Valve dedicates an agent to a real life hero
One of the new agents from the Operation Riptide has been dedicated to French martyr, Arnaud Beltrame.
On Wednesday, Valve dropped one of its most significant and impactful updates to CS:GO in a long time. The newly released Operation Riptide consists of a series of remarkable changes to the competitive scene, with one of them being that players now can drop grenades to teammates.
In this update, Valve has dedicated one of the new agents to a real life French martyr, Arnaud Beltrame. Agent Gendarmerie Nationale Officer Jacques Beltram is the CS:GO agent that is based on the Frenchman, who was a lieutenant colonel in the French Nationale Gendarmerie. During the March 2018 terrorist attack on a supermarket in the southern town of Trébes, France, Arnaud Beltrame had negotiated the release of all the hostages and switched places with the last one. After a three-hour standoff with the terrorist, the French martyr died after getting stabbed and shot by the terrorist.
The in-game character’s part of description also matches the real life heroics of the Frenchman, along with the fact that he was awarded the Legion of Honour, which is the highest French order or merit. Even though Valve does not outright mention it anywhere specifically, the community always tends to find out what the developers from Valve want to convey.
Valve has previously dedicated another one of their in-game agents named SWAT | Cmdr. Mae “Dead Cold” Jamison to Mae C. Jemison. She was the first African American female astronaut to be admitted into NASA’s training program and went to space a couple of years after.
Valve clearly takes an effort to pay tribute to people they admire and respect in their own way. The developers also paid tribute to the late basketball player Kobe Bryant by creating a weapon loadout called “Kobe!” within the Retake game mode.
