Reading about Doom in a historical sense, I always find that there is a bigger absence of emphasis on the ability to modify the game than there should be. Doom not only revolutionized gaming and the FPS genre, it tore open the doors for game modifications. Projects like DeHackEd[1] allowed us meddling kids to start to see the possibilities of modifying our games at very fundamental levels. Sure, you could open a hex editor and edit Ultima VII to make your own maps, but Doom, DeHackEd and WAD editors meant you could, relatively easily, modify and share your creations.
Aliens TC[2]. The Energizer Bunny[3] mod. These were the beginnings of what would later become some of the most popular games that have ever come out for the PC. Being able modify a game and engine allowed for things like Counter-Strike[4] and Team Fortress[5]. Anyone else remember QTF or Beta 5.3? These humble beginnings of shared modifications grew into entire empires and created celebrities in the game development world. The gamers needed new heroes that weren't all caught up in ridiculously silly enterprises like Daikatana[6]. They needed cliffe[7] and goose[8]; independent developers working on something incredible for everyone to enjoy. From small teams to huge mega corporations and back again, game modification has had a lasting and incredible impact on the PC game market and will continue to for a long time.
We have Doom to thank for this. Now, where are my serial cables? I wanna do some multiplayer fragging.
Not just the mods, consider the tools as well. As far as I can recall id Software rarely released their own tools for content creation in the early days. Often because their tools were made to run on expensive industrial strength computers, especially in the Quake days. They only just described in various ways how to create content for their engines and/or released source code to their tools.
If the tools people didn't step up to create these things then the mod scene may not have turned out the way it did. This tool creation "scene" led to some interesting creations that the industry benefits from today. For example, we had Worldcraft until Valve hired the creator and made it into Hammer; which is still in use today.
This type of thing doesn't really exist as much today simply because most of the common engines are supplied with content creation tools out of the box. Part of me longs for the days of exploring new crazy ideas that was done back then. I knew a guy that designed his first few levels in Quake with notepad (three dimensional BSP node coordinates by hand!), graph paper, and the compile tools until editors starting showing up. To pat myself on the back I built the first Quake2 "unit" of levels (AFAIK) to be released and I did that by opening the compiled id BSP files in notepad and followed the trail of entities through the plain text. Those were fun days.
Aliens TC[2]. The Energizer Bunny[3] mod. These were the beginnings of what would later become some of the most popular games that have ever come out for the PC. Being able modify a game and engine allowed for things like Counter-Strike[4] and Team Fortress[5]. Anyone else remember QTF or Beta 5.3? These humble beginnings of shared modifications grew into entire empires and created celebrities in the game development world. The gamers needed new heroes that weren't all caught up in ridiculously silly enterprises like Daikatana[6]. They needed cliffe[7] and goose[8]; independent developers working on something incredible for everyone to enjoy. From small teams to huge mega corporations and back again, game modification has had a lasting and incredible impact on the PC game market and will continue to for a long time.
We have Doom to thank for this. Now, where are my serial cables? I wanna do some multiplayer fragging.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeHackEd
[2] http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Aliens_TC
[3] http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=68
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Strike
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jess_Cliffe
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minh_Le