Counter-Strike co-creator says he's happy they sold the game to Valve—'They have done a great job of maintaining the legacy'

Counter-Strike recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, and is more popular than ever. The original Half-Life mod became a standalone title after Valve hired co-creators Minh «Gooseman» Le and Jesse «Cliffe» Cliffe, and since then has iterated and grown into the most popular competitive FPS on the planet, with over 30 million monthly players.

It's an incredible feat of longevity, and the anniversary has brought forth a rare interview with Minh Le, who first began the project all those years ago when he was finishing up at university. Le has previously said it took him around a month and a half to program «beta one» of Counter-Strike, by which time Jesse Cliffe had joined the project to work on other elements including the maps.

Speaking to Norwegian site Spillhistorie.no, Le says the original concept for the game came about the year before he began work on the mod. «I came up with the idea of Counter-Strike in 1998,» says Le. «I was inspired by many of the old arcade games that I used to play, such as Virtua Cop, Time Crisis. I was also heavily inspired by movies such as Hong Kong action movies (John Woo), and Hollywood movies such as Heat, Ronin, Air Force One and the Tom Clancy movies in the 90s.»

Le credits some of the elements that make Counter-Strike special to his previous work on mods. «The idea of the round based gameplay was actually a concept that I borrowed from a previous game I had worked on called Action Quake2,» recalls Le. «I noticed that not being able to respawn forced me to play differently and encouraged teamplay, so I knew that was the best feature to add to Counter-Strike. This feature as well as the balanced design of the maps is the main reason CS is such a team focused game.»

The creator's favourite maps were CS_Siege and CS_Facility, but of course it was DE_Dust that «took all of us by surprise. We never thought it was that special when we first playtested it, but we were pleasantly surprised to see it become the standard Counter-Strike