DM-Blockland (Unreal Tournament 3)

It can turn Unreal Tournament into a sky-bound cel-shaded adventure, the tropical thunder of Far Cry into Fritz Lang-inspired art cinema, a gun into a blade, a deathmatch into a platform game, and a bedroom hobby into a lifelong career. Yet, 17 years after The Bard’s Tale Construction Set and almost a decade after Quake III Arena, there’s one image the mod community still has trouble changing – its own.

To some, the ‘art’ of carving one game (or one system) out of another is nothing less than a crucible for tomorrow’s triple-A hits, building the talent, vision and prototypes that big-name publishers need. To others, it ranks alongside recreational benchmarking as just another of PC gaming’s peculiar habits. Despite the commercial graduation of teams and the interest of two million monthly visitors to Mod DB, the scene’s largest online portal, old stereotypes remain: untextured gun models in the backs of magazines; ‘total conversions’ that convert, totally, the knitwear on a terrorist’s head; cyberpunk ‘dystopias’ that, by some kind of mirror-shade-overflow error, crash your computer.

“Like any user-generated content, it’s the signal-to-noise ratio,” explains Unreal Tournament producer Jeff Morris. “For example, we spend a lot of time on the first 15 minutes of a game, that first play session that’s gonna determine whether there’s a second or a third. People who get into mods have the same threshold. If the first five mods they download crash their machine, look stupid or aren’t fun, they’re gonna say: ‘These kids are just screwing around’. I understand that, but I think those people just got burned – they didn’t know how to read the topography of the community and know, for instance, that there’s a site that rates every map. Maybe they browsed to a forum and clicked the first five links that they saw.”

There are, at present, over 4,000 mods hosted on Mod DB, half considered ‘finished’, half not, covering everything from the humble ‘mutator’ (a clutch of scripts that tweaks existing features) to maps and total conversions. For founder Scott Reismanis, who built the site as Mod Realm in 1998, Morris touches a nerve. The mod scene, obsessed as it is with the language of alphas and betas, has found its own move to ‘version 2.0’ particularly hard. “These days, hundreds of games have SDKs, and hundreds of sites cover the scene, not to mention a billion blogs,” he says. “To me, that’s information overload. Everything wants everyone’s attention now. It’s hard to get anyone interested beyond the couple of minutes it takes to watch a web video, which makes us more important than ever before.”


Eternal Silence (Half-Life 2)

Part of the problem, believes Morris and his colleagues at Epic Games, is the lack not just of filtering for the worst mods, but platforms for the best. To this end Unreal Tournament, the virtual deathmatch, has spawned some very real champions through its Make Something Unreal contest, now in its third year. Morris admits: “Half the mods probably aren’t worth playing, and it’s really hard to know which ones aren’t what we call ‘DM-Cube’ – you know, just a basic box map but with lights, geometry and a sexy name. So that’s where we can help.”