Knives in Counter-Strike 2 are no longer unusual today, even if they remain expensive. Gabe himself created a knife from Counter-Strike 2.
How did Valve fare in 2003? Long before Valve was a globally successful video game company, the company was in deep crisis in 2003. In the early 2000s, the company was involved in a legal dispute with the Vivendi company. It was about the rights of Half-Life and the sale of the Counter-Strike mod for Half-Life in Asia without Valve’s consent.
The legal battle was expensive and so the company tried to find a publisher for Counter-Strike 2 in order to obtain new financing, otherwise there was a risk of bankruptcy at the time. After a deal fell through shortly before completion, then-COO Scott Lynch did everything he could to find a salvage deal.
He succeeded shortly beforehand and with the new funds, Valve was able to see the legal dispute through to the end. Ultimately, they were given full control of their games. The Counter-Strike 2 deal was pivotal to CS2’s first knife, made by none other than Gabe Newell himself.
You can see the trailer for Counter-Strike 2 here:
Counter-Strike 2: Valve really impresses again with its launch trailer
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A knife to celebrate the deal
What does litigation have to do with a CS2 knife? Valve’s boss Gabe Newell is a fan of knives, as he has proven several times in the past (via www.geekwire.com). As early as 2003, he enjoyed crafting blades and engraving them as gifts, for example.
To successfully conclude the deal, the Valve boss also forged a knife. It says “Counter-Strike 2” engraved on it. The knife not only has the lettering like on the game’s logo, but also the man who is carrying a weapon.
The knife, which was intended as a gift on the occasion of the deal, has not been lost to this day. It is featured in the documentary (via YouTube) celebrating Half-Life’s 20th anniversary. You can see it here:
Why did it take the team 20 years to release CS2? What the developers thought of as Counter-Strike 2 at the time was later called Counter-Strike Source. The actual Counter-Strike 2 was released in 2004. It wasn’t until September 2023 that Valve finally released Counter-Strike 2 as a direct successor to Counter-Strike Global Offensive.
Later, the publisher who saved Valve with the deal also decided to back out. Thanks to the good sales of Half-Life 2, the company was able to quickly regain the rights to Counter-Strike 2 this time. This was the only way they were able to rename the game in the first place, which also contributed to the fact that CS2 wasn’t released in 2004 after all. In the case of a CS2 streamer, however, there was no last-second rescue: German Twitch streamer founds a team in CS2, but fails shortly before the hoped-for goal