While popular at launch, nobody could’ve predicted the money-spinning machine Counter-Strike would turn into. Still hugely popular, the shooter gnerates millions upon millions of dollars for Valve annually, contributing to the considerable wealth of some people within the company. Minh Le, a co-creator on Counter-Strike, left much earlier in the game’s life, leaving him with some lingering thoughts about what might have been.
“I do have some regrets,” he tells Edge magazine. “A lot of the people who I still keep in touch with at Valve, I kind of notice that they’re really well off financially.”
In the early 2000s, Valve hired Le and his fellow original Counter-Strike dev Jesse Cliffe, for an official release of what was then an exceedingly popular Half-Life mod. A few years later, with the team-based military FPS a fixture of PC, Le wanted a fresher challenge, but nothing suited him within Steam’s owner.
“I could see what Counter-Strike had become, and it hadn’t really changed in six years,” Le reveals. “Valve offered me a chance to work on Counter-Strike: Source, but they didn’t want to change anything – they just wanted to upgrade the graphics. I wanted to work on a completely new game.”
After what Le describes as an “amicable” meeting with Gabe Newell and a number of other Valve higher-ups, a mutual parting was agreed. “They just told me, ‘You know, Minh, we feel like you’d develop better on your own and not in a professional environment,'” Le remembers.
He launched his own shooter afterward, Tactical Intervention, that shut in 2019, and has since enjoyed stints on Rust and at Black Desert Online developer Pearl Abyss. “If I had stayed at Valve, I probably could have retired by now. I took a different path, a much more challenging path,” he says.
“But I feel like it was a much more rewarding path in terms of my career, my development and my growth as a developer and a person,” he continues. “I saw some sides of the game industry that I wouldn’t have seen if I had stayed at Valve.”
