In 2001, when the Counter-Strike scene was still blossoming, Martin Rosenbæk decided to provide a needed service to the gamers out there. With his band of merry men Martin created and started HLTV.org. Since then we have grown to become the largest provider of HLTV servers for the competitive Counter-Strike scene.

The original concept for HLTV.org was a central location to gather HLTV ips. HLTV was everywhere, Counter-Strike games were being broadcasted everyday, but no one was tuning in. Our original purpose was distributing the HLTV ips, all we had at our disposal was our IRC channel topic that we used to list all ips, this however caused much panic and mayhem whenever it magically disappeared.

The dedicated team of a few volunteers was just about sufficient, everything had to be done by hand, the updating, the information gathering, simply everything. But interest soon picked up exponentially, we had to expand to cater for the needs of the people.

Soon more people joined the ranks of HLTV.org, along with them came 2 new servers on a 10mbit connection hosted in Sweden. This was to become the starting point of what you see now at HLTV.org. Bookings for our HLTV servers started slow, bookings primarily coming from our website with information emailed to us, this however picked up very quickly. HLTV.org was the new word on the street, the place to go so you too could broadcast your own matches out for the world to see.

The new team brought along the expertise required to keep HLTV.org above the rest. With our website now accepting bookings, everything being done by hand just wasn't quick enough to deal with the sheer amount of demand created. Our team worked hard together to create the treasure trove that it is our current website, the innovation that was the automatic booking and HLTV control system. This allowed our team to dedicate their efforts into greater things for HLTV.org, with the stress of processing information by hand now completely accomplished by our website.

With Counter-Strike expanding further more, our servers needed to follow suit. In 2003 Danish server company Clanhost.dk provided HLTV.org with the required servers to broaden our infamous service. During this period we dedicated a lot of effort into major worldwide tournaments such as the CPL and ESWC, broadcasting continuously throughout the respectable events. However our sponsorship was to cease at the end of 2004. HLTV.org had to look elsewhere. Then on Christmas eve, we got what we were hoping for.

In stepped Boomtown.net, one of the biggest server providers in Europe, they provided us with everything. This was more than we could have asked for. This gave us the edge that we needed, and with our newly developed Geomaster tool, which allowed users to connect to their nearest server instantly without the need of any intervention, HLTV.org was completely back on track.

Unfortunately, only one year after the partnership with Boomtown had been announced, Boomtown decided to break it off, in preparation for the upcoming sale of their parent company TDC.

Quite unhappy with the situation we announced on the front-page that we, yet again, were looking for a main sponsor. Unhappy, because with the move to Boomtown we had been working very hard building a new site, so it all seemed a bit wasted. Things quickly started to become brighter as the offers started to arrive in our inboxes. That and the wide positive feedback from the community encouraged us to keep working for a new and better HLTV.org.

The new main sponsor turned out to be GameGuard.no, a Norwegian ISP and game server provider. Back on track! With even more server capacity than ever and renewed energy, we decided that it was time to expand the site. New features were added including: Betting, Discussion of matches, Galleries, Support for CS:S and even more are planned.

Since the days of our original 2 servers, HLTV has developed into a major part of the Counter-Strike scene. We currently have over 40,000 registered users, hosted approximately 600,000 games, and recording demos to just over 500,000 of those. But here at HLTV.org, nothing has changed in our respect for the community. We still stand by our promise to deliver the best possible service to you, the gamer.