Ever since the release of Counter-Strike in 1999, the PC gaming community has been overwhelmed by the experience offered by the simple FPS. Since then, two successors have been released, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, and Counter-Strike: Source, the most recent addition to the series. Counter-Strike, and CS:Source have held the number 1 and 2 spots for most actively played games on Steam for as long as I can remember. Most gaming companies, well almost all of them would have released multiple predecessors by now, I mean look at Call of Duty. But, we are not talking about Infinity Ward here, we're talking about Valve. Their track record of spewing out games has been relatively slow over the past few years, with a 6 year gap between Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Also, we still have yet to see Episode 3 of the series after Episode 2 was released three years ago.

So why hasn't there been a sequel? Well, I really don't have an answer to that, because no one knows but Valve. In an interview last year, Gabe Newell, one of the founders of Valve was asked, "What would you rather see first; Counter-Strike 2 or Portal 2?" He answered with Portal 2, and as a result, Portal 2 is on track to be released in 2011. But what about Counter-Strike 2?

Well apparently, Minh Le, one of the creators of CS, was supposedly working on the monumental Counter-Strike 2 for Valve. Unfortunately, the project never got off the ground, and was canceled. Le did not finish his video game development career on that note, as he has been hard at work over the last year on his newest title, Tactical Intervention.

Although this game does not bear the Counter-Strike name, it appears to run exactly like his famed series, of course in an upgraded and more realistic format. In the newest games, hostages are taken off the streets and react to the action going on in the map, such as explosions. This differs from Counter-Strike's seemingly robotic hostages who do nothing when being shot at. Le also commented on the overpowered snipers in Counter-Strike. Of course he was talking about the AWP sniper rifle, which kills in one hit above the waist. To many players, this makes the game very unbalanced, and as a result, many servers restrict use of the AWP. When Tactical Intervention is released at its expected time of holiday 2010, I guess we will not be seeing an AWP.



I wonder how the gaming community will respond to this announcement. Many players still prefer the original game over Counter-Strike: Source, which has much more advanced graphics and physics. I guess what they say about graphics not making gameplay still applies to PC gamers. I am sure many players will be angered by this game, stating that the series is fine as it is. I am not one of those people. I have been wanting to see a new Counter-Strike title for a long time now.

There is more details about the project on IGN, in this article