If anyone is to be believed, it should be him, because he has started mod projects that have gotten attention.

Modding is often touted as one of the best features of PC gaming. Mods are what keep games alive for up to a decade and a half. Many developers hire modders from their own community to become full-time game designers. But modders sometimes fear that publishers who are overly protective of their intellectual property will erase their hard work. Many companies have been slow to embrace the modding community that has grown up around their games.

Splash Damage worked with Bethesda on the highly mobile FPS Brink. It also helped Microsoft when it worked with The Coalition on Gears of War episodes; it helped 343 Industries develop Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Since 2020, it’s been a studio for China’s Tencent, after it acquired its parent company Leyou. However, the studio started its career with Quake mods. For example, Quake 3 Fortress is associated with them. The popularity of the team’s multiplayer maps attracted the attention of id Software, which allowed the team to officially work on the games they modded. And these former modders were given enough freedom to put their stamp on these long-running series. This is what former Splash Damage writer and designer Ed Stern told PCGamer.

“The industry’s neglect of the mod scene is just stupid. Modding is not only a vital way for bedroom developers to gain skills and experience, it’s also an ideal way for the industry to find and develop talent. It’s so short-sighted not to support it. Before I joined, Paul Wedgwood created Splash Damage out of the Quake III Fortress mod team, and that id Software-engineered multiplayer FPS shooter DNA ran right through it. Hell, the first three IPs we got to work on were Doom (Doom 3 multiplayer), Wolfenstein (Enemy Territory), and Quake (Enemy Territory: Quake Wars).

None of us had ever made a game before. It’s crazy. We had no idea how lucky we were. We weren’t really thinking in terms of high-end commercial IP at that point. It was more like ‘FFS, we get to make a real Quake game? In Bromley? The idea that we got to help define the canonical backstory of the Strogg and Quake still seems very strange. Id gave us a pretty free hand to play with one of their crown jewels, they were very generous creatively,” Stern said.

Someone should tell that to Take-Two and Nintendo…

Source: PCGamer