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.

Makes you feel old...

I'm not a fossil quite yet, but my consciousness in this life almost coincides with the birth of electronic gaming. I remember Pong. I remember those games at parks with the light rifles. The introduction of Boot Hill, Space Invaders, Star Castle, Battlezone. The shift from vector, to bitmap, to even laserdisc graphics in arcade games. The rise of electronic toys such as Merlin, Simon, and those awful black and white quartz games. The growing of computers, the Sinclair, the TRS80, The C64. The introduction of multigame consoles, the Atari2600, Intellivision and Colecovision. 256 colors to millions of colors. Raytracing. Rendering. Colored lighting. I've followed it all from the start.

What's to come? Some predicted holograms, others virtual reality. Some predicted large online worlds where people could congregate and explore, and they'd have been right. It's to be expected there will always be better graphics and better physics around the corner. Currently video games are more accessible than ever before.

This is both good and bad. It's great because you can get all the gaming goodness you want at home. It's bad because it signalled the death knell of the arcade, which could be social hangouts just as much as places to play games. I don't know if they can be revived in America- and that's a little sad.

Once Windows 95 set in, I was essentially a PC gamer. I seemed to get one console per generation; a Sega Genesis, a Nintendo64, a Playstation2. I never got many games for them though. I always preferred PC gaming.

Why? Likely because of the style of games I like- RPGs, FPSs, MMORPGs. These were all much better suited for a PC, with mouse, keyboard, and online connection. I also liked to create mods for games, and you can't do that anywhere else. If you take that out of the equation however, consoles may finally rule the roost. I know someone with a PS3, and it eliminates a lot of the advantages that a PC has. Online connectivity? Yup. Can use a keyboard? Yup. Latest graphics and sound, without need to mix and match components? Yup.

Consoles are output only however, you can't create on them, and that is why I will continue to use a PC. With the rate things are going, who knows how long that will last though...

You must gather your party before venturing forth.

Hello, world!

When deciding to make a blog page, many ideas swirl in your head. Topics to discuss, how to make a logical presentation, and in my case how to present my gaming files- or even which ones to present at all. Then you sit down with a blank canvas in front of you. What to do first? Although not highly functional, I always feel better with an introduction. Foundation, and then the bricks.

This blog comes out of some necessity. I keep, or kept, an online account of gaming mods that I create, and the space I was using has closed down. (Not like you'd ever read this Erik, but thanks for the many years of use!) It occurred to me that I didn't really need to keep so many mods online anymore, since games become obsolete in the manner of a few years. The current ones are usually posted on mod sites anyway, so by creating a blog I can present them formally and also speak about other gaming-related topics that interest me, such as card games, poker, etc. I have other creative interests such as music, and I know I'll probably link to it at some point, but my intention here is to focus on gaming.

When discussing mods that I have created, I'll add MOD to the title, just to make them easy to find. If the game is still relevant I'll include links when I can.