Having given ATI coupon holders, Condition Zero owners and LAN cafés the chance to try out a one-map beta version last month, Valve has now finally launched its Steam pre-purchase offers for Half-Life 2, and given fans who pre-order the game full access to a 'release version' of Counter-Strike: Source, featuring nine maps. In the end, the idea turned out to be so good that Valve also decided to remake Day of Defeat, Team Fortress Classic, the original Half-Life single-player and more besides in its new Source Engine, not only attracting nostalgic fans back to retread fondly remembered paths, and gathering new blood to the shiny old flag, but saving the Seattle-based developer the trouble of designing an original multiplayer component to tack on the end of Half-Life 2 at the same time. But it's easy to see how it's since established itself as Half-Life 2's chief multiplayer component given that the majority of people who own the original Half-Life and still go online with it choose to play Counter-Strike, why waste time and resources trying to reinvent the multiplayer wheel when you can just polish an unbroken concept and re-release it as a pre-order bonus? Go, go, go!
If asked, Valve will tell you that Counter-Strike: Source originally began life as an experiment, designed to demonstrate how easy it is to port Half-Life modifications to the Source Engine.
