When Counter-Strike was in its beta phase, various patches were released, refining and improving the core gameplay. When development ended, the full game was finally released as version 1.0 on December 9, 2000. When compared to the retail game, these beta versions were tremendously different in terms of environments, graphics, and even gameplay. During this phase, many maps were included and ultimately discarded. The public beta began on June 19th, 1999 with Beta 1.0 and ended with the release of Beta 7.1 on September 13th, 2000.