Minh Le

Who is Minh Le?

Minh Le, also known by his online nickname Gooseman, is a Vietnamese-Canadian computer game developer who co-created the popular Half-Life mod Counter-Strike with Jess Cliffe in 1999. He was later employed by Valve Software, the developers of Half-Life, and is currently working on the multiplayer first-person shooter Tactical Intervention. In the small-team games that he has worked on, Le has been a programmer, modeler, and designer.

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 called 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 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.