“The indie explosion pushed mods back to being a bit niche,” he says. And once that version of the game saw success, the team went back and made a ‘proper’ commercial version of the title. The critically acclaimed Dear Esther by Brighton-based studio The Chinese Room started out life as a free Half-Life 2 mod in 2008. It’s been great bringing new people who are really talented.”Īnd of course, the mods you create can just have legs of their own. Those people have been a really powerful creative force on this game. 'One of the things that Mark Healey said to me was one of the things he’s most proud of with LittleBigPlanet was that loads of people have gotten into the games industry who wouldn’t have otherwise. “The level design team is made up of 15 or so people, all hired from the LittleBigPlanet community,” Sumo’s design director Damian Hosen says. Sheffield-based Sumo Digital, the developer behind LittleBigPlanet 3, went so far as to hire entire sections of its development team for the title from the community that formed around the creative platformer series. Because he had the gumption to make a good-looking website and highlighted that they were bought by Valve rather than submitting a resumé, we sorted the wheat from the chaff and found him.”

“Those levels were actually picked up by Valve. “One of the people we are thinking about hiring right now is a level designer who has no professional experience in the industry outside of making fantastic Team Fortress 2 maps,” he says. In fact Boss Key founder and former Epic Games developer Cliff Bleszinski has been hiring people straight out of the modding scene.

Modded games