10 Weird Versions Of Iconic Games You Didn't Know Existed

Counter-Strike is one of gaming’s greatest grassroots success stories in some ways. Starting life as a fan-made mod of Half-Life, it proved to be so popular that its creators entered an agreement with Valve to sell the rights. The company would then go on to market it, produce sequels and so on.

One thing Valve decided to do was bring the game from the PC to the home console in 2003 with an overlooked Xbox port.

For one thing it’s overlooked for a good reason and that’s not necessarily its quality. Counter-Strike is a cornerstone of PC FPS titles, its fast moving mouse-and-keyboard gameplay setting a standard for multiplayer games on the Windows platform. Putting this on a console, and a controller of course, felt outright wrong to many fans.

For what it’s worth, Counter-Strike on Xbox worked surprisingly well, when its servers were live (and even then, the game included bots for offline play). Its development was troubled, with several teams all pitching in, and it shows. The high recoil of many weapons in the game, which works very well for correcting with mouse on PC, doesn’t translate on the twin-sticks.

However, it did have exclusive maps for a time and even had the radial weapon UI from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive about ten years early.