Meanwhile, two former Microsoft programmers were investing their time and money in a new venture. They called it Valve Software, and without any prior industry experience, Mike Harrington and Gabe Newell were hoping to transform the state of games with a title that would become "Half-Life" (1998). After a visit to the id offices in Mesquite, Texas, they chose to build the game on top of the original "Quake" 3-D rendering "engine."

But important as that engine was, they needed a full-featured level editor to develop the game. "When we looked at the things we were doing in the engine to create 'Half-Life,'" Newell says, "it became pretty obvious that our tool set wasn't going to diverge enough, that we would have to do our own editor." And in the end, they didn't go with id's editor. Instead, they opted for Worldcraft, Ben Morris' mod utility. "A bunch of the guys at Valve had a really high opinion of Ben and Worldcraft," Newell says. (Much of Valve's staff had been recruited from the mod community, as well.)

"It wasn't long before I went to Seattle for an interview," Morris says. "I remember the whole thing, right down to the nick[names] everyone used in deathmatch and the pecan-encrusted French toast at the Woodmark Hotel." After helping Valve develop a version of Worldcraft to build "Half-Life," Morris would take a job outside the game industry. "I really enjoyed my whole Valve experience. But I was too young to appreciate it, and I just didn't like Seattle."

But his contribution was enough: Morris had provided the key utility to create a series of games that would sell millions of copies. All from what he considered an art project, developed mainly for the benefit of his gamer community. And as with id and QERadiant, a professional game studio was now depending on a tool created by an amateur modder.

Because mods were so integral to "Half-Life," Valve returned the favor, creating a Half-Life Mod Expo to bestow attention (and money) on its fans' best works. From this event came "Counter-Strike" (2000), which Valve eventually purchased from British Columbia student Minh "Gooseman" Le and its other creators. The terrorists-versus-anti-terrorists multiplayer game became so popular, it would eventually sell over a million copies even though it's always been free and legally available for download.

Last November, Valve invited the "Day of Defeat" team to San Francisco to attend its 2001 Expo. It was actually the first time the team members had ever met each other in person; scattered throughout the States and Canada, they'd mainly collaborated via e-mail and instant messaging. "Most of us had worked with each other over the Net for about two years," Jungles says, "so it was strange to have 'just met' someone you already knew very well."

With "Counter-Strike" and "Day of Defeat," modders had truly found their place: no longer wannabes or amateur tinkerers but, in a very real sense, members of the game industry with the proven talent to compete with the professionals on their own terms.

"It feels to me like we're moving toward a point where game development is becoming a very collaborative process between the game developers and the players," Maxis' Will Wright says. "I can imagine a future where the mods created by the players are automatically sent between players by a central server that is ongoingly measuring what you enjoy in the game and what's available."

And despite the ascendance of next-generation consoles, most developers seem confident that mods will continue to thrive on the PC and keep the market for PC games thriving. Meanwhile, the best mods will become even more indistinguishable from the "official" games in terms of quality and popularity.

"The trend seems to be toward higher and higher production value, larger teams and longer development times," says Valve's Keranen. "In other words, mods are becoming very similar to commercial games in all but the way they are [not] funded."

Their quality is already gaining recognition among the estimated 10 to 20 percent of gamers who compose the hardcore contingent of mod makers and users -- many of whom prefer the mod "Tactical Ops" to "Unreal Tournament," or who like fan missions like "The 7th Crystal" and "Calendra's Legacy," for the Thief series even more than the missions from the original game.

Or for that matter, who prefer "Day of Defeat" to "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" and "Medal of Honor." "I've always been fascinated with WWII -- the struggle and its impact on civilization," says Kelly Thornton. The team's commitment to portray it with ruthless accuracy attracted gamers with similar passions. "Our initial audience came from the 'historian gamer' group," says Jakob Jungles. "Mostly hardcore realism fanatics who really knew their stuff concerning anything from weapons ballistics to specific World War II events."

In contrast, while the professional WWII games are quite good in their own right, their believability is marred by the assumptions of mass market and the clichés of the first-person shooter genre. ("Medal" has no onscreen bloodshed, for example, while "Wolfenstein" features, well, Nazi zombies.) Judged on historical authenticity and battlefield realism, "Day of Defeat" is actually better than both of them, treating the grim nature of World War II with the fidelity it deserves. "The ultimate compliment for us," says Thornton, "is when veterans of military service play our game and say, 'That's just what it's like!'"

"Of course," adds Jungles, "as 'DoD's' popularity grew, our audience became more diverse." Their niche eventually became a crossover audience, but few companies would be willing to gamble as much effort on such an unproven undertaking. "In the mod community," notes Epic's Cliff Bleszinski, "the users are sometimes able to take design risks that the designers may deem too radical or scary."

And with Steam, modders will have a powerful tool to put themselves out to a larger market -- at a profit, if they choose. "We are going to be offering mod teams a $995 engine license plus royalty to allow them to distribute their mods over Steam," says Newell. "Once a mod team has developed an audience they could think about either being aggregated into some other offering or going all the way to publishing their game over Steam."

For veteran designer Rich Carlson, this shift may be a cause for worry. What happens when modders begin paying to download and make what they once built and traded with each other just for the community spirit and the pure love of creating? "It's kind of frightening," he says, "but the popularity of mods could spell the eventual doom of freeware levels and modifications."

What follows next depends on the ambitions of the modders and the wisdom of the game publishers. Cannibalism -- modder energy consumed by the gaming industry -- is one possibility. Then again, so is a partnership of inspiration and investment, where the only barriers to entry are imagination and a willingness to remake each other's dreams.

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