Once upon a time a Half-Life mod maker named Minh "Gooseman" Le launched the first version of his multiplayer mod Counter-Strike. The team based gameplay was something totally different than the normal deathmatch or capture the flag modes and its popularity grew and grew until Counter-Strike became far more popular to play than Half-Life. Half-Life's creators Valve bought the Counter-Strike mod and turned it into a full fledged commercial title. Counter-Strike is still one of the most popular games to play online 10 years after the first mod release.

While Le worked with Valve for a while (which apparently included some time on a canceled Counter-Strike sequel) he eventually decided to leave Valve to work on a totally original game. IGN now has the first brief preview of that game with the somewhat ungainly title Tactical Intervention. While there are apparently similarities between Counter-Strike and the new game (both are team-based shooters) there are new elements such as AI civilans that react to events and can be taken hostage. Rounds are also faster than in Counter-Strike (around two minutes on average). The game is expected to go into beta testing "soon" with a released planned for the end of 2009.

Update: 4Gamer.net has some new (and watermark lacking) screenshots from the game that we have reproduced here