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Any online gamer worth their salt with know what Half Life and Counterstrike is. The original game and the new source engine version. Its become almost a household name for game servers like Quake and Doom were in the 90s.

CS Source in the early days

Counterstrike was originally a mod to Half Life. In 2000, Valve chose to retail the mod. The game had 19 beta releases until version 1 was made available. After all that, there followed 7 big updates to the game, one of the biggest and most talked about with the update from 1.5 to 1.6.

Counterstrike meets Steam

Many people believed that this update ruined the game as 1.6 was only released on Steam. After the WON platform was shutdown in 2004, there is still a group of hard-core players still playing 1.5. But these mainly consist of people who are too cheap to buy a genuine copy of the game. 1.6 opened a whole new world of modding- maps, models, sounds etc. Still now, there is a large group developing maps and mods for Counterstrike game servers. This shows exactly how popular CSS gameserver renting still remain.

Counterstrike Conditions Zero servers were released shortly after in 2004. In a nutshell, slightly better graphics, bots and single player mode. This was based on a modification of the Quake II engine and did not have the success that was expected with only 2.9 million retail sales of the game 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. The new release introduced cutting edge graphics. When Half Life Episode One was released they also released an update to the Source engine in June 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. However, once you play CS Source, you dont stop. New maps, mods etc were brought alone with Counterstrike Source.

Hax, cheaters and Counterstike Servers

All three versions of Counter Strike have been plagued with issues of cheaters and hackers on Counterstrike Source game servers. VAC is a popular deterrant, however its not the best anticheat. Which is why you find organisations such as Steam Bans that work on submissions from game 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. This is helped by mod makers providing scripts to automatically block hackers.

The future is unsure on Counterstrike as we write this. The market is becoming increasingly competitive with the likes of EAs Battlefield series of games and Activision with the Call of Duty games.

What we see next is up to Valve.