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Original Counter-Strike co-creator Minh "Gooseman" Le left Valve all the way back in 2006, and in the years since, his views on the legendary FPS series and its historic endurance in the PC market have changed significantly.
The original Half-Life: Counter-Strike launched alllllllll the way back in 2000 - that's 26 years ago for my fellow English majors - and yet, the current version, Counter-Strike 2, is consistently the most played game on Steam, and by a pretty massive margin according to the Steam Charts. GR+ sister publication Edge Magazine pointed this fact out to Gooseman in an interview for issue #418, and he didn't take a lot of credit for helping kickstart such an enormously successful franchise.
"I used to think it was the theme – I still think counter-terrorism is a fascinating theme – but I think people play it just to collect skins and shit," he said.
Admittedly, I'm not a regular Counter-Strike player and I don't think I know anyone who is, so it's always baffled me seeing it so reliably at the top of the Steam Charts for so many years. It's obviously massive in the esports scene, but even that, Gooseman said, is a coincidence.
"Around beta 5 we were contacted by a competitive league and they were like, 'It would be great if you could change this and change that, and make the game more amenable for competitive play'," he said. "I was like, 'Don't bother me – I'm too busy trying to make the game. I don't have time to make it into an esports game'. I was kind of annoyed with their requests. I didn't pay attention to making Counter-Strike an esports game."
And so it was, Counter-Strike's decades-long dominance reduced to the impulse to collect microtransactions. I'm sure Gooseman understands there's more to it than that, but there's something deeply funny about him being handed a softball like that, only to strike it down with his foot.
Counter-Strike didn't make our list of the best PC games, but we know one chart it does always top.
