In analyzing user-generated content in the gaming industry it is first important to map its evolution in order to understand why it has been successful.
The original mods can be traced as far back as the early 80’s with a total conversion called Castle Smurfenstein being widely considered the first. This mod was a parody of Castle Wolfenstien – a classic arcade style shooter designed for Apple II.
Castle Wolfenstein was a terribly fun and addicting game but something was missing. Nazis just didn’t seem that threatening to a suburban high-school kid in the early 80s. Smurfs. That was the real threat now.
So we changed the game. The Nazi guards became Smurfs, the mostly unintelligible German voices became mostly unintelligible Smurf voices. We created a new title screen, new ending screen, new opening narration, and an opening theme, and changed the setting from Germany to Canada. (I’m still not too sure why we had this Canadian fixation, but then growing up near Detroit does expose one to a fair degree of Canadian culture.)
The conversion was pretty straightforward, needing only a paint program, a sector editor, and Muse Software’s very own ‘the Voice’ to add in the new audio. I think we did this during the summer of 1983 but I’m not completely sure. (http://www.evl.uic.edu/aej/smurf.html)
The game also had an interesting opening theme
This juxtaposition of pop cultural artefacts continued throughout modding history however it wasn’t untill nearly a decade later that the modding community would gain real momentum. Doom (developed by id Software) exploded into the gaming scene in the early 90’s and like Wolfenstein 3D and Duke Nukem became one of the most prominent first person shooters of the decade. What id Software soon noticed was the community of gamers generating new content and tools that would extend the lifespan of the game, even resulting in the retail release of Final Doom – a package containing two amateur built missions.(http://www.nag.co.za/2009/03/a-really-brief-history-of-game-modding)
Before the success of Doom – ‘Apogee (which published id’s first games), Miller and his “Wolf3D” developers watched astounded as mods “actually helped extend the life of a game by providing free additional content for players to explore.”… “So by the time ‘Doom’ rolled around,” id co-founder Tom Hall says, “we really wanted to enable the user to make their own content, to make that easy as possible. [John] Carmack’s always had the Berkeley-like ‘Information should be free’ mantra.”… (http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2002/04/16/modding)
The relationship between game developers and modders has always been one of good will. This began early on with id Software and Apogee only asking modders to create content for the commercial release of games and not the freeware versions. Not only did most abide by this but often modders would create mods that would only work on registered versions. This self-policing would become the foundation of modding culture as it allows software companies to be commercially successful and able to provide modding tools and affordances. Gamers were and generally are happy to pay their dues to developers like id and Apogee for the freedom to ‘mix things up‘.
Soon it was apparent that modding was not only inevitable but would eventually influence the very nature of game play. For instance, Justin Fisher’s “Aliens Total Conversion” for “Doom” and “Doom II,” says Rich Carlson, an independent developer and veteran level designer, changed the way “Doom” was played “by focusing on stealth rather than frontal assaults … [It] presaged the kinds of 3D action games and mods we play now — by about eight years!” (http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2002/04/16/modding)
One of the first big modding tool packages designed by the developers themselves was Tim Sweeney’s UnrealEd which lead this era of gaming where the line between producer and consumer is completely blurred and modding is the norm. To the point where large companies like Valve have absorbed talented modders into the professional realm of developing.
FROM PACMAN TO POOL 