| Galactic CafeĪs a student, Orr-like many other now-professional game developers-got his start modding Half-Life 2. 'Because when you think about some of Valve's biggest games in the world for PC back in the early 2000s, many of them had their start in the mod community: Team Fortress, Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat, to name a few.' The Stanley Parable is one of many games born of the Half-Life 2 modding community. 'I think Valve really understood the value of mods,' says Roy Orr, lead designer on the recent VR hit, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners. Valve Software, creator of Half-Life and founder of Steam, has historically had a particularly keen eye for clever mods, often going so far as to bring their creators on board as full-time employees. The first battle royale, the first MOBA, and the first auto chess game all started out using the assets of established titles, while altering their rules enough to create something meaningfully new. Some of gaming's dominant genres began life as modifications of existing games. Programmer John Carmack planned for this, storing the data for the game's art, levels, graphics and music in WAD ('Where's All the Data?') files that were accessible to anyone who purchased Doom, but separate from the game's underlying engine. Upon its release in 1993, Doom was immediately hacked apart and creatively reassembled by its demon-slaying legion of fans. For almost as long as there have been first-person shooters, there have been mods.

Half life 2 pc mods