COUNTER-STRIKE TEAM PARTNERS WITH VALVE
Version 1.0 to be included in Half-Life update
KIRKLAND,WA (April 11, 2000) — The Counter-Strike development team and Valve today announced Valve's support for on-going development of Counter-Strike, the popular multiplayer modification (MOD) for Valve's awarding winning debut title Half-Life.
"The financial and technical support from Valve is a big help in continuing to evolve Counter-Strike. It lets us focus on making Counter-Strike a better game and respond to gamers requests for features and fine-tuning," said Minh Le, Project Leader of Counter-Strike development. "Distributing Counter-Strike 1.0 as a free upgrade to the two million Half-Life players will grow the Counter-Strike community enormously."
"We made a major investment in the MOD community early on with activities like the MOD Expo and the release of tools and source code," said Gabe Newell, Managing Director of Valve. "With Half-Life still a top seller at retail, and generating over 350 million player-minutes per month on the Internet, a lot of the credit for that goes to the MOD community's support of Half-Life. Working with Minh and Cliffe is one way of showing our on-going commitment to them and all the gamers that make Half-Life the most popular game on the Internet."
Counter-Strike was first showcased at the Half-Life MOD Expo '99 in San Francisco and, after a series of subsequent releases, has become the premier realistic combat game on the Internet since its initial release late last year. Currently Counter-Strike is at Beta release 6, with future releases to be made available shortly via Half-Life's built-in MOD browser or via download from http://www.Counter-Strike.net/.
Counter-Strike casts players as a member of either a terrorist or counter-terrorist team. Each team has unique weapons and capabilities. The game is played in a variety of maps with varying objectives, including rescue missions, assassination, bomb diffusion, and more. More information on Counter-Strike can be found through the official Web site at http://www.Counter-Strike.net/.
Founded in 1996, Valve develops entertainment software. Half-Life is Valve's debut title. Since its release in November 1998, Half-Life has won over 50 Game of the Year Awards from publications that include PC Gamer, Computer Gaming World, and CNET's Gamecenter. More information about Valve is available through the company's Web site at www.valvesoftware.com.