MOD: Games of the Past

This isn't going to be a long post, but I'm putting this here as an amusement to myself and perhaps anyone else who's been modding a long time.

Remember programming in basic? LOGO? TURTLE? (god help us, turtle.) I never claimed to be a programmer, but I tend to tinker. I can't recall making anything terribly playable back then besides some really basic text adventure. Saving your work to cassette tape, knowing full well you'll never be able to retrieve it again... good times. Five inch disks were better, at least until you get the Disk Drive Chatter of Denial.

When did "modding" officially start, anyway? I suppose you could always hack your favorite game to your liking. There were programs like Game Genie that would let you change values in games. But when could you create content to share with other people? I'm not sure of the answer. I remember around the C64 era a lot of games came out with editors, so you could build your maps for Risk or whatever. I was fascinated with Adventure Construction Set, which essentially let you build a tile-style kind of RPG, much in the style of the first Ultimas. (I'd like to add that I'm now fond of the phrase "tile-style". I can see it appearing in Necro's next album.) The internet was still on the horizon at this point, so mass sharing of files was difficult.

Then around 1990 the internet started to bust out of it's crib. MUDs... oh God, MUDs. I spent way too much college time playing and creating MUDs, not to mention Nethack. Once our campus put nethack on the local vax network (was it vax? I'm having a block) many more hours were flushed away. I never did beat that damn game but I did have the highest score. Knowing nethack I probably died cutting my thumb on a tin can and getting tetanus.



Then Doom hit. I realize Wolfenstein came first but I never did play that one. Marathon might have as well, again my timeline is fuzzy. But I did have Doom, and it was a thing of beauty. I remember getting a WAD editor from somewhere and thus the level editing started. What a pain it was to be able to get hallways to overlap each other in the Z-axis. I did publically release a level pack for Doom, but I couldn't even tell you much about it at this point.

Since then, games and their editors have become more complex, at least depending on the game. 2D games are still fairly easy to use. Let's see... exactly a decade ago I was making Starcraft levels. The Selear campaign, if I recall. Strange how you don't realize how old some games are until you think about it... and then you don't want to, because that makes you realize how old.... gulp.