25 years later, Counter-Strike co-creator says Valve has "done a great job" with the FPS icon, and he still regrets "not balancing some of the weapons, such as the AWP"

Counter Strike 2 key art — (Image credit: Valve)

As Counter-Strike turns 25 and Valve plows ahead with what's now Counter-Strike 2, co-creator Minh Le, opposite Jesse Cliffe in the original CS team, reckons the house of Steam has "done a great job" with the now-iconic FPS.

Speaking with SpillHistorie (in English, though it's a Norwegian site – thanks, PC Gamer), Le says "I'm happy with how things turned out with Valve, with regards to selling the IP to them. They have done a great job of maintaining the legacy of CS."

Counter-Strike began as a Half-Life mod, but relatively quickly Valve scooped up Le and Cliffe and it became a standalone game, with the first beta released in 1999. Le says he had the original idea in 1998, "inspired by many of the old arcade games that I used to play, such as Virtua Cop, Time Crisis." He also "played Doom a ton and when Quake was released, I played the hell out of it."

"It was very humbling because I viewed Valve with such high regard," Le says of his dev experience. "I learned a lot from working at Valve because I got to work with some of the best game developers in the industry and they taught me some skills I would never have learned outside of Valve."

Looking back on the original game's development, Le tells SpillHistorie that the legendary map "DE_Dust took all of us by surprise." Nobody expected it to become the go-to map, though Le says the mapper behind it "spent a lot of time tweaking the design of de_dust to make it fun and balanced."

For his own part, Le jokingly regrets "not balancing some of the weapons, such as the AWP. I think it gets overused and has become a bit of a meta gun."