Some of the best-known games of the last thirty years were first made for nothing, by players, on top of somebody else’s game. Team Fortress, Counter-Strike and Dota all began as free mods, and all three ended up as Valve products, with their makers on Valve’s payroll. Behind those famous deals is a quieter pattern, followed by many more people: a teenager building levels for Doom or Quake, learning by doing, and turning up years later in a studio. Wireframe summed it up in 2018: from the mid-1990s “people were seeing that they could use modding as a route into actual development as well as using it as a creative/mucking about outlet”. It was never a safe route. As one modder who made the jump told the magazine, “Modding is no way to make a living – for now, at least.”
Fast facts
- First commissions: id Software paid Doom level designers to build Final Doom (1996)
- Mods bought outright: Team Fortress (Valve), Counter-Strike (Valve, 2000), Desert Combat (its makers, Trauma Studios, bought by DICE)
- Mod teams that became studios: Tripwire Interactive (Red Orchestra), Unknown Worlds (Natural Selection), The Chinese Room (Dear Esther)
- Contests: Epic’s “Make Something Unreal”, with prizes worth about $1 million in total
- Individuals: modders who later turned professional, from Dario Casali, hired by Valve, to Jon McKellan, who moved from graphic design to Creative Assembly
Before mods: players who built
Players were making content for games long before anyone called it modding, usually with tools the publisher put in the box. Wireframe listed some in 2022: Lode Runner, which “allowed the end user to design maps, save them to tape, and then load them into the official game”; Bill Budge’s Pinball Construction Set (1982); and Sensible Software’s Shoot-’Em-Up Construction Kit (1987), which let players make a shooter “without having to program a line of code”. These kits made a generation of players into designers, but they rarely led to jobs, because there was little sign that anyone in the industry was watching.
Doom: the first hires
Doom (1993) changed that. Its data sat in WAD files that players could replace with their own levels, and players wrote the editors themselves (see Modding). As Wireframe put it, “Like Lode Runner a decade earlier, DOOM helped turn a generation of gamers into amateur designers, and some of those amateur designers eventually turned professional.”
Dario Casali was one of the first. He told PC Zone in 1998 that he found the Doom Editing Utility on a magazine cover disk and “spent the whole night and the next day on the computer, just moving barrels and monsters about”. After he and his brother Milo released an episode online, id Software got in touch. “We were commissioned to build a full 32-level game,” he said, “and we had under three months to get it done.” Their levels became part of Final Doom, which shipped with two campaigns by mod teams. Dario was later flown to Seattle and hired by Valve as a designer on Half-Life.
Valve buys its mods
Valve made buying mods a habit. In Australia, Robin Walker and John Cook had built Team Fortress for Quake, a team game in which each player picked a class. It was downloaded, by Sierra’s count, 500,000 times. Valve’s Gabe Newell then “acquired their little company, its technology, and its founders, making them all part of Valve”, as Sierra’s InterAction magazine put it in 1999.
Counter-Strike, made by a university student, Minh Le, with Jess Cliffe, came out as a free Half-Life mod in June 1999. Le and Cliffe sold the rights to Valve in 2000. Le carried on working on the game, first under contract at another developer, Barking Dog, and then at Valve, and Cliffe became a full-time designer at Valve. The modder known as IceFrog, who had refined Defense of the Ancients, a custom map for Warcraft III, joined Valve in 2009 to make Dota 2, released in 2013. One of the map’s earlier authors, Guinsoo, went to Riot Games to help make League of Legends. Wireframe pointed out that a fan-made map for StarCraft had led, by that route, to two of the world’s biggest games.
Valve’s marketing director, Doug Lombardi, told Edge in 2007 that “more than half the company [on] the developer and art side has come out of the mod scene”. He listed Day of Defeat, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress and Portal: “they all came to us from smart, young people who were doing it already. The only smart thing we did was hire them.” Portal was the exception in that list, because it did not start as a mod. It grew from Narbacular Drop, a final-year student project at the DigiPen Institute of Technology, near Valve’s offices, and Valve hired seven of its students together. Kim Swift told Edge how it happened: “After about 15 minutes of us demoing the game, Gabe just offered us a job. We thought he was joking.”
Mod teams that became studios
Some teams skipped the job interview and became companies. Epic Games ran a contest for Unreal Tournament modders, “Make Something Unreal”, with prizes worth about $1 million in total. Red Orchestra, a mod set on the Eastern Front of the Second World War, won it in 2004 and took $50,000. Its makers, a group of modders spread around the world, formed Tripwire Interactive in 2005 and settled in Atlanta. Their president, John Gibson, told Edge that publishers offered them “really heinous deals”, so he asked Valve to sell the game on Steam instead: “We were the third game on Steam that wasn’t from Valve.” In its first week it sold ten times what Valve had estimated for the game’s whole life.
Others followed the same route:
- Unknown Worlds. Charlie Cleveland’s Natural Selection, a Half-Life mod that mixed first-person shooting with real-time strategy, became a company. For Natural Selection II it wrote its own engine, Spark, and it hired from its own community: Edge found an accountant, Hugh Jeremy, recruited as the studio’s press officer because of his passion for the game.
- The Chinese Room. Dan Pinchbeck’s Dear Esther began as a Half-Life mod in 2007. Rebuilt as a standalone game, it sold 50,000 copies in its first week in 2012 and won an award at that year’s Independent Games Festival.
- Trauma Studios. The makers of Desert Combat, a Battlefield 1942 mod, were bought by DICE, which closed the studio about a year later. Wireframe called it the story that “often springs to mind” when modders talk about the risks.
One career at a time
Most modders who turned professional did it alone, and often slowly. Jon McKellan grew up in the east end of Glasgow, typing in magazine listings with his father. “I was making DOOM mods when I was twelve, and getting really passionate about it,” he told Wireframe in 2022, “but then you talk to a teacher and they’re just [dismissive]. There were no university degrees back then that were useful to get into games.” He moved from graphic design into games at Creative Assembly, on Alien: Isolation, and then founded his own studio, No Code, whose Observation won a BAFTA.
Matt Peddlesden wrote telecoms and banking software by day and built trains for Microsoft Train Simulator by night. A publisher put his model of a British Deltic locomotive on the front of a retail add-on box, and in time he joined the team that became Dovetail Games, where he was a senior producer on Train Sim World. The small team behind the mod XCOM: The Long War was hired by Firaxis to make downloadable content for XCOM 2. Nick Pearce, an Australian legal adviser, spent 1,700 hours on The Forgotten City, a mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that was downloaded 1.8 million times, and then left his legal career to turn it into a standalone game.
Pearce described the gap between the two kinds of work: “When you make a mod, you’re cherry-picking all the fun stuff from game development.” Going professional added “a huge amount of serious, boring work on top of that, like starting and running a company, securing funding, budgeting, tax returns”. Peddlesden made the same point about money: “as a free modder you can spend three years making something that ten people will hugely enjoy”, while a commercial project has to balance its cost against its likely return.
Sources
- Wireframe issue 3, November 2018, pp. 18–23, “The route less travelled: when modders turn pro”: Final Doom; Nick Pearce and The Forgotten City; Matt Peddlesden; XCOM: The Long War; Aeon of Strife, Dota 2 and League of Legends; Trauma Studios; Tripwire; Natural Selection; Dear Esther.
- Wireframe issue 68, November 2022, p. 97: Lode Runner’s editor, Pinball Construction Set, Shoot-’Em-Up Construction Kit, DEU, and Jon McKellan’s route from Doom mods to Observation.
- Wireframe issue 67, October 2022, p. 71: Jon McKellan on growing up in Glasgow and making Doom mods at twelve.
- PC Zone issue 71, Christmas 1998, p. 74: interview with Dario Casali (DEU on a cover disk; Final Doom; hired by Valve).
- InterAction (Sierra), Spring 1999, pp. 48–49: Tom Chick, Team Fortress 2 preview (Walker and Cook, 500,000 downloads, the acquisition).
- Retro Gamer issue 119, October 2013, pp. 84–87, “The Making of: Counter-Strike”: Minh Le and Jess Cliffe, the sale to Valve in 2000, Barking Dog.
- Edge issue 225, March 2011, pp. 56–57: Dota 2 feature (Eul, Guinsoo and IceFrog).
- Edge issue 181, November 2007, p. 65: Doug Lombardi on Valve’s hires from the mod scene; Kim Swift on Narbacular Drop and joining Valve. Wireframe issue 1, November 2018, p. 25: Narbacular Drop as a DigiPen student project released in 2005.
- Computer Gaming World issue 233, December 2003, p. 130: Epic’s “million-dollar” Make Something Unreal contest. Giochi per il mio computer (Italy) issue 101, March 2005, p. 34: Red Orchestra’s $50,000 win. PC PowerPlay (Australia) issue 109, February 2005, p. 22: Red Orchestra as a contest winner.
- Edge issue 218, September 2010, p. 127: interview with John Gibson of Tripwire Interactive (founded 2005, Atlanta, Steam).
- Edge issue 245, October 2012, pp. 62–63: Natural Selection II, Charlie Cleveland and Hugh Jeremy.
- Edge issue 240, May 2012, p. 82: Dear Esther, the 2007 mod, 50,000 copies in the first week, and the Independent Games Festival award.