Every Counter-Strike Game

CS2 stands for Counter-Strike 2, but veteran Counter-Strike players know that this is pretty misleading, as it is far from the second Counter-Strike game. It is the 5th installment of the Counter-Strike series, and the 9th if you count spin-off games. In this article, we will be going back in history to look at every Counter-Strike game ever!

Counter-Strike

It is time to turn the clock back to 2000 when the game that means so much to so many of us was born. Counter-Strike began as a mod for the popular game "Half-Life," but in 2000 the properties of the mod were purchased by Valve, and the original creators of the mod were hired. On November 1, 2000, the Counter-Strike series was officially born with the game's official release. The game was relatively primitive in the beginning, which should be obvious considering its time, but it still garnered plenty of fans, so much so that a second game was born.

Counter-Strike: Condition Zero

Condition Zero, commonly abbreviated to CS:CZ or simply CZ was the second installment of the Counter-Strike series. Released on March 23, 2004, the game was mostly a large-scale update to the game's graphics, enhancing and modifying details on maps, player models, weapon models, and more. The game featured a campaign progression where players had to defeat opposing bots and complete challenges.

Counter-Strike: Source

Just 8 months after the release of Condition Zero, Valve brought us CS: Source. Source was a remake of Counter-Strike on Valve's Source game engine. The game maintained the Terrorist vs. Counter Terrorist bomb/hostage scenario gameplay, but it was initially criticized by the competitive community, which claimed that the game had a lower skill ceiling compared to Counter-Strike. This created a split between the community, which lasted for almost 7 years until the arrival of a game that would go down in history as the greatest First Person Shooter of all time(completely unbiased).

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

CS:GO was a massive leap in the Counter-Strike franchise. Released on August 21, 2012, the game reunited the split competitive scene(after a turbulent period of development) and brought new maps, weapons, skins, operations, and more. In its 11-year reign, the game consistently grew, eventually boasting a player count of 1.8 million simultaneously, and consistently averaging around 1,000,000 players in its final year of existence. The game is by far the most well-known game in the Counter-Strike series and is truly responsible for cementing Counter-Strike in gaming history.

Counter-Strike 2

Announced on March 22, 2023, Counter-Strike 2 is the most recent installment of the Counter-Strike series. It features an entirely new graphics overhaul with the Source 2 Engine, new sounds, ranks, and so much more while maintaining the same Terrorist vs Counter-Terrorist game that brought the game success more than two decades ago. The game was officially released to the public on September 27, 2024, and although it has had a bumpy start and received a lot of criticism over the past few months, it has a long way to go, and we have faith that it will go down as the greatest Counter-Strike game of all time, or at least until Counter-Strike 3 comes out...