Tactical Intervention

» see tacticalintervention.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Every internet cafe I walked into in Turkey between 2002 and 2005 was running Counter-Strike on most of its machines, with the sound of the same two maps coming off twenty screens at once. In all that time I never once wondered who had made it. Mods arrived from nowhere and belonged to everybody, so there was nobody to ask after.

Minh Le made it, with Jess Cliffe. He released the first beta in June 1999, Valve bought the rights and hired them both in 2000, and he stayed there until 2006 doing level and model work. Then he left to build his own game, and in 2008 he moved to South Korea to do it at a company called FIX Korea. That game was Tactical Intervention and it took five more years to appear.

It arrived on 28 March 2013 as a free-to-play shooter on a modified Source engine, which is to say it looked like Counter-Strike and moved like it. The reviews were brutal in a specific way: not that it was broken, but that it had been overtaken. Eurogamer gave it 4 out of 10 and Destructoid 4.5. The Metacritic average settled at 47 from seven reviews, fourteen years after the beta that made its designer famous.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the things that were in it ~

The design was not shy. One mode put you in cars on a highway, shooting out of windows at a convoy, which no competitor was doing and which the engine was never built for. Hostage rescue came back from Counter-Strike with the hostages given enough intelligence to follow you around. There was a grappling hook for coming through upper windows.

And there were dogs. You could buy a dog, and the dog would chase down and hold a player while you dealt with the rest of the room. It is the one feature everybody who played it remembers. The engine underneath was the one Half-Life 2 had shipped on in 2004.

~ the first shutdown ~

OGPlanet published it in North America and ran the open beta from 14 to 25 March 2013 before launching on the 28th. On 10 June 2013 the same publisher shut the servers down, citing a lack of player involvement. That is ten weeks from release to closure, and most of the coverage the game ever got was written inside that window. For a few months in the middle of 2013 it did not exist anywhere.

~ the four years after ~

RNTS Games picked it up and put it back on Steam on 3 October 2013, worldwide this time, and kept it running on a budget that the later posts describe without much decoration. On 2 October 2017, one day short of four years after that relaunch, the announcement went up: "With great sadness, I must inform you that Tactical Intervention is shutting down." The European server host had stopped hosting and there was no money to move anywhere else.

Two crowdfunding attempts for a version called Tactical Intervention: Reloaded had already failed that year, and a third platform attempt in January 2018 failed too. The game came off Steam in early December 2017. By April 2020 the people still around had converted some of the assets to Unreal Engine 4 and given them to whoever wanted them, which is what the end of a shooter looks like when nobody owns anything worth selling.

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