Every time a shooting game has made you crouch before firing, you're following a rule invented in 1999 by a 21-year-old named Minh Le.
Le was in his final year at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, spending 20 hours a week on a mod for Half-Life. A mod uses an existing game's code as a base to build something new. He had already made mods for Quake, the dominant shooter of that era, where you could move sideways at full speed and still hit your target. Players could run, jump, and fire all at once, which made matches feel more like pinball than tactics. Le wanted the opposite.
His solution: the further you move, the wider your shots spread. Stand still and your bullets go where you aim. Crouch and they go even straighter. Walk, run, or jump, and your barrel might as well be pointing at the ceiling. Counter-Strike Beta 1.0 went live on June 19, 1999, and within months, players worldwide had one consistent habit: stop moving before you fire.
Valve noticed the mod was outperforming their own games. They acquired Counter-Strike in 2000 and released it officially that November. CS 1.6 arrived in September 2003 and peaked at nearly 320,000 active players at once in December 2007, per Steam. Every tactical shooter since then copied the same core mechanic: Valorant, Rainbow Six Siege, the crouch-and-fire rules in Call of Duty, all trace back to Le.
In real life, whether you crouch or stand barely changes a shotgun's spread. A standard 12-gauge patterns roughly 8 inches wide at 10 yards, growing to about 15 inches at 20 yards. Your stance mainly affects recoil control on the second shot, not where the first pellets go.
"1.74E2 CU" is scientific notation for 174, a joke number designed for comic effect. But the frustration it captures is real. Le built an artificial spread penalty, not a physics-based one. He just wanted people to stop running.
Average videogame shotgun