Oswald Rant: What is a Counter-Strike Clone?

As we occasionally do on The 6th Floor, we get people other than myself who have an opinion and want to be heard. This special edition rant come from SID Level Designer, Tristian “Tub” Barrett. Just as I smacked back on a Counter-Strike article this week, Tub decided to follow suite and get some comments off his chest. Check out, “What is a Counter-Strike Clone?” I pose this question because it seems that every realism mod coming out is now being called a Counter-Strike (CS) clone. Where is the end of this line of thinking and why has it become common to label mods as CS Clones?

Well normally it’s best to take a look at the past for answers first. You’ll see that the same thing has happened before in the gaming industry in numerous genres, such as in the early fps days with “doom clones”. This came about by a bunch of copies that were far worse than the original doom, seeking to make money from one of the most successful games in PC history. The term “doom clone” basically ended with Duke3d, because it was, in many people’s eyes, a much better game than the original doom.

The Real Time Strategy (RTS) genre had the same problem when there was a large influx of low quality games, “C&C clones” after the success of Command and Conquer (C&C). This lasted while there was a large influx of poor quality titles.

In the Quake and Quake 2 days, a similar game with a lot of hype was called a “Quake killer”. I think that the noticeable change from an derogatory name such as a clone to a more appealing name is simply that the community actually wanted more quality games of that type and realized it was possible.

Now before I go into the current state of CS clones we should first determine what a CS clone is. It’s actually a little strange because the community seems to consider a mod to be a CS clone not for game play reasons, but for purely aesthetic reasons. For example if you made a mod in a futuristic environment, or even better if you changed all the CS graphics/models to futuristic ones would the mod be considered a CS clone? Probably not. If it was, it would be in a different way than the term currently implies.

So if the term “CS clone” isn’t based around game play it must be based on the sole reason that it’s environment is a realistic combat setting. That’s it. I don’t know about you, but that seems a little silly to me. So if you make a mod which is about modern day combat, you are a CS clone. Next time you read an interview with a team that’s making a realistic mod, if you see the question, “Are you a CS clone?” answered with a negative you know they are lying, because all realistic mods which aren’t CS (or Action Quake 2) are CS clones.

Okay, some people may think that the realism genre is very small, far too small for a large number of mods. But that is far from the truth. You just have to look at the movie industry to see that the narrowest genre, that of modern action movies is probably the one with the most titles. Or look at anime. The plot is basically the same in every show from a macro point of view. What interests people are other things; the art of the movie and the unique ways of telling the story. The fact the audience knows the basics of the movie doesn’t hinder, but in fact helps the audience become more involved.

Looking at the evidence it seems that the current crop of realism mods must be well below the standard of Counter-Strike. Why? Because as in the past the word clone is being used to say that the current mods are much poorer in comparison.

So when is the community going to realize that the realism genre is large enough for many different mods, all with their particular take on the genre, which will actually improve the community, not hinder it? Probably when a CS clone comes out that is better than CS itself, a “CS killer”. Watch out, it may not be a mod.

Tristan “Tub” Barrett