Most mods add something to a game: a level, a weapon, a new rule. A total conversion replaces it. PC Zone explained the idea to its readers at Christmas 1999: picture a game with its artificial intelligence routines and graphics functions kept, but its weapons, enemies, player models, sounds and textures all swapped “for shiny new ones”, and a new interface on top. “What you’ve imagined is a Total Conversion, or TC.” PC Gamer put it more briefly in 1997: “complete reworks of Quake that share only the 3D engine with the original”.
The name belongs to the Doom years, when fans turned id Software’s demons into the creatures from Aliens, but the idea is older, and total conversions went on to produce some of the best-known games of the following decades. See Modding for the wider story.
Fast facts
- What changes: levels, graphics, sounds and music, and often the rules; the engine stays.
- Early example: Castle Smurfenstein (1983), which Edge called “a popular total conversion” of the Apple II’s Castle Wolfenstein.
- Made the name: Aliens TC for Doom, released by Justin Fisher in December 1994.
- Became games: Team Fortress (Quake, 1996), Counter-Strike (Half-Life, 1999).
- Cost: new art, models and sounds, which took mod teams far more work than new maps.
Smurfs and aliens
Looking back in 2003, Edge traced the practice to Castle Smurfenstein, a version of the Apple II game Castle Wolfenstein in which “all the in-game characters and text” were swapped for “assets which related to a popular children’s television show of the period”. Wireframe dates it to 1983.
The term itself came with Doom. Because Doom kept its levels, graphics and sounds in WAD files that a player’s own files could override, a determined fan could replace almost all of them; Fabien Sanglard, who has studied the engine, notes that only the monsters’ behaviour and the map names were fixed in the program. “These mods were known as ‘Total Conversions’ (TCs),” he writes, and “the most notorious of them all was named Aliens Total Conversion.”
Justin Fisher released Aliens TC in December 1994 after a year’s work. Every demon became an alien, egg or facehugger, up to the alien queen. The player carried the film’s pulse rifle, grenade launcher and smart gun, the chainsaw became the “Caterpillar P-5000 Work Loader”, and the soundtrack used sound effects and digitised lines from the film. It also changed the pace. Its first level had no enemies in it at all, a long wait that built the film’s paranoia before anything attacked. Edge credited it with “stealth-based play years ahead of the rest of the industry”, and Wireframe remembered game shops running it in store “with staff acting near-enough as though this was an actual, proper game”. There was an irony in the choice: id had first planned to base Doom on Aliens itself before deciding against it to keep creative control.
Not every conversion was an amateur’s. Chex Quest (1996) was a Doom conversion with the violence taken out, given away on CD-ROM inside boxes of Chex cereal. Wireframe puts its cost at about $500,000 and calls it the moment “the money men knew the power present in modifying existing properties”.
Quake and Half-Life
Quake gave conversions a programming language, QuakeC, so their authors could change the rules as well as the look. PC Gamer was unimpressed by the first Quake TCs in August 1997, apart from an Aliens conversion “that Fox quickly put the kibosh on”, but promised “a new breed of TCs, many of them looking very special indeed”, including QuakeRally, a racing game built on the shooter.
Team Fortress was the Quake conversion that lasted. Robin Walker and John Cook released it in 1996, dividing players into classes with different weapons and abilities, and it was downloaded 500,000 times before Valve bought their company and brought them to Seattle. On Half-Life, Team Fortress Classic and Counter-Strike followed; Counter-Strike set a team of terrorists against a team of counter-terrorists and became, in Edge’s words, more played at its height “than the rest of the shooting games online combined”.
Half-Life also carried single-player conversions. Neil Manke of Black Widow Games, designer of the horror conversion They Hunger, told Edge that “it’s easier to create a successful singleplayer mod as opposed to a multiplayer mod”, listing “a high-quality storyline, impressive visuals, well-planned gameflow, original challenges” as the ingredients. Natural Selection, a Half-Life conversion that mixed the Aliens theme with strategy, was “downloaded over a million times”, Edge reported in 2003.
What it took
A new map needs a level editor. A total conversion needs everything else as well. PC Zone warned in 1999 that it was “one thing to bash together a new deathmatch level, it’s another to revise and repackage all the elements within it”: the designers needed 3D modelling and animation packages for new characters, and a working knowledge of the C programming language used by the Half-Life software development kit. Art was the hardest part. Edge found in 2003 that the weakness “especially required in total conversions” was producing original art and models, because professional 3D packages cost “somewhere in the region of £2,000 upwards”; free tools such as gmax began to close the gap, but only for games whose makers had licensed them.
A conversion also ran on someone else’s property, and the owners set the terms. When Valve opened its Half-Life development kit to everyone in 2000, Computer Gaming World noted that users would “still have to abide by an end-user license limiting how they can market their work”. Film studios could object too: PC Gamer’s aside about Fox and the Aliens conversion for Quake is one example. The conversions that became commercial games did so with the engine owner’s agreement. Valve bought Team Fortress and Counter-Strike, and Black Mesa, a remake of Half-Life rebuilt from scratch on Valve’s later Source engine, was “given Valve’s blessing to be released as a paid product on Steam”, as Wireframe put it.
Sources
- PC Zone issue 84, Christmas 1999, p. 30: what a total conversion is; Team Fortress Classic and Counter-Strike; the skills needed.
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 46, August 1997, p. 71: TCs as “complete reworks of Quake”; the Aliens Quake conversion; QuakeRally.
- Edge issue 126, August 2003, pp. 60–67: mod culture feature (Castle Smurfenstein; Neil Manke on They Hunger; art and gmax; “Mod crib notes” on Aliens, Team Fortress, Counter-Strike and Natural Selection).
- Wireframe issue 3, November 2018, pp. 18–21: Castle Smurfenstein in 1983; Aliens TC in shops; Chex Quest; Black Mesa “given Valve’s blessing to be released as a paid product on Steam”.
- Fabien Sanglard, Game Engine Black Book: DOOM (2018), section 4.2 (the abandoned Aliens plan) and section 5.8 (WAD overrides; Aliens TC, Justin Fisher, December 1994).
- InterAction (Sierra), Spring 1999, pp. 48–49: Team Fortress (1996, 500,000 downloads, Valve’s acquisition).
- Computer Gaming World issue 192, July 2000, “Inside Gaming” column: the Half-Life SDK released to all, under an end-user licence.
- Retro Gamer issue 119, October 2013, p. 87: Black Mesa rebuilt Half-Life from scratch on the Source engine.
- Digital Press issue 33, September 1997, p. 21: Chex Quest free in boxes of Chex cereal.