Counter-Strike

Counter-Strike began as a free fan-made modification of Valve's Half-Life, created by Minh Le and Jess Cliffe, with its first public beta arriving in the summer of 1999. Valve took the mod on — the partnership was announced in 2000, and a retail version shipped November 9, 2000. The premise was deceptively simple: two teams of five, terrorists versus counter-terrorists, one life per round, and a weapon-buy economy that layered real strategy onto maps like de_dust.

The numbers got absurd fast. By late 2000 it had over 700,000 players on more than 7,000 servers; by March 2002 it was the most popular multiplayer game in North American game centers and cybercafés, and by 2004 roughly two million people were playing worldwide. Competitive play grew from 2000 on, with the first major tournament at the Cyberathlete Professional League's Winter Championship in 2001 — founding history for everything esports later became. Version 1.6, released September 12, 2003, became the definitive edition and moved the game onto Valve's new Steam platform.

Counter-Strike: Source followed in 2004 and Global Offensive in 2012, each bigger and shinier. But the headshots that echo in millennial memory came from 1.6 — in a basement, over a tangle of Ethernet cables, three feet from the person you just eliminated.