Nationality Canadian Name Minh Le Other names Gooseman Role Programmer | Occupation Video game programmer Years active 1996-present | |
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Full Name () 27 June 1977 (age 38) Alma mater Simon Fraser University Known for Co-creator of Counter-Strike | ||
Education Simon Fraser University | ||
Minh Le
Minh Le (Vietnamese: Lê Minh, born June 27, 1977), also known by his online nickname Gooseman, is a Canadian video game programmer who co-created the popular Half-Life mod Counter-Strike with Jess Cliffe in 1999. He was later employed by Valve Corporation, the developers of Half-Life, and worked for 8 years in Korea on the multiplayer first-person shooter Tactical Intervention. He is currently 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.
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His nickname comes from Shane Gooseman, one of the main characters of 1980s cartoon series The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers.
Career
Le first 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. While he was working on the Action Quake 2 mod, he came up with the idea for Counter-Strike and became friends with AQ2's webmaster Jess Cliffe.
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 (he later graduated with a degree in computer science). He spent about 20 hours a week on making the mod, expending more effort on it than he did on his schoolwork, 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.
By the fourth beta version, Valve Corporation, the developer who created Half-Life, began assisting in the development of Counter-Strike. In 2000, Valve bought the rights to Counter-Strike and hired Le and Cliffe to work with them in Bellevue, Washington, USA 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.
After Counter-Strike 2 was shelved, Le left Valve to work on a project of his own. After two years working with a small team on this project, he then 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.
In October 2013, he joined Facepunch Studios, where he works on Rust.
Recognition
In 2003, a GameSpy editorial cited Minh Le as the most important reason Half-Life was still popular five years after it was released. IGN ranked Jess Cliffe and Minh Le as number 14 in their "Top 100 Game Creators of All Time" list.