Even games that swam against the current of tactical mil-sims had moved beyond the cartoony hup. “I was never a fan of the super-slow methodical pacing of tactical shooters such as Rainbow 6, and I felt that the ultra-fast movement of Unreal Tournament-slash-Quake was a bit too over the top, so I made the decision to just find a middle ground between the two genres,” Counter-Strike creator Minh Lee told me. “Oddly enough, the sound of players jumping never really crossed my mind at the time.” Lee created one mod prior to Counter-Strike called Navy SEALs, which was built with Quake’s software development kit and retained its jump sound; Counter-Strike, however, was built as a mod to Valve’s considerably less-macho Half-Life (though it bears mentioning that Half-Life was itself built an a heavily modified version of Quake’s engine). True to that down-the-middle approach, Lee created a game which exhibits some of the speed and bouncy, fantastical movement of an arena FPS, paired with the class-based characters and realistic weaponry of a tactical shooter. “Perhaps it is something that could have added an interesting meta to the game and made players more cautious of abusing the jump mechanic,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, once CS‘s player base grew to such a massive size, it was difficult changing the meta of the game, and eventually the core game mechanics became set in stone.”