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All gamers will have heard of Counterstrike and Half Life. The original game and the new source engine version. Its become just about a house hold name for gaming servers like Quake and Doom were in the 1990′s.

CS in the early days

CS was originally a hobby mod based on the Half Life engine. Then in 2000, Valve took the game over. The game had 19 beta releases until version 1 was made available. Despite that there was also 7 major updates, the upgrade from version 1.5 to 1.6 being the biggest.

Counterstrike meets Steam

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. 1.6 allowed modders to add maps, sounds etc. There is still a large active community of developers supporting this game after 10 years! This proves just how big Counterstrike Source gaming hosting still remains.

Valve also released Counter Strike Condition dubbed as CS:CZ in 2004. The game was essentially a facelift that allowed you to run bots single player. Based largely on the Quake II server engine it didnt do as well as expected, selling only 2.9 million copies from December 2009 as opposed to 4.2 million during the same period.

Source server engine is introduced

Back in 2004 when Valve brough out Half Life 2, this also saw the release of Counterstrike Source, or CSS for short. This version now had the same level of graphics of other games for its age and so was making older PCs struggle to run the game. Half Life Episode One, also brought a new release to the Source Engine in 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. When they did many did not really look back, some people still prefer 1.6 to this day after playing CSS for many years. Like 1.6, CSS maintained the ability to change the game content with mods and maps etc.

CS servers and cheaters

All three versions of Counter Strike have been plagued with issues of cheaters and hackers on CS Source gameservers. VAC is a popular deterrant, however its not the best anticheat. Which is Steam Bans works well- an organisation that works on submissions from clan server admins. But still there is no substitute to good old fashioned human admin but for many clan servers One problem though is having admins on the servers 24/7. Which is why we have recently seen a lot of scripts that automatically kick and ban hackers.

The future is unsure on Counterstrike as we write this. CSS has lots a great deal of players to both Battlefield and COD.

What we see next is up to Valve.