"So Minh and Valve agreed to part ways on good terms (he still keeps in touch with people there), and he started his own project soon afterwards. Then he promptly fell off the video gaming map. "I moved into my parents' basement since I had to save money," he recalled. "And for two years, I worked as much as I could." Minh moved to Vancouver and continued the new project with a small 5-man team. But things were difficult for him as he now had to come up with an entirely brand new game on his own, from coding to map-making, with no pre-existing game to rely on. Add in the fact that Minh didn't have a regular support staff to help him and the one-year project Minh envisioned died a horrible death.

Now over a year later, Tactical Intervention is nearly complete. For Minh it's been a labor of love, the game he wanted Counter-Strike to be but was never able to make happen or call his own. "I enjoyed Counter-Strike," Minh recalls, "but I wanted to have my own game. I was never able to put in all the cool features I wanted because the people who played Counter-Strike would [complain] about all the changes. They liked the game as it is."

On the surface the new game very much resembles Counter-Strike in appearance; both games run off the same engine so the graphics haven't progressed much. "Graphics-wise, I know it's not the best," said Minh. But the game is definitely his baby as he is finally able to introduce some of the elements he wanted to put in Counter-Strike into TI.

"I hated how powerful snipers were in Counter-Strike," said Minh. "They really unbalanced the game." With players camping at sniping points around the map, Minh remembers playing and watching games that took way too long, especially for players who died early and had to watch from the sidelines. TI resolves the waiting issue in a simple manner: make the rounds faster. "I wanted to make TI faster so people aren't waiting around as much between rounds," explained Minh. "The average round should be two minutes, maybe less, so people aren't waiting around as much."

Tactical Intervention will be going into beta-testing soon and is likely to be released by the end of this year."