The gaming industry underwent a major metamorphosis during the 1990s. Radical advancements in technology took place that pushed the industry to new heights and into previously unexplored spaces. One of those spaces was the creation and cultivation of modding communities. Self-expressive and sometimes even a little rule-breaking, those ’90s communities of game modders sowed the first seeds of what earlier people might not have recognized as a garden of gaming’s future. They laid the foundations for much of what we see and do in gaming today. Though many of the games that the modders of yesteryear played with have since faded into obscurity, the work they did lives on in more ways than you may realize.
When I first got into working on games, it was through Doom, which came out in 1993. It fundamentally changed my idea of a game as just something you play and turned it into something way more powerful. Doom was the first game where I saw there was an awesome amount of creative freedom. When the guys at id Software released the game, they also, shortly thereafter, put out all the Doom source code. It was a revolutionary idea. One of the reasons Doom was so successful is because players could modify it and, even better, they could create add-ons (or WADs) for the game.
One of my best memories of those times was coming home after school to download custom Doom WADs from websites like Doomworld and AOL Games, and later, those same WADs were also hosted on websites like “wadhost.com” and “doomwad.com.”
BBS is where it all started, in terms of getting new WADs, from a time just before the World Wide Web had their very own Doom WADs distributed to the public. You couldn’t call this time an eon (we only had around five years between the first release of Doom and the heyday of the World Wide Web), but new WADs within that time were the thing to have if you called yourself a Doom fan.
Doom is a very successful game, and it has kind of set the stage for a lot of what has happened since then, in that it has almost made the modding medium a respected part of the industry. “Quake” was the true killer app for 3D accelerator cards, but it was also the next evolution of modding from Doom, with a true 3D engine and a whole lot more power for the people who were modding. And what happened with “Quake” is that you got a totally new game that seemed to change every few months because of all the content the community pumped out for it.
The art of game modding has never been confined to one or two genres. When I was a kid, I saw that first-person shooters hosted robust modding communities and churned out content at a steady clip. But completely different kinds of games—like the real-time strategy ones I played for umpteen hours—were also pushing out boatloads of player-made goodies. Fans of the original Command & Conquer (which came out in 1995) and StarCraft (1998) cooked up all sorts of new missions, units, buildings, and maps after the titles went on sale. Many of my classmates were modders. I didn’t create anything myself, but I salivated over the possibilities.
In the 1990s, modding communities weren’t just a wellspring of fresh ideas for games; they were virtual petri dishes where the first flashes of game development took hold for the long haul. Many among the community were already forming the basic germs of clever design that lay down the core experience for their works. Some would hoist their makeshift reasoning into the lofty realms of ingenious mechanics, while others would shuffle their decks of bespoke assets into nifty well-made levels. The communities, in the plural, as Duke Nukem 3D’s community didn’t mandate the same specific modus operandi other games’ did—stretched the games into all sorts of weird and wonderful contortions.
The key characteristics of modding communities in the 1990s centered on camaraderie and a shared focus. These were online spaces full of friendship and project collaborations, often incisive and full of sizzling wit. These chatrooms and boards formed the basis of new groups of friends and companions in the most-socially-reclaimed act of videogaming. While the games themselves remained fairly locked into their own intents and spaces of play, the modders who broke them open and fiddled about in their entrails laid the act’s undertow.
The technical work of modding helped me understand how games are put together. I was partially raised by modders and machinima artists. I was one of the kids who was way, way too into The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. From my perch in a forum for would-be vampiric dark sorcerers, I learned what it meant for a game to be ripe for the taking with console commands, “rebalancing” patches, and other methods. I think, even now, that people too young to remember when command-line interfaces were game studios’ first modding tools will benefit from understanding what game studios’ second set of modding tools has to say about how games can be snapped apart and rebuilt.
It is impossible to deny the impact that modding has had on professional game development. Successful video game developers history is filled with game developers who began in the modding community. For instance, Counter-Strike, one of the most popular online shooters, was originally a mod for Half-Life.” The creators of the Counter-Strike mod for Half-Life did not just get good at modding, they got so good that they created a game that, for much of the last two decades, has been one of the world’s most popular online shooters. Similarly, the original creators of Dota and Dota 2, a phenomenon on the Massive Online Battle Arena scene, started as modders for Warcraft III.
Game design has also been significantly influenced by modding communities. Developers really started to pay attention to which of their games were being modded, and to what the modders were doing to them, around the turn of the millennium. But even as big a game as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was, Oblivion was never modded in such a wide-ranging way as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim—a virtual world that can feel like both a product of a real medieval history and a place under a sufficient variety of contemporary influences to seem quite fabulously, well, modded.
Modding communities had a profound effect on the 90s. They were dedicated to creating new content for old games. Players were their focus, and they created for them. Even Electronic Arts recognized that in 2010. “Content you can download for a game means excited players, who play your game and keep playing your game,” said Chip Lange. “Excited players can’t wait to find out what happens next, and here’s where we come in. A steady stream of new content is the Holy Grail for a games company.” And again: “For a company that seeks to engage its players in a steady stream of conversation, mods are a gateway to that golden world.”
The 1998 release of Half-Life by Valve is a shining example of a game which flourished owing to its modding community. The developers gave Half-Life robust and accessible modding tools. As associate creative director Chet Faliszek once explained, “If you have a great game that people love, and you give them the tools to do what they’d like in that world, then cool stuff can be made to happen.” Both the online community and PC World agree: Half-Life is a classic, and Counter-Strike, the most famous Half-Life mod, is a classic as well.
In 2002, Bethesda released The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, a title greatly served by a community rich in modifications. The toolset released with Morrowind was specifically designed to give players the express ability to bring unique, modded content into the game.
Although many of the popular games that paved the way for such a community took place in the ’90s, Morrowind learned from what was done before and did what it could to bring the experience into the new millennium. With pioneers like id and 3D Realms leading the first-person revolution, the ’90s made gaming personal in a way never seen before. Morrowind capitalized on that, delivering a distinct and grand experience that easily survived the onslaught of an ever-shorter gaming cycle.
The Quake series has enjoyed an extended lifespan, chiefly through modifications. Quake III Arena, which came out in 1999, is the installment probably most famous for its modding community. The reason was simple: the raw material was already high-quality stuff that could somersault along with your imagination, and the id Software multiplayer emphasis meant that you had a new generation of pioneers to push the envelope further. One of the most popular mods was Rocket Arena, which lived up to its name and made Q3A a test of skill in a way that’s still satisfying to those whom you might ask to show you their old screenshots. (And makes you wonder about the percentage of the A-Team you-know-what that didn’t make it into the mod’s ersatz Joe Satriani soundtrack.)
Mods were also a key part of the recipe behind the strategy games Warcraft III and StarCraft. Both games’ map editing and modding scenes were very active, and the content Warcraft and StarCraft fans produced on their own shifted the nature of those games’ fandom in not just quantity but also quality. Fans gave the game a longer life by keeping fresh content in circulation, making it live longer in the minds of anyone lured by it on the initial front of the box or the first wave of positive reviews. The content, in turn, opened the slim possibility that the game could make its way into the esports communities long before potential scene organization could approach the conversation. And it did.
Innovation, creativity, and community are the lasting impacts of 90s modding communities. Open development was a given; nearly anyone could open up a game, look at its insides, and harness the power of a commercial game engine for another purpose. Community collaboration was what separated modders from lone hackers, but during the era of dial-up Internet and BBS forums, reaching into a game’s insides and pulling out something fun was also part of what bound the multitude of online communities together. And when it came to player empowerment, few things carried as much weight as a mod—all the more so when those players were left without an online home.
The 90s modding communities’ chief boon was that they took game development and brought it into the realm of what was then known, in the positive sense, as “amateur” game development. They took the pure idea of the term “amateur” (a person who intensely loves what they’re doing even if they’re not being paid for it or seeking a career in what they’re doing) and allowed gamers to run with it by giving them a positive, charming, and sometimes absurd development territory. They then took what was once a “closed” development system (developers were the only ones really producing any content at all) and said to the gamers, “Hey, why aren’t you in the development act, too? You can be! You can own this development! You can make this world/make worlds!”
Today’s modding communities are very much keeping the spirit of freedom and MacGyver-like inventiveness of the 1990s alive within them. Now, with platforms like the Steam Workshop and Nexus Mods, it’s just a whole lot easier to play together on the half-built swing set that is a modded game.
In 2012, Skyrim was a game that tottered under the weight of its liberties. From then until now, it’s become the International Space Station of Games: every day someone’s adding a new node or module to it.
The tenets of modding have given early access games and open development models a significant boost. This is a situation where developers have a great deal of influence from their most dedicated fans, and in exchange for their service and monetary support, grow their games with the full faith and perseverance they can muster. This is a fanbase with the “right stuff” in terms of game creation; why wouldn’t developers want their most dedicated fans to be happy?
When I think back to my experiences with modding communities in the 1990s, I have a lot of appreciation and nostalgia. There was an era when the creativity, the collaboration, and the innovation that happened within those communities definitively shaped the events surrounding my gaming journey. The mods I played, the mods I created felt like so much more than just off-shoots of the games they were based on. They felt like fully-realized, passion-driven works in and of themselves.
It was supremely satisfying to be part of the modding community. The main reward lay in having the opportunity to bring visions to life and see others enjoy the fruits of that effort. For me, a big part of the experience was the support of other community members. For every rudimentary part I didn’t know how to disguise correctly, upgrades hardly imagined, someone in the community—and sometimes people outside the community, too—gave me the tools, guidance, and support I needed to help me fulfill a dream.
The gaming industry feels the deep and long-lasting influence of the communities of game modders that really got started in the 1990s. The ideas and even some of the games that have come about because of ’90s modding are staggering in their range and sheer number. Some of the most beloved PC games of all time, like 2000’s Deus Ex, got their start in the ’90s modding scene. And if you’ve been paying attention to some of the biggest PC games over the last five years, you’ll notice that the spirit of the ’90s is very much alive. Teams of thirtysomething people often run the biggest and most popular projects. Coincidence? We think not.
To sum up, modding communities in the 90s were a real tour de force. They changed the landscape of video games forever and pushed boundaries, while at the same time, they left an indelible mark on the charts of video game history. We can always hark back on that era, even venerate it, for what those modding communities accomplished. For people who really found themselves in the life and culture of video games in the 90s, the memory of what modders did will always hold a special place in their hearts. Being able to understand what a modder from the 90s felt like and what creativity meant to him or her will always make for some really interesting stories to tell about that gaming era.
