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) Known for Co-creator of Counter-Strike | ||
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.

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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.