A Brief History Of Counter Strike Source
July 22, 2010All gamers will have heard of Counterstrike and Half Life. Thats not just old half life, but the games that run on the new source based engine. Its become almost a household name for gaming servers like Quake and Doom were in the 90s.
Counterstrike Source in the dawn of online gaming
Counterstrike was originally a mod to Half Life. In 2000, Valve chose to retail the mod. The game had 19 beta releases until version 1 was made available. Despite that there was also 7 major updates, arguably the biggest when the upgrade from 1.5 to 1.6 took place.
Introducing STEAM servers
Many people still argue the 1.6 update spoiled Counter Strike. Hardcore players still play 1.5, even though WON has been long dead. Although some would argue the only ones playing on these illegal game servers are those that dont want to buy a legtimate copy of the game. 1.6 opened a whole new world of modding- maps, models, sounds etc. There is still a large active community of developers supporting this game after 10 years! This shows exactly how popular Counterstrike Source server hosting still remains.
CS Zero came not long after Counterstrike back in 2004. This was a slightly facelift version of the game but still ran on the now 6 year old Goldsource engine. Based largely on the Quake II server engine and did not have the success that was expected with only 2.9 million retail sales of the game from December 2009 as opposed to 4.2 million during the same period.
Game servers taken on the source engine
When Valve released Half Life 2 in November 2004, with this, we were introduced to Counter-Strike Source, commonly known as CSS. The new release introduced cutting edge graphics. The release of Half Life E1 also brought an update the the source engine, back in June 2006. With the original engine needing a reasonable powerful pc for the time did mean that it took a while for people to start getting into CSS. However for most, once played CSS, they never stopped. CS Source also had more ability to modify the game.
Cheaters, hackers and CSS servers
All three versions of Counter Strike have been plagued with issues of cheaters and hackers on CS Source gameservers. VAC or Valve Anticheat is a good option, but is not the best thing. Thus there are groups like Steam Bans that work better as this is ban submissions by real people. The best option is always a server admin on a gameserver. Although its difficult to always make sure a game server has an admin online. This is helped by mod makers providing scripts to automatically block hackers.
As we write this, we arent quite sure on the history of Counterstrike. CSS has lots a great deal of players to both Battlefield and COD.
What comes next is down to Valve
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