Michael Booth raconte à HomeLAN Fed comment il a été ammené à travailler pour VALVe afin de créer le bot officiel de Counter-Strike, distribué au départ avec la version bêta de CS 1.6. Chez VALVe, ils ont été très satisfaits de son travail (la communauté aussi, apparemment) et surtout, Scott Lynch (Chief Operating Officer) s'est tout de suite très bien entendu avec lui.

Over the next six months, I was in game-programmer heaven, pouring two decades of AI knowledge into the "Official Counter-Strike Bot". When the CS Bot went live in the 1.6 Steam Beta, it was a huge success. The very hard-to-please Counter-Strike community was having a lot of fun with the CS Bot.

À l'opposé, CS : CZ ne répondait pas aux attentes, n'étant pas "fun", c'est alors vers lui et son nouveau studios Turtle Rock qu'on s'est tourné (lequel a été créé après son départ de chez Electronic Arts).

During this time, CZ was being finalized. The unfortunate consensus-shown in a few early reviews and final play testing-was the game wasn't much fun. With the success of the CS Bot, Valve was comfortable with my capabilities as a game developer, and decided to "jump off the cliff" with me and see if Turtle Rock Studios could turn CZ around and make it fun - which I believe we did.

Et contrètement, ça donne quoi ?

Valve has an update planned to release prior to the launch of Condition Zero that will give the current CS community the code updates in CZ, so CZ and all CS players will be one, even more giant CS online community. In additions to various tweaks and fixes and insuring compatibility, the update will also include interface updates and other functionality enhancements. However, the new content and all single player gaming modes are exclusive to owners of CZ.

Pour plus d'info à ce sujet, c'est par ici.