Rob Smolders

Rob Smolders
Born	April 5, 1984
Nationality	Dutch
Title(s)	Level designer
Alias	Sm0lderS

Rob Smolders is a level designer for Counter-Strike. He is the creator of Rotterdam.

Biography

Rob Smolders started level design at the age of 11 with Duke Nukem 3D. He eventually moved on to the Quake series and then to level design for Half-Life. Smolders got introduced to Counter-Strike when his friend had downloaded the Beta 2 release.

Rob got hooked by Counter-Strike around the release of Beta 3 and picked up level design around the release of Beta 4. His initial attempts at level design were not that successful and he never finished these maps. The first map he finished was Robbery which he was hoping would be included in Counter-Strike 1.0, but it didn't get included at the time as he sent it in too late. However when he finished his second map, Rotterdam, and showed it to Minh Le, he liked it so much that it was included in Counter-Strike 1.1.

For Counter-Strike 1.3, Smolders rebuilt both his maps in the hopes that the updated Rotterdam would get a better reception by the community and that Robbery would become an official map. However, Jess Cliffe didn't want to take another look at the map Robbery since he had already seen it when Smolders tried to get it included into Counter-Strike 1.0. Rotterdam was also removed to make room for Torn, thus neither of his maps were included in the new version.

Following his venture into Counter-Strike mapping, he was working on single-player maps. He also contributed a few maps to another Half-Life mod, The Specialists.

Professionally, Smolders worked as a level designer for the company Eximion in 2009. Since then, he has been working in web development.

List of maps

Official maps

Map name	Game(s)	Responsibilities	Year
Rotterdam		Level designer	2001

Custom maps

Map name	Game(s)	Responsibilities	Year
Overrun (de)		Level designer	2000
Robbery (cs)		Level designer	2001