
Interview with CS co-Creator Gooseman: Early CS years, hardships, and creating Alpha Response — Part One
Minh "Gooseman" Le, best known as the co-creator of the original Counter-Strike, is back with something new: Alpha Response, a PvE title that combines elements from old arcade games such as Time Crisis, his lesser famous FPS Tactical Intervention, and of course, CS.
Though Alpha Response entered early access in late 2024, Gooseman only recently began actively promoting it — now confident in the direction the game is heading. As part of this promotion, Gooseman sat down with Dust2.us' Leonardo Biazzi for an extended interview.
In this first part of an in-depth interview with Gooseman, he reflects on his journey from modding Half-Life to shaping the best tactical shooter ever made, shares what he's been up to since leaving Valve, explains why he's shifting gears to PvE, all while making the case for his new title Alpha Response.
The interview has been slightly edited for length and clarity.
Gooseman's first years as a game dev and creating CS
Can you talk about your overall career as a game dev and the creation of Counter-Strike? I think a lot of new CS players may not have heard of you. Also, tell us what you did after you stopped working for Valve in the 2000s.
I started my game development career in 1997, I guess. It was a pretty long time ago. I started making mods for a game called Doom. The original Doom 1 was very old, and it was like one of the very first FPS games released. And, it really changed the industry because it had like, modding tools that allowed people like me to create mods.
I used the modding tools to create a lot of levels for Doom. And then, after Doom was released, Quake came out, and I made a mod for it. So, in that mod, I did more than just create levels. I actually created characters and weapon models, and I also programmed some enemy AI. After this, I started to become better at creating mods.
And then, when Half-Life was released, I saw a good opportunity to make a game like Counter-Strike, because I've always wanted to make a game that kind of took place in a real, realistic setting. And I wanted to focus on counter-terrorism because I was interested in that theme.
Yes, I was going to ask you this. Where does all this counter-terrorism stuff come from?
It was mostly from playing video games like Rainbow Six, and also I read a lot of books about counter-terrorism. So, that's kind of how it started. To me, it felt like an exciting theme and I thought it would make for a very, very exciting game because you have two very distinct sides. And because of that, you can have some very interesting mission scenarios like hostage rescue or bomb defusal.
So, when I started working on Counter-Strike in 1999, I was joined by another person called Jess Cliffe. He basically helped to create the website, and he was very good at connecting with a lot of level designers who helped to create the levels for CS, because I wasn't able to create levels.

So, wait, you didn't do any level design back in the day?
I was too busy just programming the game and then creating the character and the weapon models. I didn't create any of the levels for Counter-Strike, all the levels were created by the community. People who were playing CS would submit levels to us, and then we would just choose the ones that we felt were the best.
Basically, I just focused on programming the game mechanics, the rules, the animations, and the character and weapon models. And then, everything else was just creating the mission or the levels. We were able to get the community to kind of submit all of the levels that they had made.
I remember that we played so many levels because when Counter-Strike became really popular, we had people submitting so many levels to us. It took a long time for us to play-test all of them and find the ones that were really good. I think we were testing like 100 levels a week at the busiest point.
But, the thing is, a lot of them were bad. A lot of them we'd just instantly disregard because they were terrible. I'd say that we spent a lot of time on like 10% of them, play-testing and reviewing, because they had a lot of potential.
"I think we were testing like 100 levels a week at the busiest point" - Minh "Gooseman" Le
And we had so many maps, right? I remember playing CS on a community server with like a 30-map rotation. I feel the maps were way more casual. By the way, when did Valve reach out to buy the mod?
Oh yeah, I remember maps like cs_siege or de_prodigy. I think de_prodigy was actually a good map, I enjoyed that one a lot. Anyways, there were so many really memorable maps, and Valve came to us in 2000, around Counter-Strike Beta 5.
They asked us if they could basically buy CS, and then they wanted to hire us to continue developing the game until we were finished with it. So, they hired us in 2001, I guess, and I continued to work on CS until 1.0.
After CS 1.0, I finished working on the game and I started to work on a prototype for a sequel, but that never came out.
Really? I think not a lot of people know this or remember that there were plans for a sequel early on.
So, it didn't come about much because I was building it on an engine, and it was the new Source engine, which wasn't finished. That engine was very buggy, and it was very difficult to use. I had a hard time creating this new prototype for Counter-Strike 2.
But anyway, I spent another five years at Valve until leaving in 2006. Besides that prototype for CS2, I also worked on Day of Defeat: Source, which is another mod for Half-Life but set in World War II and with re-spawning.
"I decided to leave Valve because I didn't really want to work on Counter-Strike anymore" - Minh "Gooseman" Le
Gooseman's life post-Valve: Working on different games and facing some difficulties
And why did you decide to leave Valve?
After I finished working on Day of Defeat, I decided to leave Valve because I didn't really want to work on Counter-Strike anymore. As a game developer, I wanted to create new interesting games, and I felt like CS was too difficult to work on because the players didn't want us to change the game at all.
They really wanted the game to just kind of stay the same, basically, and that's kind of why I left Valve. I just wanted to create a new game that had new features.
What did you do after leaving Valve?
So, from 2007 to 2012, I worked on a game called Tactical Intervention. I made this game with a small team in Korea. This turned out to be a very difficult process because a lot of the people that I worked with didn't really have much experience making games. It was a very small team and it was a very inexperienced team. We were trying to make a game to compete with CS:GO, but we just didn't have the resources to do that.
Tactical Intervention didn't really turn out to be a good game. It was kind of a failure. I left the project in 2012, and then I joined a company called Facepunch Studios. They're famous for Garry's Mod and they wanted me to work on a game called Rust, so I worked on it from 2012 to 2017, I guess. It was a great project, I really enjoyed working on it.

Rust is very different from the games you had worked on before, right? It's a survival game, after all.
Yes, so it wasn't exactly the type of game that I would play because it requires a lot of time. For example, it's not the kind of game that you can play for one hour, like Counter-Strike. You have to play it for like four or five hours to make some progress.
But anyway, it was a good project and I enjoyed my time there, but I was hired by Pearl Abyss, which is a Korean company based in Korea. They wanted me to work on a new project, which was kind of a sci-fi 3rd person shooter. I also really enjoyed working at Pearl Abyss, they treated me really well, and they had such a talented company.
Which game did you work on while you were at Pearl Abyss?
I worked on a project called Plan 8, which kind of looks like the Terminator movie. But, it didn't come out, actually. It was kind of put on hold, I think, because they wanted to focus on Crimson Desert and finish that game.
Two years ago, I decided to leave Pearl Abyss because my wife had some problems finding a job in Korea. She was an accountant in Canada and had a nice job over there, but she had a hard time finding a job in Korea, and she was becoming very depressed because of it.
We decided to move back to Canada so she could find a better job, and that's when I started working on Alpha Response.
Why is Gooseman working on Alpha Response and what makes the game interesting

How did this opportunity become available?
I met with a bunch of devs who I used to work with on Tactical Intervention, and some of them worked on games like Ghost Recon and Far Cry. A lot of them worked at Ubisoft, and some worked at Activision.
They asked me if I wanted to work on Alpha Response, which looked like Payday, but it also takes a lot of the elements from CS. So, it's kind of Payday mixed with CS because you get to play as the police and fight the terrorists. It also feels like CS because as you progress through the missions, you can buy better weapons like in CS.
"We want Alpha Response to be a bit more casual, not as hardcore as games like Ready or Not. We're targeting people who enjoy games like Payday or Left 4 Dead." - Minh "Gooseman" Le
For me, it felt like I was playing Left 4 Dead in a sense, because all of a sudden, you're swarmed with enemies.
Yes, that's one of our inspirations, L4D and Payday. But, we still need to balance out the enemy spawning because right now I think I think it's spawning a bit too many. We want to find the right balance, so we don't want to overwhelm new players because it can be very overwhelming.
That's why Alpha Response is in early access right now, we're just taking a lot of feedback from the players and just kind of balancing the enemy spawning, and improving the enemy AI.
We want Alpha Response to be a bit more casual, not as hardcore as games like Ready or Not. We're targeting people who enjoy games like Payday or L4D, hopefully, they can find some fun in this game.
This means you're back to working with counter-terrorism after all these years. You've kind of come full circle.
Yeah, I kind of convinced the team that I work with that 'Hey, let's add some counter-terrorism.' Originally, it was a game about police, so we had police in there. I just thought that maybe we can add some cool counter-terrorism stuff because it's kind of related. It was just an idea that I wanted to inject into the game and just make it feel more like Counter-Strike and make it feel more exciting.
This is the first PvE game you're working on, right?
Well, actually, the game I worked on when I was at Pearl Abyss, Plan 8, was a PvE game. But it was quite massive, so that one almost felt like The Division. It had a huge world, and it was more like an MMO, a massive RPG kind of game. But, Alpha Response is probably the first game that I worked on that is more like Payday and L4D.
"I felt like right now, the PvP space is quite crowded, and it's very difficult to come up with a new PvP product because it's very difficult to attract players to your game." - Minh "Le" Gooseman
That said, why did you decide to go for this genre instead of PvP? This is very curious to me, because you arguably created the best PvP FPS game of all time.
I felt like right now, the PvP space is quite crowded, and it's very difficult to come up with a new PvP product because it's very difficult to attract players to your game. It's very hard to convince someone to stop playing CS and play another PvP, unless your game is very polished and has a lot to offer.
PvP games also require a lot more. It probably requires a bigger team, and the PvP space is just more competitive. I felt that by making a PvE, I'd be targeting a different audience, someone who has more time to play PvE games. I feel like you can play PvE co-op shooters for maybe a few hours, maybe up to 10 or 20 years, and you can get enough of the game. You don't have to play them for like, months. They don't have to be a live service-type of game.

Oh yeah, definitely. Live service games typically require the players to truly grind them.
Yeah, what we're doing with Alpha Response doesn't ask the player to invest so much time into it. They can just play it on a more casual basis. Besides, when you work with PvP, you have to deal with a lot of hacking, and that requires a lot of resources, a big team, to name one, to properly deal with all the hackers.
But, the thing is, I do have a lot of ideas for another PvP game. Maybe one day I can explore those, but it would probably require a bigger team, for sure.
What do you aim to accomplish with Alpha Response based on what you just told me?
We want to find our own player base, maybe some CS players. I'm hoping some of them can give it a shot despite it not being PvP, and maybe enjoy it because it has some counter-terrorism. And I think the gunplay feels very similar to Tactical Intervention because I took a lot of experience from working on that game.
A lot of people who played TI told me the gunplay feels almost the same, and I think that's a good thing. I kind of enjoy how the guns felt in TI, and I really wanted to make the Alpha Response guns feel really similar.
I hope that players who really enjoy games like Payday, Ready or Not, or Insurgency, can find some kind of value in our game as well. Some Ready or Not players told us that Alpha Response is 'too fast-paced,' and not as slow as Ready or Not. They weren't really used to how fast the action was in Alpha Response, so that's why we're trying to find a balance and trying to tone down the amount of enemies that spawn, and make the game more comfortable for players like that.
Would you say that the gunplay is the best thing in Alpha Response? I liked how tense the environment is and the extra pressure that the clock adds. I felt like my sessions were quite immersive in that aspect.
Yeah, that's one thing that we felt during our play-test as well. We really like how the missions can be very dynamic, because the enemies kind of come from different directions. And, every time you play the same mission, the enemies will come from a different area, so it's very hard to predict how the gun fights will occur. This forces you to really think and change your position
One thing that we really wanted to focus on with the enemies is that we didn't want to have enemies with just guns, we wanted to have enemies who throw grenades and enemies with shields like suicide bombers. We wanted to have a lot of different types of enemies because they force the player to react and change their tactics.
By having all these different enemy types, we wanted to create something like in Left 4 Dead, where all of these different enemies make you always change your positioning and re-adjust. In the early play-test, we had players who would just stay in one spot, camp, and kill all the enemies. We thought that was kind of boring.
Oh yeah, if you can predict where the enemies are coming from in every mission, it would get stale pretty fast.
Exactly, this is why we added these really fast dogs and the suicide bombers. The goal is to just try to make the enemies challenge the players, and make them react dynamically. Sometimes when I play Ready or Not, every time I play the same mission, it feels like I'm playing it the same way, and I just have to execute it better. But the way that I'm moving through the mission, it feels like it's the same. So it can be a bit repetitive.
We also have enemies that come in vehicles, and that make players react differently. It forces you to run and find some good cover because it just becomes a very dangerous event.

After playing Alpha Response, I was left with the impression that you were influenced by those old arcade games from the 90s. Did I assume correctly, or am I wrong here?
No, you're actually right. A lot of the art style and the game mechanics were probably influenced from my experience playing games like Time Crisis and Virtual Cop. I kind of enjoy having those moments where there are like five or six enemies popping up, and they force you to cover up and shoot.
When we designed the missions, we were kind of influenced by those arcade shooters like Time Crisis. So, it makes sense that players who played those games will probably remember them and be like 'Oh, this feels like Time Crisis.' We really enjoyed how kind of fast-paced those games felt.
When will Alpha Response be out of early access?
We've been in early access since October 2024, so it's been almost seven months. We feel like we're going to finish early access probably early 2026, I think. We're getting there because right now, the game has a lot of missions, almost 40. So, we do have a lot of good content.
We want to just keep improving the graphics, the levels, and the enemy AI a bit in some areas. People are also asking us to add an AI for teammates, like a companion, as they want to have someone following them when they play alone.
We also want to add a mission where it's all about driving a car, chasing other cars like in GTA, and having your teammates shoot from inside. Right now, the player only drives from one mission to the next, so it's quite short.
"I started talking about it a few months ago because we wanted to focus on fixing a lot of the bugs that we had early on. I didn't want to reveal it too early." - Minh "Gooseman" Le
Why did you wait some months to start talking about Alpha Response?
I think right now the game is in a pretty good spot, it's pretty stable and we don't have too many crashes. So, I want to do more marketing and try to raise more awareness so players can know about the game.
I started talking about it a few months ago because we wanted to focus on fixing a lot of the bugs that we had early on. I didn't want to reveal it too early. Now that the game is in a pretty good state, I think it's ready for us to reveal the game to a bigger audience.
Also, do you mind saying how many people are working on Alpha Response?
We have about eight people on it. At some point, we had maybe 15 people, but unfortunately, some of our team members had to leave to find other jobs.
Maybe that's more than CS2, you know? People joke all the time that only three or five people work on CS2.
[chuckles] Yeah, I mean, I don't know how many people work on CS2, but maybe they have like 40 or maybe 50 people. You know, I'm pretty happy with how CS2 has come about. I watch a lot of the competitive scene, and I've played the game. To me, it feels very polished.
I think the only thing that they really need to add is just add more agents, because right now, there are only a couple of agents that we can play with. I do think that they're working on it, but I think they just take their time. They want to make it good, and they really take their time with their stuff. I'm excited to see what they come up with.
And with that, we end the first part of our interview with Gooseman. We hope that you enjoyed the read, because in part two, we'll talk a lot more about CS2.
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