Minh Le

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Minh Le (Westernised^{[citation needed]} from Vietnamese Lê Minh, born 1978), also known by his online nickname Gooseman, is a Vietnamese-Canadian computer game developer who created the popular Half-Life mod Counter-Strike with Jess Cliffe in 1999.

Lê first picked up Quake in 1996 and began playing with the SDK. With it he created his first mod, called Navy SEALs. While he was working on the Action Quake 2 mod, he came up with the idea for Counter-Strike and became friends with AQ2's webmaster Jess Cliffe.

Gooseman began work on Counter-Strike while he was in the middle of his fourth year at Simon Fraser University (he later graduated with a degree in computer science). Lê spent about 20 hours a week on making the mod, expending more effort on it than he did on his schoolwork, and beta 1.0 was released in June 1999.

Gooseman joined Valve Software in Bellevue, Washington, USA in 2000 where he continued to work on Counter-Strike and related games. Lê's current status with Valve is not publicly known, since he is not listed as an employee on the company's team page, nor is he among those credited for Counter-Strike: Source, five years after the original Counter-Strike.

In 2003, a GameSpy editorial ranked Minh Le as the most important reason Half-Life was still popular five years after it was released. ^[1]