Counter-Strike (CS), originally created by Minh "gooseman" Le and Jess Cliffe, is a series of team-based tactical shooter games which originate with Counter-Strike, a total conversion mod of Valve Software's first-person shooter Half-Life. The series also includes Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and Counter-Strike: Source.
Counter-Strike pits a team of counter-terrorists against a team of terrorists in rounds of competition won by completing an objective or eliminating the opposing force. The latest incarnation of the game, Counter-Strike: Source (CS:S), is based on the Source engine developed for Half-Life 2. CS is widely acknowledged as the most successful and popular of the tactical shooter genre. Signs of CS's wide influence can be found in mods for Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament, and other standalone shooters such as Global Operations and Soldier of Fortune II.
CS has been the most widely played online FPS for the past few years and has over 19.5 million legal owners. In 2002 there were over 30,000 Counter-Strike servers on the Internet (second place was Unreal Tournament with about 9,800). In 2004, GameSpy statistics showed over 85,000 players simultaneously playing Counter-Strike at any point in time and in 2006, Steam shows over 200,000 players for Counter-Strike (this includes Counter-Strike: Source, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and Counter-Strike 1.6); accounting for almost 70 percent of the online FPS audience. According to statistics gathered by Valve's content-delivery platform, Steam (1), these players contribute to over 4.5 billion minutes of playing time each month, making it the most popular online FPS in history. CS was originally played online through the WON gaming service, but it was shut down in 2004, forcing players to switch to Steam (although some players responded by creating their own WON network, dubbed WON2).
