.

Events like the Electronic Sports World Cup, Cyberathlete Professional League and the World Cyber Games used Counter-Strike as a pillar of their tournaments. Gaming, largely due to companies harnessing the popularity of Counter-Strike, became a profession.

But becoming a professional, or chasing the dream of being one, has problems of its own. FRAG, a documentary about progaming, detailed many of the personal and professional issues that arose.

Counter-Strike wasn't the progeny of competitive gaming: that happened decades prior in the arcades. But Le and Cliffe's mod took first-person shooters into a new era, breaking ground in a way that developers and publishers never envisioned.

Gamers hear the word eSports a lot today: many games are created specifically for competitive gaming, with titles like DOTA 2, League of Legends and Shootmania a perfect example.

If you ever want to know how the industry developed, if you want to know why professional gaming exists the way it does today, then look at Counter-Strike. The industry didn't start with Counter-Strike, but gaming was never the same again afterwards.

Alex Walker is the regular gaming columnist for ABC Tech + Games. You can follow him on Twitter at @thedippaeffect.