We may earn a commission when you buy through links in our articles. Learn more.

Happy birthday ModDB! Spiritual home of modding turns ten years old today

moddbsite

Fortress of graph paper Chewbacca doodles and half-finished Quake mods ModDB turns ten years old today, proving that mods, modders and PC games are all brilliant and nothing anybody says or does can ever change that. “We’ve survived the great DLC avalanche of 2010 when previously mod-strong games like Call of Duty and Diablo announced you’ll have to buy updates from them,” boasts the press release. “Despite this modding is as strong as it has ever been, with millions of modders continuing to share their creations on ModDB.” Scanning through ModDB’s Hall of Fame – naturally dominated by DayZ at the moment – it’s easy to see why mods have persevered and flourished in the years since ModDB’s launch. Happy birthday, chaps.

ModDB creator Scott Reismanis celebrated all modkind in his statement, claiming that”whether game creators encourage it or not, people love to tweak and change their favourite games. In the end we all win, give a modder complete creative freedom and the result is the creation of timeless classics such as Counter-Strike, DOTA and more recently DayZ which millions have played.”
The press release also notes an interesting statistic. Of the 17,000 mods in their database, only 33% ever made it as far as release. The rest, those stacks and stacks of wookiee fan-art sat next to an artist’splaintive request for coders, remain a testament to the frustrated creative inside us all. Check out the detailed 10 year history of ModDB to see how far the site’s come.

For example, have you ever wondered what the most downloaded screenshot on ModDB was in 2002? It was this picture of Kramer modded into Quake. Of course it was.