Not just the mods, consider the tools as well. As far as I can recall id Software rarely released their own tools for content creation in the early days. Often

Not just the mods, consider the tools as well. As far as I can recall id Software rarely released their own tools for content creation in the early days. Often because their tools were made to run on expensive industrial strength computers, especially in the Quake days. They only just described in various ways how to create content for their engines and/or released source code to their tools. If the tools people didn't step up to create these things then the mod scene may not have turned out the way it did. This tool creation "scene" led to some interesting creations that the industry benefits from today. For example, we had Worldcraft until Valve hired the creator and made it into Hammer; which is still in use today. This type of thing doesn't really exist as much today simply because most of the common engines are supplied with content creation tools out of the box. Part of me longs for the days of exploring new crazy ideas that was done back then. I knew a guy that designed his first few levels in Quake with notepad (three dimensional BSP node coordinates by hand!), graph paper, and the compile tools until editors starting showing up. To pat myself on the back I built the first Quake2 "unit" of levels (AFAIK) to be released and I did that by opening the compiled id BSP files in notepad and followed the trail of entities through the plain text. Those were fun days.