The Influence of Modding

The gaming industry has evolved over the years. With different genres for different people, it's no surprise that the industry is heavily diverse. One of the things that helps keep these games alive are mods. Mods can vary from adding new things, fixing already existing content, or overall make the game look better. Two of the most popular game franchises in the gaming industry, Counter Strike, and DoTA all pay their tributes to mods.

Counter Strike is a beloved series and a long lasting one. Starting in 1999, and still prominent to this day, it's no surprise that Valve's fabled FPS is a well-respected franchise. However, Counter Strike was not made on original software. It started as a mod of Half-Life back in 1999. Even so, Half-Life's engine, Gold Source, is a heavily modded version of the Quake engine. It was made by 2 college students, who after creating Counter Strike, got the attention of Valve software, the developers of Half-Life, took them in and hired them as full-time developers for Valve.

Due to the amount of success of mods, a lot of games started supporting mods, mainly real time strategy games. One of them being WarCraft. It was due to this one franchise that a certain mod not only helped shape the gaming industry as we know it, but completely birthed a new genre of games titled “Multiplayer Online Battle Arena” or MOBA. That certain mod being Defense of the Ancients, or more commonly known as DoTA. It was in 2009 that Valve software contacted the creator of the mod to work on a sequel DoTA 2.