Minh Le | |
|---|---|
| Born | June 27, 1977 |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Other names | Gooseman |
| Alma mater | Simon Fraser University |
| Occupation | Video game programmer |
| Years active | 1996-present |
| Employers |
|
| Known for | Co-creator of Counter-Strike |
Minh Le (Vietnamese: Lê Minh; born June 27, 1977), also known by his online nickname Gooseman, is a Vietnamese Canadian video game programmer who co-created the Half-Life mod Counter-Strike with Jess Cliffe in 1999 and started the Counter-Strike series.[2] He was later employed by Valve, the developers of Half-Life, and worked for 8 years in Korea on the multiplayer first-person shooter Tactical Intervention. He is a contractor on the multiplayer survival first-person shooter Rust. In the small-team games that he has worked on, Le has been a programmer, modeler, and designer.
His nickname comes from Shane Gooseman, one of the main characters of 1980s cartoon series The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers.[3]
Minh Le was born in Vietnam. In 1979, he and his parents left Vietnam on a boat and immigrated to Canada as refugees.[4]
Le attended Simon Fraser University from 1996 to 2001, graduating in 2001 with a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in Computing Science. His curriculum and electives were "focused mainly on computer graphics courses covering subjects such as compression algorithms, 3D animation techniques, image recognition."[5]
Le picked up id Software's Quake in 1996 and began playing with its software development kit, and after about a year he completed his first mod, Navy SEALs, Counter-Strike's spiritual predecessor.[6][7] While he was working on the Action Quake 2 mod, he came up with the idea for Counter-Strike and became friends with Action Quake 2's webmaster Jess Cliffe and Marcelo Dilay.
Le began work on Counter-Strike as a mod for Half-Life while he was in the middle of his fourth year at Simon Fraser University[7] (he later graduated with a degree in computer science).[8] He spent about 20 hours a week on making the mod, expending more effort on it than he did on his schoolwork,[6] and released the first beta version in June 1999. The "Counter-Strike Team" quickly produced several more beta releases in the following months as the game's popularity skyrocketed.[6]
By the fourth beta version, Valve, the developer who created Half-Life, began assisting in the development of Counter-Strike.[9] In 2000, Valve bought the rights to Counter-Strike and hired Le and Cliffe to work with them in Bellevue, Washington, where Le continued to work on Counter-Strike and related games. During this time he was developing Counter-Strike 2, however Valve eventually put this project on hold indefinitely.[10]
After Counter-Strike 2 was shelved, Le left Valve in 2006 to work on a project of his own.[10] After two years working with a small team on this project, he moved to South Korea in 2008 to work with a business named FIX Korea who provided funding for further development. Le's new game was later revealed to be Tactical Intervention, a game similar in style to Counter-Strike created with a modified version of Valve's Source engine.[11]
In October 2013, he joined Facepunch Studios, where he worked on Rust.[12] He left Facepunch Studios in February 2018.[13]
In March 2018, he joined Pearl Abyss to start working on a new project for the game studio that made the MMORPG Black Desert Online.[14]
In 2003, a GameSpy editorial cited Minh Le as the most important reason Half-Life was still popular five years after it was released.[15] IGN ranked Jess Cliffe and Minh Le as number 14 in their "Top 100 Game Creators of All Time" list.[16]
