When Counter-Strike was published by Sierra Entertainment / Vivendi Universal Games, it was bundled with Team Fortress Classic, Opposing Force multiplayer, and the Wanted, Half-Life: Absolute Redemption and Firearms mods.

On June 19, 1999, the first public beta of Counter-Strike was released, followed by numerous further " beta " releases.

Counter-Strike received a major technology update and refresh on November 1, 2004 with the release of Counter-Strike: Source, which was heavily updated using Valve's Source game engine to take advantage of more modern graphics and audio hardware.

On August 12, 2011, it was confirmed that a new Counter Strike game was in development at Valve Software and Hidden Path Entertainment, which also codevelops Counter-Strike: Source, going under the title Global Offensive.

Counter-Strike faced controversy in April 2007 when Jack Thompson, now a disbarred attorney from Florida, predicted that the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech Massacre had been trained to kill in the game, well before Seung-Hui Cho ( the shooter ) was identified.

As of June 18, 2009, a regional federal court order lifting the prohibition on the sale of Counter-Strike was published.

* Counter-Strike: Condition Zero – ( PC ) Ritual Entertainment was working on the title in 2002 after Gearbox Software and before Turtle Rock Studios took over in mid-2003

Half-Life: Counter-Strike, a mod of Half-Life ( 1998 ), was the most popular multiplayer game of its era.

For much of its early history, Team Fortress Classic was second only to Counter-Strike as the most played and popular of online games.

Among popular mods, none is more well known than the Half-Life multiplayer mod Counter-Strike, which was released shortly after the original game, and upwards of 1 million games per day are hosted on dedicated servers.

CrossOver Games, announced on 10 March 2008, was a new product that let the users play a broad range of games, " particularly games with a lot of replayability such as MMOs like World of Warcraft and the range of games from Valve e. g., Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, and so on ".

Beta 3. 0 was released in July 2002 and added the Allied Sergeant, who carried a M3 Grease Gun, as well as the para gameplay mode which was similar to Counter-Strike in that players did not respawn until the end of the round.

The first time the World e-Sports Games took place, was January 30 through March 20, 2005 and featured Counter-Strike and Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos as main titles.

This pushing back of HL2s release date came in the wake of the cracking of Valve's internal network through a null session connection to Tangis which was hosted in Valve's network and a subsequent upload of an ASP shell, resulting in the leak of the game's source code and many other files including maps, models and a playable early version of Half-Life Source and Counter-Strike Source in early September 2003.

The Steam client was first made available for download in 2002 during the beta period for Counter-Strike 1. 6.

Installation and use of Steam was mandatory for Counter-Strike 1. 6 beta testers, but Steam remained an optional component.

Counter-Strike: Source was initially released as a beta to members of the Valve Cyber Café Program on August 11, 2004.

On August 18, 2004, the beta was released to owners of Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and those who had received a Half-Life 2 voucher bundled with some ATI Radeon video cards.

It was expected to have a release in early 2003 with a secondary multiplayer mode, and developed alongside the Xbox version of Counter-Strike.

News sources originally stated that Seung-Hui Cho only played the game in high school, however no video games whatsoever were found in the gunman's dorm room, and there is no evidence that he ever played Counter-Strike.

However, the original Counter-Strike is still available and played by many people via Steam, as the two variants are quite different, and players inevitably prefer one variant over the other.

In a massive Counter-Strike roster overhaul on December 7, SK Gaming signed on the departing Fnatic players Patrik " f0rest " Lindberg and Christopher " GeT_RiGhT " Alesund, ( the latter of whom played for the organization previously ), while also seeing the departure of Dennis " walle " Wallenberg.

The scenario is popular in many parts of the world ; in the Philippines and Thailand, it is played as much as the game Counter-Strike.

* Counter-Strike: Source ( CS: S ), an online first-person shooter computer game

Counter-Strike Online is available in South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and Indonesia, and is now fully online.

New World Order is an online team-based tactical first-person shooter video game, similar to Counter-Strike.

Prior to Steam, Valve had problems releasing updates for their online games, such as Counter-Strike, wherein a patch would result in the disconnection of the larger part of the online user base for several days.

Tactical Ops: Assault on Terror is an online multiplayer computer game with similar gameplay to Counter-Strike.

Minh Le ( Vietnamese: Lê Minh, born June 27, 1977 ), also known by his online nickname Gooseman, is a Vietnamese-Canadian computer game developer who co-created the popular Half-Life mod Counter-Strike with Jess Cliffe in 1999.

GameSpy Arcade allows users to play games online such as Halo, Command & Conquer: Renegade, Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament 2004, as well as various other First-Person-Shooters and Strategy games.

The term " griefing " dates to the late 1990s, when it was used to describe the willfully antisocial behaviors seen in early massively multiplayer online games like Ultima Online and first-person shooters such as Counter-Strike.

Some prominent examples of this include fighting games such as Street Fighter IV and Marvel vs. Capcom 3, sports games such as NBA 2K11, strategy video games such as Warcraft 3 and StarCraft, older online games such as the Sega Meganet titles, and particularly first-person shooters such as Battlefield 2, Halo 3, Counter-Strike, Quake 3, Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops.

* de_dust, one of the original maps in the online multiplayer first-person shooter Counter-Strike

The Movie Battles mod was started by Richard Hart ( online alias RenegadeOfPhunk ) in 2003, with the goal of mixing the round-and objective based gameplay of Counter-Strike with the lightsaber and gun mechanics of Star Wars.

Newell had indicated that they would like to bring the service to the console through the game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which would have allowed them to provide the same feature set that they did for the PlayStation 3, but later affirmed that cross-platform play would not be present in the final version of the game.

* September 12 — Valve releases the first stable version of Steam, which would replace the WON system that has been used for Counter-Strike and other Valve games a year later.

After the shutdown of WON, some players continued to run a patched version of the retail versions of Half-Life or Counter-Strike, which connects to a WON replacement called No-WON ( or WON2 ), and allows users to use the original server browser to connect to Half-Life servers, and their various mods ( including Counter-Strike 1. 5, and a Steamless version of 1. 6 ), much as they could before WON's shutdown.

In computer gaming the term is usually used to refer to a person highly skilled in multiplayer games like StarCraft, Warcraft III ( RTS / RPG-DotA ), Diablo II ( RPG ), Counter-Strike ( FPS ) and others.

From 2007 to 2011, WeMade Entertainment operated a professional gaming team called WeMade FOX that maintained high-ranking Counter-Strike, StarCraft: Brood War and Warcraft III players.

Emil Pathric William Christensen ( born 14 June 1984 in Stockholm ), alias HeatoN, is a former Swedish professional Counter-Strike player, formerly playing as captain of the gaming team Ninjas in Pyjamas ( NiP ).

When working together with Minh Le on the first Counter-Strike version, Jess Cliffe quit working for the " Silo X " website and was followed up by Tom Konings known as HaLf-DeAd in the Half-Life gaming community.