8 Mods Better Than The Actual Game

Half-Life is one of the greatest and most influential video games of all time, but the very same can also be said for Counter-Strike, which started out as a 1999 multiplayer mod for the legendary FPS before being acquired by Valve and turned into an official product with the original creators' assistance.

Now to be clear, Half-Life and Counter-Strike are very different games at the top of their respective genres, but Counter-Strike became an outright, enduring phenomenon in ways that Half-Life itself simply didn't.

With its fiendishly simple team-based mayhem, ingenious level design, tactical focus, and highly communal nature, Counter-Strike is one of the most ludicrously addictive multiplayer games ever produced, in turn becoming one of the most long-lived eSports in gaming history.

While you can't deny the influence that Half-Life has had on gaming, Counter-Strike's pitch perfect gameplay loop continues to drive daily engagement, with Counter-Strike 2 regularly posting concurrent player counts of over 1.5 million on Steam.

Counter-Strike wouldn't exist without Half-Life, but this mod leaped off to capture far more player mindshare than the original FPS could've ever dreamed of.