Article by I.K MONTY
Released in June 1999, the modification for Half-Life entitled Counter-Strike, has been in our presence for a decade and today enjoys its 10th birthday.
Counter-Strike, the ever burning flame of the eSports cause was first unveiled as a public beta on June 18, 1999, and its initial incarnation included a zoom function for the Colt. Interestingly enough the popular terrorist weapon AK47 was not added until August of the same year, along with the Desert Eagle according to a German article posted on the ESL website.
In November 1999 de_dust, de_nuke and de_prodigy entered the fray and in 2000 the developers of the mod joined forces with Valve. Nine years on and Counter-strike has held off threats from countless other team-FPS', including one made by the same company; Counter-Strike Source, with its 1.6 version (released September 2003) remaining the tournament standard.
Counter-Strike has made its way into the Guinness World Record Gaming edition as it became the world's most successful game MOD by selling over 9 million retail copies worldwide. The game also inspired further world records as SK Gaming entered the record books for becoming the first ever gaming clan to legally bind their players to a clan.
Counter-Strike has become the backbone of competitive eSports, and on its tenth birthday, it seems only right we should salute a lowly mod that became an international success, and one that continues to stand the test of time.
So what are your earliest Counter-Strike memories?
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REPORT BY LEWRANCE
Sophie "inzane" Regnér talks of the sacrifices she made to pursue her Counter-strike career, how the game has impacted her social life, and where she sees herself in the future.
FULL NEWS
Sophie 'inzane' Regnér, one of the Pink Zinic ladies, has decided to leave school due to being unable to concentrate fully, and is now working as a model alongside her role at Pink Zinic.
Pink Zinic have confirmed their attendance at the upcoming DreamHack Summer Qualifier in an attempt to have a shot at qualifying for the 100,000 SEK tournament.
Zinic.insane: "I was 10 when i tried it [CS], and i couldn't stop"
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REPORT BY DANIEL DOCKEN
SK Insider is back and we are happy to announce that with the reunion of our exclusive content, we bring back monthly prizes for the most active players on our Insider servers. This month, we are going to give away 30 days of free SK Insider for top five as well as a brand new Icemat Siberia Neckband provided by SteelSeries
RELATED NEWS
We are happy to announce that we brought back the old APP system, and we are going to give out prizes to the most active people on our Insider Servers as we did back in the days. A short reminder to the people, who might have forgotten how this used to work: APP points are being gained by playing on the private servers of SK Insider. So all you have to do is to massively play on our servers, no matter if it's a serious gather or just some random deathmatch action.
We are going to give out hardware and other great prizes to the top five players of our APP ranking for the upcoming months. This time it's going to be an Icemat Siberia Neckband headset for the first place and the usual 30 days of free SK Insider for all five top ranked players.
With the release of this news, the APP System will be activated on all Insider servers and You will be able to fight for the first place on our Servers. More information on how to win prizes and about the tournaments we are going to host will be announced soon so stay tuned!
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This week's 1on1 interview is a special edition. Michal "Carmac" Blicharz sits down with SK Gaming's CS player Robert "RobbaN" Dahlström to talk about everything. With one exception: not a word about esports.
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SK Insiders' first tournament in 2009 was held last Sunday with an entertaining final on de_dust2 with Aim41 beating Banks and Blaster to get more than $200 in hardware prizes* report by hassam sohail*
FULL NEWS
The first successful SK Insider tournament was played this weekend and we congratulate all winners and participants.
Aim41 got to play Banks and Blaster on de_dust2 in the final, they managed to beat them with an impressive 16:08 and therefore won the first SK Insider tournament in 2009. Read more to see what Aim41's backbone _NIKITA had to say and make sure you check out the HLTV demo in case you missed the match.
Aim41_NIKITA:
" I really liked the tournament because it was possible to play 2on2, in my opinion it is more exciting to play in a team instead of a normal 1on1 tournament. It is sad though that there weren't enough teams in the tournament, we just had to win 2 matches to get the prices. I think we could impress all the spectators with our impressive teamplay in the finals. The servers were great without a doubt. Yeah and the administrating was also great.Would be great if more teams will participate in the next tournaments."
PRIZE WINNERS
Placed 1st : AIM41 - 2x SteelSeries 5Hv2 headsets + 30 days of SK Insider
Placed 2nd : Banks and Blaster - 2x SteelSeries Qck+ mousepads + 30 days of SK Insider
Placed 3rd : GRIZZLY - 30 days of SK Insider
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We are happy to announce that we finally bring back SK Insider tournaments starting next Sunday, 14th of June 2009 at 2PM CET. The first tournament is going to be held in Counter-Strike 2vs2 mode. Read more to find out what great prizes we will be offering and how to sign up. (report by ronald)
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The Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) launched today the Championship Finals website at http://www.TheCPL.com/finals/. The CPL 2006 Championship Finals, taking place Wednesday, December 13 to Sunday, December 17, 2006 at the landmark Hyatt Regency hotel in Dallas, is primarily sponsored by AMD and ATI, and co-sponsored by Pizza Hut, BenQ, Plantronics, Razer and Insomnia365. The event will host two PC tournaments for Counter-Strike 1.6 and Quake 3, and offer $150,000 in cash prizes. The
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GameCenter will be hosting their first Counter-Strike: Source tournament beginning August 27th and ending the following day on the 28th, at which eight teams of five will be competing for $2,000 in prizes. Registration will begin on August 25th at 5pm Pacific time.
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The Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) has announced that registration for the upcoming Counter-Strike team tournament is now in progress. The tournament is sponsored by Razer and features US$15,000 in prizes. The event is being hosted as part of Babbage's CPL $100,000 tournament. Players that wish to participate must first obtain a registration number for the event from the official CPL web site, and then register at the Counter-Strike tournament web site.
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[UPDATE] Technical problems cause event organizers to scrap their previously announced $160,000 BYOC competition. Valve denies Steam problems were the cause.
they may be able to frag opponents with their eyes closed, but the world's top gamers probably didn't see the cancellation of the Cyber X Games' Counter-Strike tournament coming.
It all started last Thursday when hundreds of international Counter-Strike players gathered in Las Vegas to compete in the Cyber X Games' bring-your-own computer (BYOC) tournament. Originally scheduled to be a double elimination competition for teams of five players, the top prize for the event was $100,000, with second and third places netting $25,000 and $10,000, respectively. Total prize money: $159,500.
However, the event was beset by problems even before it could kick off. According to a report on Gotfrag.com, tournament PCs were not set up in time for the beginning of the event. Subsequent cabling issues caused further delays.
However, things got worse. On Thursday evening, Valve's Steam service shut down for four hours. Officially, the outage was caused by a "device failure on our network following a power outage," but Valve director of marketing Doug Lombardi told GameSpot Steam was also also the subject of a denial of service attack. The timing of the outage compounded the problem, since Valve had released a Steam update on Wednesday night which the hundreds of competitors in the tournament needed to download.
As a result of the technical issues, only three matches were played on the first day of the tournament. Throughout Friday night morning a group of gamers helped CXG organizers rework the competition's network. However, on Saturday morning, gamers reported that a problem with Steam made it impossible for competitors to join the local LAN tournament servers.
As a result, only two games could be played at any given time. Given that 50 Counter-Strikes games were yet to be played, CXG CEO Joe Hill decided to cancel the established tournament. According to a release provided by a CXG publicist, the new tournament series "was shifted to shootout matches after access to Vault's Steam authentication service was found to be inconsistent."
"That is not accurate," said Lombardi said of the accusations levelled at Steam. "We did not experience any down time with Steam on Saturday." Lombardi denied charges that Valve employees attending the nearby Consumer Electronics Show refused to help CXG employees. "No one from Valve attended CES," he said. Lombardi also pointed out the Steam update was only 400k, not the 3MB some reports had claimed.
While the cause of the Counter-Strike tournament cancellation is in dispute, its fallout is not. The event was replaced by seven $10,000 winner-take-all exhibition matches and an all-star match between two teams assembled from top American and European players. Three $2,000 matches were later added to help appease understandably upset competitors. Sadly, technical and organization problems continued to plague the event, forcing the cancellation of all $2,000 matches and the all-star game. In all, only seven matches were completed before the event was shut down.
Ironically, further problems awaited the 22 teams--many of which had flown in from Europe--excluded from the exhibition matches. According to a member of A-Losers.MSI, a German team invited to play in a cancelled $2,000 match, CXG officials initially told all C-S team members that their "expenses will be completely compensated." However, one hour later, the A-Losers were told that only their hotel costs would be partially reimbursed. The team members raised a question many others are now surely asking, "what will happen to the $160,000 prize money for the CS tournament?"
Another C-S team member vented his anger in the Valve forums: "We flew over to Las Vegas expecting a really great time. We came home tired and disillusioned," read the C-S player's post. "Gotfrag neglected to mention the incredible amount of hostility that permeated the halls of the arena as we received word that the event was cancelled." The player posed another question that will be likely asked in the wake of the Cyber X Games debacle--"What happened to the fun in gaming?"
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