Before Counter-Strike there was Action Quake 2

Way back in 1999, Minh “Gooseman” Le and Jess “Cliffe” Cliffe released Counter-Strike, a mod for Valve’s Half-Life. Within a couple of years, Counter-Strike had become one of the most successful and popular multiplayer games of all time, and it’s popularity marked a shift in the first-person shooter genre towards more realistic settings, rather than the sci-fi fantasy of Quake and Unreal. Counter-Strike wasn’t the first semi-realistic shooter mod — they had been a simmering trend since the days of Doom. However, late 90s game technology allowed the trend to more effectively embrace realism mechanics, with details such as locational damage and higher polygon counts for more detailed weapon models. It was this era that saw the rise of one of Counter-Strike’s predecessors, and a mod that Counter-Strike creator Minh Le himself worked on. That mod was Action Quake 2.

John Woo meets Quake

Action Quake 2 appeared just under a year after the release of Quake II in December 1997. The mod was the work of a team of modders known as the A-Team, one of those modders being future Counter-Strike creator Minh Le. By early November 1998, the A-Team had released Action Quake 2, and by the end of November the mod had already caught the eye of id Software, who included it with their officially released Netpack 1 modpack. Action Quake 2 was a huge success, and continues to have a following today — q2servers.com lists several servers running the mod, and several of them are always populated.

One thing to highlight, however, is that Action Quake 2 is not Counter-Strike. AQ2 is still predominantly a deathmatch/arena shooter, with realism elements. Le stated that it was during his work on AQ2 when he met Jess Cliffe (the AQ2 webmaster) and the ideas for Counter-Strike’s unique round and objective based gameplay began to incubate. Despite the gameplay differences, the influence of AQ2 on Counter-Strike is undeniable. There is, of course, the fact that both mods employed a similar arsenal of weapons, but this could be said of most mods using a real-world arsenal. And then there are the similarities in game engine — the Half-Life engine was based on the Quake/Quake II engine, so it goes without saying that there would be similarities in physics, gameplay dynamics and aesthetic. The real influence of AQ2 is less obvious, however, and its an influence that you don’t quite notice until you play it. AQ2 has a “feel” to it that is difficult to describe, but conjures up feelings of it being a sort of proto-Counter-Strike. Game design being the incremental process it is, this is hardly surprising that Counter-Strike came from some of the minds behind AQ2.

Gameplay

Action Quake 2, as I previously mentioned, is primarily an arena shooter, where players duke it out on competitive multiplayer maps to get the highest number of kills.

Game mechanics are also not strictly realistic. As hinted at by the name of the mod, the aim of Action Quake 2 is to replicate action movies — so there is a pseudo-realism at play. AQ2 incorporates realism elements absent from Counter-Strike; if you get shot, you will bleed until you can bandage the wound, and injuries to limbs can adversely affect performance, such as a broken/injured leg slowing the character down. These elements add a great deal of tension to a fight — if you get hit and start bleeding, do you take time to bandage yourself, even if the action makes you vulnerable? Or will you try and take down your opponent before you bleed out, and hope that you have enough time afterwards to patch your wounds?

The Path not Taken

Action Quake 2 is an interesting case study in how timing and slight mechanical differences between games can often be the factor that makes or breaks them. AQ2 was followed up with a mod for Half-Life called, predictably, Action Half-Life, but it was nowhere near as popular as Counter-Strike. The Action series is great, but it attained the reach of its protegé, Counter-Strike, and many gamers have probably never heard of it.

I don’t think the A-Team did anything “wrong" from a game design point of view. The additional combat mechanics of bleeding and limb damage added some complexity that Counter-Strike lacks, and it could be this added complexity that lent itself to a slightly more niche crowd.

Then there is the timing factor. AQ2 released in late 1998, well and truly into the modern multiplayer era, but in those days, multiplayer growth was exponential, and with added growth came added convenience. Quake II, unlike Half-Life, relied on an external server browser like GameSpy, whereas Half-Life (and its many contemporaries) had server browsers integrated from the ground up. Combined with a huge jump in the popularity of multiplayer gaming each year and improvements in networking code and technologies, finding a low-latency game with lots of players was significantly easier for Counter-Strike than it had been for AQ2. Action Half-Life had a significant playerbase, but by then, Counter-Strike had established itself as the king of the multiplayer scene.

One has to wonder — if Action Quake 2 had been released only 12 months later, or Action Half-Life had gotten a 12 month start on Counter-Strike, would we still have seen things play out like they did? Personally, I still think Counter-Strike would have eventually come out on top — the diversity of game modes combined with the simplicity of picking it up and playing it was a winning combination. But the race might have been a bit tighter.

I want to reiterate that Action Quake 2 and Counter-Strike are different games, appealing to slightly different audiences. I played both quite regularly. But I think it’s also important to recognise that Action Quake 2 had a huge amount of influence over a series that has been an industry powerhouse for over 20 years now, and the industry might look very different had only a few minor details changed.

Action Quake 2 in 2021

Is it worth playing AQ2 in 2021? That depends. If you’re nostalgic for the golden era of late 90s PC gaming, and you can find a group of like-minded players, you can’t go wrong with having this one in the rotation, especially at a LAN party. If you decide to play online on one of the lingering servers, be prepared to get schooled by some hardened veterans that haven’t stopped playing for two decades.

If you haven’t got a nostalgic attachment, though, then it’s hard to recommend. So much of what Action Quake 2 innovated is now standard in many shooters, and all of them do it better. To the modern gamer, AQ2 will likely feel clunky and dated.

For modern gamers interested in exploring PC gaming history, it’s important to look past these limitations and view the game in the context of the time in which it was released. If you can do that, then it is a fascinating exercise is seeing how the industry we know today has been influenced in large parts by the late 90s modding scene. It is why it is so important that studios continue to support and nurture modders, as today’s mod is tomorrow’s golden goose.