Counter-Strike’s co-creator Minh “Gooseman” Le feels proud of his role in the creation of the game, though he’s surprised by how long the franchise has been around.
“Valve’s contributions and just the way that they handled it are the reason why it’s been able to maintain its popularity,”
Gooseman told Thunderpick.io in an exclusive interview.
“If Counter-Strike was run by a AAA company like EA or Activision, there’s no way it would have lasted this long.”
The long-term view Valve has of its products is another element to Counter-Strike’s success, according to the designer. “They don’t want to extract the most amount of money in the least amount of time.” But such steady and careful approach to developing CS didn’t match Gooseman’s will to push the boundaries and try new ideas, which made him decide to leave the development team in 2006.
“When I look back at it, like 25 years ago, I think it was a good decision for me personally because Counter-Strike… I think it’s good that it hasn’t changed, because that’s the reason why it’s still popular today,” he noted.
Still, Gooseman reiterates that’s what makes CS — and Counter-Strike 2, specifically — so popular across generations. “You have people that played the game 25 years ago, and they can still kind of play the game today and not be lost,” he explained. “I think that’s really important. And I think that’s a really critical thing to the success of Counter-Strike.”
The one change Gooseman would make to Counter-Strike
As a game designer, Gooseman can’t ignore positive changes that could improve Counter-Strike. He’d like to see more gun diversity, one that made picks other than the AK-47, M4A1, and AWP viable — or mandatory.
“It might be interesting to have a system where if you buy too many guns, it goes out of stock,” Gooseman says. “If a team buys AK-47s in the entire match, his team is only allowed to buy maybe 20 AK-47s. If they buy too many of them, then they have to buy like the Galil, and that kind of thing.”
Gun scarcity is interesting from a game design perspective, he notes, but could be very disruptive for the esports scene that is a key part of CS2 today. But in a scenario where Gooseman is invited to be part of a hypothetical Counter-Strike 3 development team, he’d actually apologize to Valve. “I don’t really have much to add,” he says.
CS2 isn’t as appealing to its co-creator as competitors today
Gooseman believes Valve’s conservative approach to Counter-Strike let other shooter games excel where CS2 lacks, such as in how much better the gun feel is in the latest Call of Duty entries.
“The way that they animate, the way that they sound, the way that they feel. Personally, I enjoy their feel more so than Counter-Strike,” he says. “From someone who likes the feel of shooting guns, I would say Call of Duty does feel more satisfying.”
The designer thinks Valve wants to avoid making the recoil too aggressive in CS2. “They’re kind of stuck in 2000 where they don’t really want to change the way that they animate,” Gooseman says. “When you play Call of Duty, you’ll notice when you shoot the guns, the screen shakes quite a lot, but they don’t want to do that with Counter-Strike, because it would be bad for the esports scene. So they want to keep the game much more clean and much more accessible to newer players.”
Gooseman admits enjoying Battlefield and Call of Duty: Warzone’s Rebirth Island mode. “It was very fun. I thought that was a good game mode.” As for Battlefield, it fills his need for play experiences that value his time. “I like the Battlefield series. I’d like to work on that,” he admitted. “There’s a few ideas that I personally feel would improve Battlefield. So I feel like that’s a project that I could really contribute to if the opportunity arose.”
Not even the CS co-creator believes he can break into the PvP gaming ecosystem independently
Gooseman’s Alpha Response, a shooter game focused around special police force missions, doesn’t feature a PvP mode because the developer believes the competitive games market is too hard to crack today. “It’s really just dominated by the heavyweights like Counter-Strike, Call of Duty,” Gooseman said. It’s such an established market that making a PvP game really just has a low chance of success.”
He claims that just throwing a lot of money at developers isn’t the key to succeed in the current PvP market, as proven by expensive games failing despite their big budgets.
“I’ve seen the writing on the wall, and it’s been like this for the past, I would say past 10 years,” he added. “The only people that can really succeed in the PvP space are people with huge pockets like Chinese developers when they made Delta Force. For indies and smaller studios, there’s just a low chance of success.”