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Here is the 22 year long history of CSGO and all the games leading up to it
CSGO is the lastest version of the game "Counter Strike". The original counter strike was released in 1999 and it was a mod for the game "Half-Life" made by Valve. It was developed by a small team of 4 designers Minh Le, Jess Cliffe, James Ohlen, Richard Gray. The original version was just an add on mod that players could download on the internet. The game became a massive hit instantly and was played by tens of thousands of people. That might not seem like many players, but for 1999 it was very large. It was large enough to attract the attension of Valve, the company that made Half Life, and they decided to purchase the rights to Counter Strike and make it a seperate game of its own. Most of the shooter games at the time were fantasy shooters where the guns were laser beams that you could shoot while running around and still be accurate. Counter Strike was the first game that you couldnt do this. In Counter Strike, you had to stay still while shooting or your bullets will not hit your target. There was also recoil control which made the game far harder. Another thing that made the game hard to master was the TTK (Time to Kill). The TTK in video games is the shortest time it takes to kill a player in game. For most games at the time it was a few seconds, but in Counter Strike it was so low that it was only limitted to the aim and reaction time of the player since most of the guns were 1 shot kill headshots. Because of all these factors, Counter Strike had the highest skill cieling at the time and it was thought to be impossible to be the best at the game because it was always possible to be better.
The next version of Counter Strike was CS 1.6 released in January of 2003. This was basically the original CS but with visual and map upgrades. This version of CS got far larger that the original because it was its own game. This time the game had anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 players at any given time. The game also gave a start to the first FPS e-sports teams and competitions. These competitions were mostly community events for fun at the start, but they soon became worldwide events that had millions of dollars up for grabs if you were good enough to win. The community for this game was amazing, everyone was friendly and helpful. They organised their own events and game servers to play together with. This community is remembered by the players of 1.6 to this day because of it positivity. This could not be said for later games.
On November 1st 2004, a new version of CS was released. It was called Counter Strike Source. This game had the same gameplay and visuals of CS 1.6 but there was 1 big difference, it was on a newer game engine. A game engine handles the visual, and physics for the game. Its basically the sandbox where you build the game ground up. The original CS and CS 1.6 games used the GoldSrc engine, but the new CS Source used the newly released Source engine. The visuals and gameplay remained the same, but the physics, shooting, grenades, and movment had changed. This change created a huge divide in the Counter Strike communtiy. There were the OG's ( term for long time or original players) of CS and CS 1.6 and there was the CS source players. Any new players would play CS Source instead of 1.6 or the original CS. This caused the 1.6 OG's to look down on CS Source players as "newbs" and "trash". The felt superior to the others. The e-sports teams continued to play on 1.6 instead of Source and this further inflated the ego of the OG 1.6 players. This was where the 1 wholesome CS community started to break down and the company behind the CS games, Valve, wanted to do something about it.
On August 24, 2012 valve released the newest version of CS, Counter-Strike Global Offensive. This game was still on the Source game engine, but its visuals were greatly above the previous games. Valves goal was to combine the CS 1.6 and the CS Source communities with this one game. But ther was one problem, the game was terrible. The mechanics were very different. The game was very buggy. The servers were always down. CSGO was universally hated because of its bugs, and its mechanics. But Valve wasnt going to give up on CSGO, so they started to fix the game. They patched almost all the bugs and glitches with a massive series of updates within the first few months of release. They managed to make the mechanics more simillar to previous CS games. Because of these changes, CSGO started to gain traction in the community and players started to switch over. In just a year and a half, CSGO had 100,000 conccurant players.
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