| Minh Le | |
| Birth Date: | 27 June 1977 |
| Birth Place: | Vietnam |
| Nationality: | Canadian |
| Other Names: | Gooseman |
| Occupation: | Video game programmer |
| Alma Mater: | Simon Fraser University |
| Years Active: | 1996-present |
| 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.[1] 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.[2]
Minh Le was born in Vietnam. In 1979, he and his parents left Vietnam on a boat and immigrated to Canada as refugees.[3]
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."[4]
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-Strikes spiritual predecessor.[5] [6] 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 2s 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 (he later graduated with a degree in computer science).[7] 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, the developer who created Half-Life, began assisting in the development of Counter-Strike.[8] 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.[9]
After Counter-Strike 2 was shelved, Le left Valve in 2006 to work on a project of his own. 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.[10]
In October 2013, he joined Facepunch Studios, where he worked on Rust.[11] He left Facepunch Studios in February 2018.[12]
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.[13]
In 2003, a GameSpy editorial cited Minh Le as the most important reason Half-Life was still popular five years after it was released.[14] IGN ranked Jess Cliffe and Minh Le as number 14 in their "Top 100 Game Creators of All Time" list.[15]
| 2000 | Counter-Strike | Designer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | Tactical Intervention | Designer | |
| 2013 | Rust | 3D Artist |