Just about any gamer knows what Half Life and Counter Strike is. The original game and the new source engine version. Its turned into just about a household game for gameservers like Quake and Doom were in the 1990′s.
Counter-Strike Source in the beginning
Counter Strike rolled off the development line way back in June 1999 as a mod to Half Life. In 2000, Valve chose to retail the mod. Gamers sat through 19 beta releases before being able to play the first full version of the game. After all that, there followed 7 big updates to the game, arguably the biggest when the upgrade from 1.5 to 1.6 took place.
CS servers run from STEAM
Many people believed that this update ruined the game as 1.6 was only released on Steam. Hardcore players still play 1.5, even though WON has been long dead. But these mainly consist of people who are too cheap to buy a genuine copy of the game. 1.6 allowed modders to add maps, sounds etc. There is still a large active community of developers supporting this game after 10 years! This proves just how big Counterstrike Source gaming hosting still remains.
CS Zero came not long after Counterstrike back in 2004. This was a slightly facelift version of the game but still ran on the now 6 year old Goldsource engine. 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, they also released a new up to date version of the game called Counter Strike Source, commonly known as CSS. This brought the graphics up to date for the time. When Half Life Episode One was released they also released an update to the Source engine in June 2006. It took a while for people to get into CSS, as a high powered PC was needed. When they did many did not really look back, some people still prefer 1.6 to this day after playing CSS for many years. CS Source also had more ability to modify the game.
CS servers and cheaters
Every single version of Counterstrike has been hampered with cheaters on CS Source game servers. The Valve anti cheat system (VAC) works well, although its not foolproof. Which is Steam Bans works well- an organisation that works on submissions from clan server admins. But still there is no substitute to good old fashioned human admin but for many clan servers Although its difficult to always make sure a game server has an admin online. This is helped by mod makers providing scripts to automatically block hackers.
As we write this, we arent quite sure on the history of Counterstrike. CSS has lots a great deal of players to both Battlefield and COD.
What comes next is down to Valve