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A Short History Of Counter Strike Source

Just about any gamer knows what Half Life and Counter Strike is. Not just the old engine, but the new source engine. The series have become a part of gaming.

Counter Strike Source in the early days

Counter Strike rolled off the development line way back in June 1999 as a mod to Half Life. But was not until November 2000 that Valve retailed the game. 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

A large group of people believed the 1.6 ruined Counterstrike. Even after 2004, when WON was shut off, there are still players on 1.5. Some would say they just dont want to buy a legal copy of the game. Like all good games this carried the ability to add custom content like: new maps, mods, sounds and graphics to it to change the game play. Still now, there is a large group developing maps and mods for Counterstrike game servers. This goes to show how popular CS Source Servers still remain.

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. This was based on a modification of the Quake II engine and did not have the success that was expected with only 2.9 million retail sales of the game as of December 2008, in comparison to 4.2 million copies in the same time.

Source server engine is introduced

When Valve released Half Life 2 in November 2004, this also saw the release of Counterstrike Source, or CSS for short. This brought the graphics up to date for the time. When Half Life Episode One was released they also released an update to the Source engine in June 2006. You needed a pretty decent PC to run CSS. However, once you play CS Source, you dont stop. CS Source also had more ability to modify the game.

Cheaters, hackers and CSS servers

Since the first version, CS has always had problems with cheaters on CSS hosting. VAC or Valve Anticheat is a good option, but is not the best thing. Which is why you find organisations such as Steam Bans that work on submissions from game server admins. By far the best deterrent has to be a good server admin on the clan server itself. However it is just unrealistic to have admins on their servers 24/7. Which is why we have recently seen a lot of scripts that automatically kick and ban 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 we see next is up to Valve.

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