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Game Mod - TV Tropes

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GameMod

Beyond Chaos

Just because the game designers made a good game doesn't mean you can't make it even better. Or at least different.

Game modifications, or "mods" for short, are any alterations to a game that were not made by the game's license holder. They can be unofficial Expansion Packs (new maps or new equipment in the same game), completely unrelated games that merely use the source game's software as a backbone ("total conversions"), or just quality-of-life adjustments to the original, such as Fan Translations, bug fixes, or character cameo appearances (which can often lead to Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot scenarios). (Or, if the game includes any attractive women or men, nude patches.) When it comes to unofficial cameo appearances, a humorous tradition — usually when a particular game is either first released or is made open to modification — involves that of porting characters such as those of CJ from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Shrek, and Thomas & Friends, though the latter prompted at least one cease-and-desist order from Mattel who owns the rights to the Thomas franchise.

Some games are deliberately designed to be easy to modify, including a "construction set" of sorts to build levels, weapons, etc., and whole modding communities spring up as a result. However, some types of mods are discouraged, or even cracked down on, for good reason: If it's a multiplayer game, a mod in the hands of a player but not their opponent usually means an unfair advantage. (Some God Modders will use these anyway and hope they aren't caught.) That's why multiplayer games are usually exempt from mods or, if running on a modular engine, deliberately designed to be hard to mod (example is that most online multiplayer of any Source engine games has a "Pure" server settings which disables any mods including texture replacements).

A few mods take advantage of content that was programmed into the game in the early stages, then scrapped from the final design. Unless space is a big issue, the programmers usually leave all this content Dummied Out in the game's code. This leaves an opening for a modder to re-introduce an access point and enjoy the missing content... albeit at their own risk, since it's usually unfinished and untested. A safer and more generally successful approach is to overhaul the graphics. PC hardware becomes more advanced over time, making it capable of handling more detailed graphics; this helps keep an older game looking new and fresh and thus helping to keep it alive among the community, as well as helping to prevent the game from being overwhelmed by current-gen games.

It's much easier to mod a computer game than a hard-coded console game, but creative adjustments to a save file (and, with the most recent generation of games, console hard drive content) and/or use of a GameShark allow determined amateur programmers to mod with the best of them. Most often, however, mods of console games are edits of the ROM files used in Emulation. These tend to be referred to as "ROM hacks" and are usually considered a separate scene from mods, as running a mod is intended behavior of the original software especially in the case of games that offer an official avenue for modding, or alternatively, as mods are designed for games on open platforms such as the IBM Personal Computer and Apple Macintosh, while playing a ROM hack requires patching the game's binaries (or performing some other kind of hack) and copying said binaries to a flash cart or burned to a disc.^note And in the case of more recent systems, performing some kind of modification to the consoles for them to run unsigned or modified code

Early ROM hacks were largely present in Famiclone consoles and cartridges, especially where the said system wasn't officially released. Cartridges contained graphics hacks very often. The most common ones were those where the main character was replaced by Mario, passing them off as an "installment" in the Mario series such as in the case of the now-infamous 7 Grand Dad (a bootlegged version of The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy). For more on this side of things, see Unlicensed Game (which are more often than not hacks, though more ambitious examples lean closer to homebrew).

Unfortunately, game mods are probably the biggest example of Sturgeon's Law. In the mid-oughts, a great many ROM hacks consisted of little else but tons of offensive and poorly drawn graphic hacks like profanity-laden graffiti, buckets of Gorn, nudity, and outright pornography, and (just to offend anybody who wasn't offended yet) swastikas, racial slurs, and pro-KKK propaganda. A compilation of such things even made it in a bootleg console purchased by an unsuspecting parent in 2019. Other ROM hacks are made with the intention of increasing the game's difficulty, and depending on the creator's ideas of how to accomplish that, it can result in the mod being Nintendo Hard and/or laden with Fake Difficulty, which may make them appealing to expert players but probably not to a mass audience. Most modding communities have very little moderation or quality control, save for a few that went on Quality by Popular Vote. In addition, redundancy is a bit of a problem as well — a lot of mods might accomplish similar things.

As mentioned earlier, computer games are much easier to modify than console games. As such, PC gamers will often list mods as a reason why PC games are clearly superior to their console counterparts, despite the aforementioned Sturgeon's Law.

Official responses to game mods vary from company to company. Some welcome them with open arms, some ignore them, and some call for their lawyers as soon as they catch wind of them, especially if the mod creator(s) are profiting from their work.

See also Rule Zero, Popular Game Variant, Self-Imposed Challenge, and Video Game Randomizer. Sub-trope to Fan Game. When mods start to eclipse the vanilla game in popularity, it's Come for the Game, Stay for the Mods.

Some of these even have their own work pages on this Wiki; see Game Mod Index.

• Role-Playing Games

    open/close all folders 

    Action-Adventure 

• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Zelda games have a Video Game Randomizer, a mod that shuffles up all item locations and sometimes a whole lot more. Kotaku called the first game "one of the best roguelikes in recent memory". Full randomizers exist for both NES games, A Link to the Past (page), Link's Awakening, Ocarina of Time (page), Majora's Mask, Wind Waker, Minish Cap, and Twilight Princess.
  • There are several mods for the original The Legend of Zelda; the best-known is probably Zelda Challenge: Outlands.
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past's mods Parallel Worlds (which began as the demo "Tower of the Triforce", and has an updated, slightly easier version known as Parallel Remodel) and Goddess of Wisdom, among others. Made possible with Hyrule Magic and Black Magic editing programs.
  • ZethN64's Ura Zelda restoration project is a particularly infamous mod that never was completed. It was a mod Ocarina of Time that, despite its name, originally was supposed to just add a bunch of developmental elements back into the game, such as the fairy fountain and the Sky Temple. This later warped once more new elements were added, such as a custom story, the Dark World, and a new protagonist. It got to the point where it was essentially a new game, similarly to Majora's Mask. The project was too ambitious and it ended up cancelled.
  • The smaller but no less ambitious hack The Missing Link luckily did make it to completion, and serves a short Interquel between Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. What's impressive about this mod is how it doesn't just modify existing assets from the original game, but rather adds new graphics, animations, music, NPCs and areas to explore; even the only preexisting area, Kokiri Forest, was redone from the ground up. It also gives Link back the ability to shoot sword beams from the 2D games, which is integral to solving many puzzles and beating many enemies.
  • Demon's Quest is new mod for Ocarina that aims to make the game more challenging for experienced players. One of the additions was a second phase for the Ganondorf boss fight, mixing his moveset from Super Smash Bros 64 and the famous GameCube trailer depicting him fighting Link.
  • One of the most famous hacks in the Spanish romhacking scene is "La Lellenda de la Cerda", a parody translation of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX, where the texts are translated re-framing the game as Link adventuring in a island full of drug addicts, prostitutes and assorted lowlife population, and the graphics were redrawn accordingly. Have a video.
• Metroid:
  • The Super Metroid community gets its share of hacks, and you can enjoy such thing as the masterful (and difficult) Super Metroid Redesign, the brilliantly atmospheric Super Metroid Eris, or the complete level overhaul of Metroid X.
  • While the definitive history of ROM hacking has yet to be written, one of the oldest total-conversion hacks, Super Metroid Redesign, dates at least from 2004, which establishes the game's hacking scene as perhaps one of the longest-standing outside the fan translation world. There's a wide variety of Super Metroid hacks, ranging from relatively minor gameplay and physics tweaks (Project Base) to radically deuterocanonical and hugely ambitious reimaginings of the entire game and its backstory (Hyper Metroid); while the total number of released hacks is relatively small compared to, say, the Super Mario World scene, the gameplay variety and general quality level of Super Metroid hacks is surprisingly high. They make a delightful diversion, especially for the veteran SM player who knows the classic game back to front. Would you like to know more?
  • There are also a fairly substantial number of randomizers, as mentioned in the game description; they can completely reshuffle items and, in some cases, rooms, allowing a new experience each time one plays the game, and often requiring use of some clever, obscure techniques to reach critical items. There are several different randomizers, including this one, this one, this one, this one (which also shuffles up the rooms), and perhaps most interestingly, the Super Metroid/A Link to the Past randomizer, which mashes the game up with A Link to the Past: Randomizer (any item can be almost anywhere in either game, as long as its location doesn't render either game unwinnable).
  • If you wanted a hair-ripping hack, try your hands at Super Metroid: Impossible. This is made by the person who developed the under-two hour tool-assisted speedrun for Redesign, a mod that typically takes as long as Metroid Prime.
  • When it comes to reasonable hacks, we have Super Metroid Dependence which, for the most part, is pretty fair in its gameplay and really only has two points that come to mind (at least at the moment) where the player can become completely lost, one involving bombing a particular wall in Brinstar and the other that involves the creator being a dick by making a certain fake wall in Tourian not be revealed by the X-Ray Scope.
  • Can't find your way through the orignal Metroid? Hate having to write long passwords? Hate having to choose between Ice and Wave Beams? What about grinding for health after continuing the game? Well, my friend, someone was thoughtful enough and made us a hack that improves the original Metroid! That's right! It not only gives you 3 save slots, but also a map screen while paused and allows you to use Ice and Wave Beams together! And it will also save your health!
• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is no stranger to mods like its Dark Souls predecessors. Early on there has been mods aiming to either tweak the gameplay like the Bloodborne Combat mod, or character mods ranging from the more or less serious such as Kenshin Himura and Shishio from Rurouni Kenshin, to the more outlandish like Woody, Bo Peep and even Benson the dummy from Toy Story, CJ and Big Smoke from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, along with the main cast of Frozen for good measure. This video pitting Elsa against Hans is something to behold.

    Beat 'em Up 

    Fighting Games 

• Street Fighter II:
  • The game had various hacked bootleg versions in the arcade such as Rainbow Edition and Koryu that modified many of the games properties, allowing for mid air fireballs, dragon punches that spammed fireball and instant character swapping in game. Hyper Fighting was developed by Capcom as a response to these hacks, being intended as a legal, saner version of them. (IE: Chun-Li gains a projectile and Ryu and Ken gain the ability to use their Tatsu in the air, but there's no character swapping or aerial fireballs.)
  • Super Street Fighter 2X: The Tournament Battle is a mod of the Japanese version of Super Street Fighter II Turbo that restores full functionality to the Dummied Out tournament mode by porting the network code from the Super Street Fighter II and getting the unique gameplay mechanics of Turbo to function properly within this mode.
• Street Fighter IV:
• With the launch of FightCade 2, an emulation service that allows people to play online against each other, came a slew of new modified hacks for fighting games, and Street Fighter was no exception.
  • Super Street Fighter II Turbo: New Legacy is an in-development mod of Super Turbo created with the intent of adding new quality-of-life features to the game and updating the balance in a way that honors the spirit of the original game, in contrast to existing updated versions like HD Remix and Ultra Street Fighter II. There are several color palette updates, such as the versus screen gaining a sleek metallic black hue and even the stages getting brand new palettes to reflect different times of day. Characters now boast not only their original colors as their default colors, but also all of their existing Super Turbo colors and 12 brand-new ones for a total of 24 selectable colors per character. Stages can now be manually selected via a code, and old versions of characters are easily selectable by pressing Start. Akuma is now selectable by default and has been rebalanced to better fit in with the rest of the cast instead of outright dominating them. Most importantly, the entire cast has been rebalanced from the ground-up in a way that pays homage to their competitive history while both reining in and expanding upon some of their intricacies. Even the old versions of characters have been completely reworked to pay homage to their CPS1-era versions from World Warrior, Champion Edition, and Hyper Fighting.
  • Street Fighter II Mix is another in-development mod for II, this time of Champion Edition, that completely reworks the game with new system mechanics, moves, and a slew of aesthetic changes. The character select screen has been completely redone and now utilizes character portraits from Super Turbo Revival for the GBA. Stages now have 3 different times of day, similar to Fatal Fury, and have been reworked to scroll in 3D. Characters now have voice clips from IV and X Tekken as well as brand-new and reworked color palettes. The announcer has been replaced with the one from V. Gameplay-wise, it is now possible to do things from other fighting games, including dodge rolls and running from The King of Fighters, Just Defense from Fatal Fury, throw teching, and a unique "Vigor Meter" that functions both as a super/EX, guard, and stun gauge all in one.
• Ultimate Mortal Kombat Trilogy, a popular hack of the Sega Genesis/Megadrive version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Contains every version of every character that appeared before and during Mortal Kombat Trilogy and with their own finishers no less, sans the MK 3 version of Noob Saibot which was a black palette swap of Kano. Basically contains much more content than a real cartridge or the Genesis console can handle. And it can actually run on an (albeit) modded console. Now has its own page.
  • As with Street Fighter, FightCade 2 has also allowed for modded versions of Mortal Kombat entries to be played on the service. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Plus is a mod of UMK3 that fixes bugs, re-adds the Bank stage that was cut from the original version of 3 to save memory, and backports several characters from Trilogy into the game, allowing them to finally be playable on arcade-accurate hardware. Human Smoke gets his own slot on the character select screen while still being available as a transformation code for Cyber Smoke, Noob Saibot becomes playable, complete with his broken moveset from Trilogy, Rain is accesible via a special code, also with his broken moveset from Trilogy, and several secret characters can also be accessed via codes including Motaro and Shao Kahn, as well as 3 mimic characters: Chameleon, Khameleon, and Triborg.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • Smash Remix is a ROM hack of Super Smash Bros. 64. This mod expands upon the original game by adding several new characters, stages, and gameplay modes without changing or removing any of the original ones.
  • The Akaneia Build does something similar to Smash Remix in that it expands upon the original game it's built off of, albeit for Melee instead. This mod backports six fighters from Brawl and introduces newcomer Tails to the roster and adds new game modes like Volleyball and Tag.
  • A large portion of the community modifies pretty much everything within Brawl's engine, including custom stages, character skins, movesets, physics, menu appearance, and music. The mods listed below are the major full-on mod projects made from Brawl:
    • Brawl+ was the first attempt to make Brawl more competitive-oriented. While it reached version 7, the team eventually lost interest and moved on to create Project M, which by contrast is specifically meant to replicate Melee's gameplay.
    • Balanced Brawl tries to mod Brawl by keeping most of the engine intact (i.e. defensive play favored, very little hitstun) while trying to make the game balanced.
    • Brawl− enhances the game by making everyone God Tier, yet balanced so that it's practically acceptable. It has hitstun comparable to Smash 64, and it's about as fast as Brawl+. It's Brawl on steroids.
    • The aforementioned Project M basically turns Brawl into the next Melee, having the return of Melee's advanced techniques and physics engine. It's intended to even surpass Melee by making every character good, making almost every stage tourney-legal, and of course utilizing the benefits of being made from Brawl, like better graphics, more characters, and modding capability (see above). Unfortunately, the mod was taken down in 2015. After Project M ceased development, several successors built off of it, including Legacy TE, Legacy XP, and Project+ (based on Legacy TE), the latter of which is aimed to further balance, bugfix, and polish Project M. It even adds Knuckles the Echidna to the roster, who was in mid-development for PM at the time of its demise, and it has been given the blessings of PM's developers, making it a true successor.
    • PMEX REMIX is a massive mod for Project M. This mod features over a hundred characters, which surpasses Ultimate's character roster of 89. Its roster covers a large range of franchises and fighters, including fighters from the post-Brawl installments (some with redesigned movesets such as Ridley and Banjo & Kazooie, others being more faithful backports like Terry), popularly requested characters that were not playable in the official games like Waluigi, Bandana Waddle Dee, and the aforementioned Knuckles, and more unexpected choices like Deathborn and Nu-13. The mod concluded development on February 2024 and shifted over to a new mod called Super Smash REX, picking up after REMIX left off with existing content plus new content that was planned for further releases, including more new fighters such as Shovel Knight, Sol Badguy, and even Master Chief. It is planned to release in 2025.
  • 20XX TE is a game mod of Super Smash Bros. Melee that creates a more tournament-friendly experience. The mod introduces a new name entry screen supporting up to eight characters with both upper and lowercase letters, a frozen mode that disables all stage hazards and stage transformations, and the option to select various shield colors.
• In December of 2021, an unofficial patch for the PlayStation version of Bloody Roar 2 was made available which redubs the game with a number of professional voice actors including Casey Mongillo, Xander Mobus, Edward Bosco, Kaiji Tang, and Kira Buckland, among others.
• On September 18, 2019, Rivals of Aether added Steam Workshop support, allowing anyone with GameMaker knowledge to add new characters and stages. Four Original Character mods would later become Ascended Fanon through the release of the Workshop Character Pack update on February 3rd, 2022.
• Prior to the game's release on seventh-gen consoles, many Marvel vs. Capcom 2 players were playing the Dreamcast port on burned CD's that contained custom soundtracks and Palette Swaps. Two custom palette swaps, teal Magneto and Mango Sentinel, would become official in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 as a nod to the mavhel baybee! video.
• Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 started developing a modding scene when the PC version was released, many years after the game first came out. Modding started with texture swaps, then custom movesets, but in late 2021 UMvC3 modding hit its "golden age" when modders figured out how to import assets into the game, allowing the game to have true custom characters. One of the biggest mods for the game is "Palette Swap Characters", adding a whopping 20 new characters (and counting), including characters cut from the roster like Cyclops, characters from Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite such as Ultron and Captain Marvel as well as newcomers like Bishop, Carnage and Leon Kennedy.
• Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite & Beyond is a comprehensive overhaul of the original game commissioned by longtime series veteran Maximilian Dood and created by a development team of over 40 talented artists, coders, and players. The intent and goal behind the mod is simply to alleviate the issues many people had with the main product as a whole (the lackluster presentation and gameplay issues). To that end, this version of the game now features an entirely new title screen and in-game effects, new music tracks and the return of classic songs that were both absent from and not remixed for this game, a completely new announcer directed to better capture the feeling of more classic games in the series (provided by Sigma's voice actor Chris Tergliafera), entirely remade and redone graphical and sound effects from characters to stages, balance changes for the competitive community to revitalize interest in the gameplay, and new single player modes that hearken back to the console versions of the older games such as Cross Frenzy (a mode where 4 players can fight at the same time), Single Cross Frenzy (a mode where 2 players can play the game as if the effects of Soul Stone were enabled by default), and Cross Fever (a mode similar to the Pair Play mode in other fighting games where 4 players can each control one team member).

    First-Person Shooter 

• Mods are Valve's bread-and-butter. Team Fortress 1 began life as a free mod for Quake, but Valve hired the staff, recreated the mod for Half-Life (calling it Team Fortress Classic) and then created their own sequel, Team Fortress 2. Ditto Day of Defeat and Dota, mods purchased by Valve and integrated into their releases.
  • Likely the most famed of all mods is Counter-Strike, the full conversion of Half-Life into a multiplayer counterterrorism game. It was eventually purchased by Valve and included in later editions of the original.
  • Another highly successful mod is Garry's Mod (pictured above), a mod for Half-Life 2 that turns the game into a Wide-Open Sandbox, allowing for nigh-complete control of the Source engine. Machinima and even comic strips have been done using the game (see Concerned and Half-Life: Full Life Consequences). The mod's developer Garry Newman eventually struck a publishing deal with Valve, allowing for it to be released on their platform Steam as a standalone game.
    • Garry's Mod itself has a vast modding community, with over 1.7 million mods available on the game's Steam Workshop. Mods for GMod are typically divided into three categories: addons^note Fully scripted, most similar to regular game mods, dupes^note Short for duplications, these are player-made structures and contraptions, and saves^note Similar to dupes, but are map-exclusive. In addition to the base sandbox, a variety of other gamemodes have been created for the game (such as Trouble in Terrorist Town and Prop Hunt). Other forms of addons typically consist of custom-made maps, weapons (often known as SWEPs), NPCs, and player models.
  • Valve's Alien Swarm is based off an Unreal Tournament 2004 mod and the inspiration for Left 4 Dead was the popular zombie mods for Counter-Strike.
    • Speaking of Left 4 Dead, on top of the typical skins and script modifications, both games have a level editor that allows people to create their own survival and campaign/versus maps. They can even include custom sounds and music, scripted crescendo events, and other things. Naturally, there have been maps of other games like Mario, Zelda, and even Half-Life 2. Then there are the Mutations, "official" modifications that come in packed with the game. Recently the developers have encouraged players to develop their own Mutations for submission to be featured for a week. They've also been featuring user-created campaigns on the official blog, and hosting them on the official servers.
  • In Team Fortress 2, there are fans out there who love to make texture hacks to change the appearance of weapons, hats, character models, etc. to further add hilarity to their game experience. Game Banana has a ton of skins for your perusal. Texture hacks unfortunately don't work on Valve's own servers, to stop cheaters from..well...seeing through walls.
    • Sound Modding is also relatively popular, mostly due to the fact that, while some sounds are blocked on Valves own servers (generally speaking it's the gun-noises and footsteps), modders have free reign to edit pretty much any sound in the game, and it'll work in most cases, whereas custom Models and Textures won't for the above reason.
    • There are also quite a few fun game mods out there: Pyro Dodgeball, Prop Hunt, Vs. Saxton Hale, TF2 Ware, and Zombie Fortress, to name a few. Vs. Saxton Hale in particular has clearly inspired the first Halloween Boss, the Headless Horseless Horseman.
    • There's also mods that alters the gameplay of existing modes. Like Randomizer, respawn time disable/reversal, class limitation and its related Highlander mode, and Hardcore- game servers with crits disabled.
    • Team Fortress 2 Classic is a complete modification of the game, taking the oldest version of TF2 and adding new weapons, game modes and even compatibility for four teams instead of two.
    • Open Fortress is an open-source mod that, alongside adding alternate game modes such as Infection, revisits the game's roots by adding Quake-style deathmatches and in the future will remake Team Fortress Classic using Team Fortress 2's aesthetics and lore.
  • Anyone play Adam Foster's MINERVA: Metastasis mod and noticed the excellent and atypical style of level design he used? Valve did, first helping him out with the last couple of chapters, and then hiring him to work on HL2: Episode 3!
  • The mod-story "G-String" made by Eyaura, while not widely known like other HL2 mods out there, has a truly unique story and setting set on an utterly-devastated Earth that is completely irreversible recovery-wise in which the North American Union, which is run completely by corrupt officials that have their self-serving slogan of "Money is blood. Keep it flowing.◊", this coupled with the fact that, as a certain someone mentions right near the beginning, "Even the air ain't free no more.", quite literally as there's a giant Mega Corporation based on Purified Air Collection that is owned by yet another Corrupt Exec. All-in-all, it's a story that'd make even the developer(s) of Half-Life be amazed with, if they ever cared to notice it earlier and, oh, would it be surprising to know that it was initially made by the one developer herself? No, this is not a lie. And it's become quite the popular mod-story among those that fondly remember its Humble Beginnings.
  • The Iron Grip: The Oppression mod for Half-Life 2, which slammed two genres against each other: Real-Time Strategy and First-Person Shooter.
  • Empires combines RTS and FPS like Iron Grip, but in a different manner; players play on one of two different armies fighting each other, each with their own commander to whom the game functions like a standard RTS.
  • Mario Kart: Source was intended to be a mod that turns Half-Life 2 into a Mario Kart game, although the project was eventually abandoned.
  • Portal's honorable mention is Portal: Prelude, an unofficial prequel that introduces fairly harder-than-original levels, new puzzle elements and several additional hours of gameplay for hardcore Portal fans, which got one million (!!!) downloads and a following of its own.^note Though, some might argue that this isn't strictly a mod, in the way that it doesn't change Source's source code, but it is worth playing nevertheless.
  • Black Mesa is a highly ambitious and long awaited Half-Life 2 mod that seeked to modernize the original Half-Life using the Source Engine. An extended, retail Steam version was greenlit and it now includes an entirely reworked Xen chapter to close off the game.
  • Sven Co-op is one of the first Half-Life mods out there, and is not only still lively with activity to this day, but is still in development.
  • Fortress Forever is a Team Fortress Classic-esque mod on the Source Engine made in response to Team Fortress 2 being stuck in Development Hell. Unfortunately, it released in time for TF2 to finally be saved from it.
• Golden Eye X is a total conversion mod for Perfect Dark that turns it into GoldenEye.
• One of the earliest game series to still have an active modding community today is the Doom series, which intentionally allowed modding of all kinds (Wolfenstein 3-D wasn't designed this way, but fans were able to mod it anyway), with the first editors coming out just months after its release. One particular Mod, The New Technology: Evilution (later known simply as TNT: Evilution,) was intended to be freeware, until it was announced at the Usenet Doom boards, on its intended release date, that not only would its release be postponed, but it would become a commercial product—published by none other than id Software themselves! The reaction to this announcement was... heated, to say the least. The product would later come out as part of Final Doom—within the same month as Quake. And the only place where the team was credited—the DOS text-mode post-exit screen—didn't appear in the bundled Windows 95 version, which is how most people installed the game anyway.
  • There are two megawads made by Team TNT that rank among the top lists: the medieval-themed Eternal Doom and the sci-fi Icarus: Alien Vanguard.
  • Of note would be Brutal Doom, which turns Doom into a faster, harder, gorier slaughterfest. Brutal Doom would ultimately get its own mod called Project Brutality, which adds new weapons, enemy types, and player abilities.
  • Due to using the Doom engine, the games Heretic, Hexen, and Strife also have a decent number of mods for them, though not as many as Doom. In addition, there are also source ports designed to be compatible with multiple Doom engine games, allowing the creation of mods making use of the various features introduced in those later games. The creator of Brutal Doom began working on Brutal Hexen. One important feature will be collecting XP and levelling up like in Hexen 2.
  • Hideous Destructor, which throws out Doom's explosive, fast-paced sci-fi slaughter, in exchange for tense, realistic, ARMA/classic Ghost Recon/SWAT 4-style fights.
  • On a lesser scale, Doom³ has a large amount of mods available, which range from solving common complaints (adding flashlights to the weapons [Finally, there's Duct Tape on Mars!] and correcting the dismal mechanics of the shotgun, for example) to full stand-alone single-player campaigns. One particularly notable mod for Doom 3 is darkmod, which is a package to convert Doom 3 into something suitable for building Thief-like game content in. This is partly due to the Thief mod community not generally liking the Unreal engine based Thief: Deadly Shadows for modding (there are some strange differences due to changing engines, and it turns out to be very hard to get things that should be a doodle, like a passageway you can just walk down, to work properly).
  • Into Cerberon is a total conversion into a Descent fangame. The name's based on Descent Into Cerberon, a music track from Quake II.
  • Sonic Robo Blast 2 is a total conversion into a Sonic the Hedgehog fangame. The source code for the game has been so radically modified over the years that SRB2's engine is considered largely unique and distinct from the DOOM Legacy engine it was first made on. Other mods have since been made based on SRB2, including (but not limited to) Sonic Robo Blast 2: Persona, Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart, and Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers.
  • Ashes 2063 is a total conversion so far removed from Doom that it's essentially its own IP. The only thing it uses from Doom is its source code, which is free to use^note notably the ModDB release of 2063 comes bundled in with the lawyer-friendly Freedoom for a template IWAD, so part of it can be used in Doom as a weapons pack, just in case you're intent on having Scav slaughter some hellspawn. Conversely, there's also a monsters pack, for when you feel like making a cannibal eat plasma.
• Duke Nukem 3D is another game that has had a fairly large number of game mods and TCs created for it. A list of the more recent mods is as follows.
  • Duke Plus, created by Dan "Deeperthought" Gaskill, started as a means to enhance the use of level effects in user maps by adding elements such as realistic water that could have both above-water and under-water effects in the same sector, in addition to have the ability to mirror and expand the size of existing maps for changing the experience of existing levels. It also possesses weather effects like rain and snow, a realistic acceleration system for running/moving, the ability to grapple along the sides of walls [i.e. mantling], improved enemy behavior, the ability to pick up, drag, or throw various items like crates or other background objects, etc. Some new weapon types were also later added, including a laser pistol taken from the Assault Captains (with a chargeable fire function), a gravity gun substitute to the Expander, two different types of shotguns instead of the original, among other things.
  • Naferia's Reign: Invasion of the Dark Mistress, a mod created by Jack "Lord Misfit" Walker, is still in the works, but many betas are released, often once every two or three months. This mod might be considered to be one of the biggest FPS/RPG hybrid mods for a game yet, as it not only incorporates normal RPG elements like leveling up during gameplay, but allows use of a group of 15 different characters, including Duke Nukem himself. The kicker: this isn't like Hexen, where a character is chosen for the whole of the game, but where characters are found over the course of the game and can be swapped back and forth via an extra menu system. Each character has their own skills, strengths and weaknesses and their own main functions in the team. And that's just a few of the numerous features of the mod. Listing them all would take up too much space.
  • Duke Nukem 3D: Alien Armageddon adds additional enemies, location based damages, and the biggest addition, an AI companion and also playable character Bombshell, which is based on her appearance on an early Duke Nukem Forever trailer, with her own set of weaponry.
• Desert Combat for Battlefield 1942. It has the same objectives as the original but transplants the setting from World War II to Operation Desert Storm, updating the maps and weapons accordingly.
  • Interestingly, much like Valve has a habit of hiring good modders, EA bought Trauma Studios (makers of Desert Combat) to work on its modern-day sequel, Battlefield 2.
  • The original Battlefield 1942 had several total conversion mods (Desert Combat being the most popular). There was Forgotten Hope, a realism mod adding a large amount of new content and balance changes to give a more gritty, realistic WWII; Eve of Destruction, a total conversion mod set in Vietnam; and Silent Heroes, a total conversion mod based on a speculative conflict between Sweden and Norway, just to name a few.
  • A mod team was also working on a mod in this engine, but limitations forced them to move it to Source (see "Empires" above).
  • Battlefield Vietnam had an official World War II mod, which basically turned it into an updated version of Battlefield 1942.
  • It's hard to mention Battlefield 1942 mods and not think of the Turbo Mod. The speed of all weapons and vehicles was absurdly increased and alternate fire on all vehicles activated a rocket boost. Multiplayer games with this tended to devolve into goofy stunts like a never-ending loop-the-loop with jeeps or jumping over Midway island using a battleship.
  • There was also a Star Wars-themed mod called Galactic Conquest, initially with only one map based on the Battle of Hoth, but massively expanded over time to include a huge variety of locations. Apparently, this mod was the inspiration behind the Star Wars: Battlefront series.
  • There is also Project Reality, a mod for Battlefield 2 that aims to make the game more realistic. It is so popular that some people buy the game just for it.
    • And now Project Reality is getting its own mini-mods. This includes PR: Falkland, PR: Vietnam and PR: Zombies.
  • The sequels are getting their own sets of mods, too, an example being First Strike, a highly Battlefront-reminiscent Star Wars mod with both planetary and space combat for Battlefield 2142.
• Unreal Tournament in general has lots of mods:
  • One of the most well-known ones is ChaosUT, an offshoot to the original mod released for Quake II. It adds a complete arsenal of guns, some of them with multiple kinds of ammunition (normal, armor-piercing, poisonous and/or explosive); Ur-Example is the Lethal Joke Item known as the Proxy, a sentient claymore which chases you down with a smiley face and a cute voice. Or the new superweapon, the Gravity Vortex, which creates a micro-black hole that sucks in and gibs everyone in a substantial radius for several seconds; it even ignores the godmode cheat^note it does so because it uses the crush death coding and crushing in the unreal engine 1 bypasses godmode. Aside from the guns, other accessories were added too like Gravity Belts as toggleable jumpboots and grappling hooks to move over impassable terrain. And who could forget the ability to amass your remaining rocket ammo and go kamikaze... Oh, and the bots are freakishly good with all weapons, especially the crossbow.
    • Then came ChaosUT2 for the sequel, bringing with it a graphical upgrade and a few new additions like the Chaos Pulse Pistol as dual-wieldable spawning weapons, the C.U.T.T.E.R. which is a badass-looking version of the Ripper, the Chaos Grenade Launcher with four types of munitions (explosive, poison, napalm, flashbang/EMP) and the Vortex Launcher which now enables the user to actually run away from the black hole before it activates. The MUG (Multi Utility Gun) now operates like a normal flamethrower and the Claw can be loaded with needle packs whose projectiles stick onto whoever touches them and continually deals damage. It even added two vehicles: the easily forgettable hoverboard and the Chaos Bike.
    • Then came the sad day when the dev team announced that due to the lack of interest in UT3, ChaosUT3 was cancelled.
  • Oldskool is another notable modification pack. It allows true single player campaign gaming, supporting the original Unreal as well as several custom map packs (Operation Na Pali and Nali Chronicles being two of the most famous). It also works as a customizable mutator for practice sessions and multiplayer.
• The "accessible realism", WWII-themed Red Orchestra was created for Unreal Tournament 2004 (an odd choice for a realism mod), and after much effort, went on to win $1,000,000 and free Unreal Engine 2 licenses in a Mod Competition (nVidia's "Make Something Unreal" contest). The team, Tripwire Interactive, has since released a retail, stand-alone edition of their mod, entitled Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45, eventually followed by a sequel on Unreal Engine 3.
  • Tripwire has since also published Killing Floor, another Unreal Tournament 2004 mod gone retail, as well as having created Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad on Unreal Engine 3. Killing Floor received its own built in mod: Defence Alliance 2.
  • Speaking of UT2004, there's the Ballistic Weapons mod that converts the game into a realistic tactical shooter complete with a huge arsenal of guns and features like dynamic accuracy and recoil; toggleable scopes and silencers on many of the weapons; toggleable firing modes between single-shot, burst-of-three^note one submachine gun has both 3-round and 5-round burst and full auto (the minigun instead has single-shot, 1800RPM, 2400RPM and 3600RPM); the loadout system which lets players customize their spawn inventory... All but two guns are kinetic^note three melee weapons, seven pistols, three submachine guns, four shotguns, three assault rifles, battle rifle, two heavy machine guns, minigun, sniper rifle, sniper railgun, rocket launcher, flamethrower, Lightning Gun, three grenades, remote-controlled explosive, land mine and are provided with a backstory. Recoil is very realistic: It's impossible to fire the minigun at full speed and hit someone unless the built-in bipod is deployed first (machine guns have bipods too). All pistols and submachine guns can be dual-wielded, even different ones.
• Daikatana 1.3 is an unofficial patch for John Romero's infamous failure. The patch turns what used to be a nigh-unplayable jankfest of a game into something that's not half-bad. It turned Daikatana from one of the worst games of all time into a great game that's one of the most criminally underrated FPS games of all time.
• The sheer number of mods released for Starsiege: Tribes and Tribes 2 (both of which are now freeware by Sierra releasing and abandoning it) is fairly astounding, not to mention what's been done with the vehicle systems.
• Fans have produced countless third-party maps and mods for all three Marathon games, including a number of "total conversions" (eg: Devil in a Blue Dress, EVIL, Erodrome, Excalibur: Morgana's Revenge, Portal of Sigma, RED, Rubicon, Tempus Irae, Trojan.) The third game, Infinity, was thus named because its headline feature was a set of polished [first-party modding tools.
  • There's also Marathon: Resurrection, a mod of the Unreal engine.
• Thief: The Dark Project, Thief II: The Metal Age and System Shock 2 have loads upon loads of new items, UI improvements, AI, missions, and even entire campaigns! Though the first game is over ten years old, the mod community is still plenty healthy.
  • Thief: Deadly Shadows used a variant of the Unreal engine, and was generally panned for mod purposes (besides weirdness like Garret now having Super Drowning Skills, it turns out to be very hard to get Garret to not walk drunkenly, and other issues). This helped inspire DarkMod, a fan-created conversion kit for Doom 3 (a game often panned for just not being very good) which makes it suitable for Thief-style games.
  • The long period after Looking Glass Studios folded and it looked like there would never be another Thief game led to the fan-made Thief 2X: Shadows of the Metal Age conversion/expansion of Thief 2.
• Halo: Combat Evolved has an extensive map modding community, which often range from crappy to excellent. All of which is played on a separate version of the game called Halo: Custom Edition (which requires the retail version to work). One particularly notable mod is SPV3, which completely overhauls the campaign with improved graphics, new weapons, expanded levels, etc.
  • A particularly, "unique" mod exists for Combat Evolved known as Cursed Halo, and it certainly lives up to its name, with bizarre changes such as reconstructing the Game-Breaker Magnum into a reverse-pistol that shoots you when you pull the trigger that instead has to be thrown as a makeshift bludgeon, the addition of several dozen esoteric vehicle variants ranging from miniature Warthogs that effectively function as a Mongoose or Wraiths whose main plasma mortar is replaced with the Homing Soulmass sorcery, functioning Minecraft weapons, or most disturbingly, a pair of completely normal Magnums.
• Deus Ex still has a very strong modding community despite being an older game. This includes graphical and gameplay tweaks such as Shifter, and many total conversions.
  • The most impressive of these is The Nameless Mod which took seven years to complete and is a complete game including Deus Ex gameplay, branching storylines, and thousands of lines of voiced dialogue.
  • Zodiac is another one, a fan made Interquel that allows you to play as Paul Denton.
  • 2027 is a fan-made prequel featuring a nonlinear plot, real-world weapons, and DX9 graphics.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. also has a number of mods, including the Complete 2009 mod, which provides a massive graphical upgrade and a wide range of gameplay tweaks.
  • AMK: Narodnaya Soljanka for Shadow of Chernobyl may not be as much of an eye candy, but more than makes up for it by bringing in lots of levels from Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat, as well as a mind-boggling variety of new gear, new artifacts, consumables and a ton of new quests. Needless to say, the game world gets huge enough to make a complete playthrough qualify as a virtual vacation of sorts.
    • And it's being translated!
  • The release of the long awaited Lost Alpha flooded Mod DB with so many visitors they had to invest on additional bandwidth to keep up with the demand. For Gun Nuts, there's the Arsenal Overhaul mod, available in varying degrees for all 3 S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games. To elaborate, this mod introduces about more than 60 guns in the games to add more variety in the mix and minimizing the ennui that was the original vanilla weapons. Each gun has varying degrees of effectiveness and, although there are some grammar problems, detailed descriptions about them. With this mod, you feel like you are in Gun Heaven.
• Several of these have been made for the Descent engine, such as Pumo Mines(a total conversion) and Descent Vignettes.
• The modding community for the games of the Dark Forces Saga was also very thriving in the past, especially for Dark Forces (link directs to the major DF fansite DF-21.net) and Jedi Knight (link directs to the major JK fansite The Massassi Temple). And even so, new levels are still being worked on even today, with recent major releases including Magrucko Daines and TODOA. Some mod developers, such as Patrick Haslow (creator of The Dark Tide) have even worked on major titles such as Wolfenstein and BioShock Infinite.
• The unfinished Game Boy Color prototype of Resident Evil has a mod to make it playable, although it still has No Ending.
• The Wolfenstein 3-D community may not be as prolific as Doom's, but there are still many, many mapsets and conversions available for the game.
• Blood (1997) has a prolific modding scene:
• The Carnivores fandom has produced many mods and addons over the years, starting with simple reskins of existing animals, and eventually going up to completely new animals, weapons, maps and even several total-conversion packs. One of the most complete and critically acclaimed total-conversions would be Carnivores Triassic, essentially a fan-made sequel which expands upon the lore of the original trilogy while introducing a completely new setting with its own storyline, assets and challenges.
• Postal 2 had a game mod created in response to complaints about the Apocalypse Weekend add-on entitled "A Week in Paradise", which fixed various issues, added new weapons/gore, and increased the difficulty. This mod was so successful the developer officially released it in the "Fudge Pack".
• Quake is next to Doom regarding modding popularity, and has spawned a scene equally as healthy.
  • The original game was written at high-level in a language called QuakeC, which allowed an easy manipulation of the game's own variables. Later, the proliferation of Level Editors such as the Radiant series, QuArK and Worldcraft allowed people to develop not only their own, well, levels, but also campaigns, leading to the existence of Beyond Belief (crafted by one Matthias Worch, who later helped Legend Entertainment develop games such as The Wheel of Time, Unreal Mission Pack: Return to Na Pali and Unreal II: The Awakening), X-Men: The Ravages of Apocalypse, Abyss of Pandemonium and multiplayer-oriented mods such as Team Fortress 1 and most importantly Threewave CTF.
  • The release of its source code allowed development of engines such as QuakeSpasm and DarkPlaces, which in turn gave birth to games such as Nexuiz and Xonotic and mods such as Arcane Dimensions.
  • The 2021 remastered edition of the game added an addons section, from where mods could be downloaded and added to the game without having to exit the game itself. The available mods are Quake 64 (effectively the Nintendo 64 version of the game ported to the Quake engine), Honey, Underdark Overbright, Terra, The Punishment Due, Rubicon 2, the aforementioned Beyond Belief, Contract Revoked, Deathmatch Dimension, Spiritworld, QDOOM and Slave Zero X: Episode Enyo.

    Hack-and-Slash 

• Among the Devil May Cry games, Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, Devil May Cry 4, DmC: Devil May Cry and Devil May Cry 5 have an active modding scene which is mainly cosmetic, though more gameplay-focused modders emerged over the years, which also covered the older games, especially Devil May Cry 2. There are also notable mods whose features were later implemented by Capcom in updated versions of the involved games:
  • Style Switching Mod for DMC3 which gives you the ability to switch styles on the fly DMC4-style and makes the questionable PC port of DMC3 run better. The Nintendo Switch port incorporates an official Style Switching feature into gameplay (known as Freestyle Mode), as well as the ability to swap through all weapons on the fly with the right control stick. The option to play with the original fixed loadout for your style and weapons is also available.
  • Using a tool for the PC version of DMC5 makes it possible to play as Vergil in the vanilla game, using a few techniques that he doesn't use in his boss fight. A later mod attempted to make this a more complete experience with better hit boxes and fewer oddities. With the Special Edition elevating Vergil to fully playable, what was left behind were actually remnants of a system used to test Vergil's moveset in his boss version.

    Maze Game 

• Pac-Man Arcade for the Atari 2600. It was basically hacked from the Atari 2600 version of Ms. Pac-Man (which in itself was a hack of Namco's arcade Pac-Man) to make a version of Pac-Man that was much closer to the arcade version than the Porting Disaster that Atari cursed the system with. With the exception of the blue ghost sound and the absence of Namco's Galaxian flagship (or the Atari "fuji" logo on the Atari 8-bit computer and 5200 versions) as one of the bonus prizes, it comes pretty close to being an arcade-quality port.
  • Pac-Man Collection for the Atari 7800 was basically a hacked version of Ms. Pac-Man for that system that turned the game into Pac-Man and a few other maze hacks.

    Pinball 

• Modifying pinball games is popular among game collectors. Simple modifications include adding additional toys to the playfield or replacing the backbox translite artwork, while more elaborate changes include repainting the cabinet or metalwork, replacing or updating the playfield lights, or retheming an entire game. Truly ambitious modders have even burned their own ROMs with custom software, though the availability of third-party controller boards has made software changes easier for more hobbyists. One of the most common mods is changing the otherwise orange-and-black dot-matrix display to a simulated colored DMD.
• Star Wars (Data East) got a rom update created by fans and hobbyists that made major revisions to the rules, fixed bugs, and improved game balance.
• Paragon was originally designed for four flippers, but tables for Europe were modified to only use three flippers, to better appeal to the preferences of Italian players.
• Hobbyists and companies have taken Stern Pinball's NFL — which can already be customized with team-specific backbox translites — and further tailored them for specific teams and players, with new cabinet and translite art, additional lighting mods, and more playfield toys.
• In 2012, pinball player Eric Priepke finished "Cactus Canyon Continued", a project that updated Williams Electronics' Cactus Canyon with an expanded and complete ruleset, new game modes, and additional animations. The code is available for free online, and requires only a Cactus Canyon table and P-ROC controller board.
• Many owners of The Flintstones have opted to replace the backbox translite (which shows the actors from the 1994 live-action movie) with one depicting the animated characters instead. There's even an infamous R-rated translite that suggests the two families are into... alternative lifestyles.
• America's Most Haunted makes this a feature of the game — the software is fully open sourced, the sound files can be replaced by any PC, and the PinHeck controller board allows owners to make updates by swapping SD cards.
• A common and easy mod for Last Action Hero is to replace the stock translite with one based on the movie poster, which conveniently gets rid of Schwarzenegger's Death Glare. There are also rom upgrades that tweak the rules and add additional quotes and features.
• Stern Pinball got into the habit of selling official accessories for their games in The New '10s. Their lineup ranges from adding to a game's aesthetic (themed knobs for the plunger handle, artwork for the sides of the game's interior - ordinarily exclusive to Limited Edition models - and toppers^note Essentially a display piece that sits on top of the machine's backbox) to adding functionality (shaker motors and headphone jacks).
• Stranger Things is unique in that it has a special ultraviolet lighting kit that activates during certain game modes, revealing hidden parts of the playfield's artwork. The implication that the mod was being developed alongside the game itself garnered controversy, with many comparing it to on-disc Downloadable Content in video games.

    Platform 

• Super Mario Bros.:
  • The Super Mario World hacking scene is extremely active, thanks largely to the user-friendly Lunar Magic editing program for the game. There are dozens of full hacks available at SMW Central, and most of them have been LP'ed on YouTube if you're curious to see how they work. Examples include:
    1. New Super Mario World 1: The Twelve Magic Orbs. It's one of the most famous ROM hacks ever made, thanks to its impressive visuals, soundtrack and levels.
    2. The Second Reality Project Reloaded and its sequel. It's a remake of two ROM hacks, with the content from the second tucked away in a secret world. The author of the Let's Play in question also features his earlier Let's Plays of the two separate original hacks as a comparison. One of those hacks being Chaos CompleXX, a So Intentionally Bad It's Good parody of a typical bad hack.
    3. Super Mario Odyssey (no relation to Super Mario Odyssey)
    4. SMW2+ 3: The Essence Star
    5. 'the, Eyeless, Game.bps and Call of Cthulhu are horror-themed hacks.
    6. Super Mario Bros. 3X is a hack influenced by the NES / Famicom Super Mario Bros. games, but the graphics make it look like a hack of Super Mario All-Stars. This is misleading, because it is actually a hack of Super Mario World.
    7. There is also the famous Kaizo Mario World, which started a trend of unfair level design and caused quite a bit of annoyance over at SMWCentral.
    8. Brutal Mario is a well-made hack. It is known for having a large variety of bosses, most of which come from unrelated SNES games, such as: Trials of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Kirby Super Star, Final Fantasy IV and V, Mega Man 7, and other Mario games including Paper Mario, Yoshi's Island, and Super Mario Bros. 3.
    9. R-ACK and its interquel ~omh~ are a duo of collaboration hacks by "Team JANK". Offering a variety of levels designed to be either good, bad, or questionable; the games together tell the story of an abstract being called "The Plumber" journeying through the lands of R-ACK and Omhland, eventually discovering a group of Level Goals plotting to resurrect their fallen leader.
  • For a while, there was also "Automatic Mario," which were levels that required no player input and simply propelled Mario through the level through various insane means. This is the original Joystiq article on it, as preserved on Engadget. Then the movement proceeded to set them to various anime theme songs. It arguably reached its peak with an eleven-minute-long medley of various theme songs and Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now". In many cases, especially the latter two, they are a sight to behold.
  • Major Super Mario Bros. 3 mods include Strange Mario Bros. 3, Mario Adventure, and Super Mario Bros. 3Mix. The developer of Mario Adventure (DahrkDaiz) is currently (as of January 2016) in the process of making a new hack using the disassembly work of the creator of 3Mix (Captain Southbird), called Koopa Kingdom Escape.
  • A recent game that has been modded is New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Thanks to the level editor Reggie!^note (named after Reggie Fils-Aime), mods for the game are starting to become widespread. One of the more well known examples is Newer Super Mario Bros. Wii, whose official site includes a few smaller mods in addition to the main one.
  • Super Mario 64 hacks became more prominent with the rise of level model importing tools as well as the decompilation of the base game. Super Mario 64 ROM Hacks are available on romhacking.com and feature a broad variety including:
    1. Older style hacks featuring just custom levels and music, such as SM64: The Missing Stars, the first full SM64 hack, Super Mario 74, and Super Mario Star Road^note the developers of this hack have been attempting to make a version for SM64DS as well.
    2. The Star Revenge series, featuring colorful visuals and music ports, as well as improvements to Mario’s movement and the camera, tied together in a largely contrived storyline.
    3. Hacks by Kaze Emanuar include lots of custom coding for new objects and gameplay systems, prominently featured in Super Mario 64: Last Impact and Super Mario 64 Land. Kaze even made Super Mario 64: Ocarina of Time, a crossover hack blending in the world and items from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time with Mario 64 gameplay. Also made by Kaze is Super Mario 64 Chaos Edition, a corruption of Mario 64 with all kinds of glitches using built-in Gameshark codes that randomly turn on and off and features intended to amuse and/or annoy the player while still keeping it (for the most part) playable, inviting many a Self-Imposed Challenge to get all the stars.
    4. "Decomp" hacks featuring extensive modifications to the Mario 64 game engine using the decompilation of the base game while also including custom levels, music, and mechanics. These hacks are the newest types and include the likes of Serene Fusion, a collaboration hack that is the spiritual successor to Super Mario 74 with many side minigames, Beyond the Cursed Mirror, a hack with RPG elements and in-game equippable costumes and badges, and Super Mario and the Monstrous Manor, a puzzle hack that takes inspiration from Luigi’s Mansion down to the spookiness and money collecting.
    5. Character replacement hacks that keep the levels from vanilla, but replace Mario with other characters with their own unique abilities, such as Super Bowsette 64 (starring the memetic character herself with actual fireball throwing abilities), Pizza Tower 64 (which replaces Mario with Peppino Spaghetti, right down to including a number of Peppino's moves like his Super Jump and replacing the Goombas with Cheeseslimes), and TOTSUGEKI 64 (another meme-based hack, starring May, who can actually ride her dolphin friend complete with TOTSUGEKI voice clip).
    6. A randomizer for Super Mario 64, which shuffles the positions of objects and level entrance warps and randomizes the music, skybox, and color of Mario’s clothes.
    7. Super Mario 64 Online, a tool that enables online multiplayer for Super Mario 64.
  • Super Mario 64 Plus is this for Super Mario 64 requiring an original rom to run. It features wide screen support a plethora of options to make the game more challenging such as a one hit kill mode. There's even alot of gameplay tweaks that improve the controls and a modern camera control. Render96 is a mod of this mod updating the game into an HD style while redesigning the character models to be based off the official render artwork. It even includes Luigi and Wario as unlockable characters with their own unique moves.
  • A hacking scene for both Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 is starting to pick up. A Level Editor called Anarchy in the Galaxy has risen to prominence, and while it's not all the way completed, impressive things have been done, like harder missions and imported levels from Super Mario Sunshine.
  • ATA's Extra Mario Bros. is a technically impressive conversion of Super Mario Bros. into a nonlinear Metroidvania. The same hacker's Luigi no Nazo is a sillier hack of the same game, borrowing a lot of annoying features from Transformers: Convoy no Nazo and featuring Multiple Endings. ATA has also produced hacks based on Mega Man courses (e.g. VS Airman which is clearly a reference to the Airman stage in Mega Man II).
  • The hacking community of Super Mario Bros. outside Japan has produced few notable works. Some notable hacks include Frantik's Super Mario Unlimited which improved graphics and added new items and collectives; and w7n's in-progress Rohrleitung Gate which enhances the music using FM channels and enabled free horizontal scrolling within 2 pages and parallex scrolling effects.
  • Nintendo themselves joined the scene in the Wii U game NES Remix, which alters Super Mario Bros. levels (and other NES games). Generally the mods affect physics, visuals, and player/enemy behavior rather than changing the level itself.
  • When New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe inspired the creation of the fan-made Bowsette transformation for Bowser, quite a few hacks were designed that replaced Bowser with Bowsette. These include a hack for Super Mario Bros.^note with various variations of Bowsette's design as options, along with one that transforms Mario and Luigi into their own Peach-like forms upon powering up, a hack for Super Mario World^note which also improves the game in other areas, as well as a version that swaps Peach and Bowser's roles, and a hack for New Super Mario Bros. Wii^note this one has an option to replace the final boss music with custom music from Segtendo and OverClocked ReMix.
  • Another mod, Mario's Mystery Meat, themes itself after various in-jokes among the Vinesauce community (particularly ones surrounding the group's frontman, Vinny).
  • The Beatles Adventures in Pepperland is a 2021 game mod of Super Mario Bros. 2, based loosely on the 1968 Beatles film Yellow Submarine.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • For humor, someone named VAdaPEGA made a mod of the original Sonic the Hedgehog, retitled Sonic Boomed, with Roger Craig Smith's stupid, canned catchphrases as Sonic. Effectively shutting down any argument that Sonic fans are blinded by nostalgia or that these new games are underrated gems. He quips about everything: grabbing rings, using Springs, beating a level, rolling into a ball, pressing switches, everything. It is extra hilarious when playing Labyrinth Zone, since Sonic continually runs his mouth even while underwater or drowning. The game throws a lampshade on the whole thing with a weary-looking Sonic on the title screen.
  • A special case is the Knuckles in Sonic 1 hack, which (as the name implies) makes Knuckles into the playable character in the original Sonic the Hedgehog, in a similar fashion to the Knuckles in Sonic 2 that is obtained by connecting Sonic the Hedgehog 2 to Sonic & Knuckles. What makes this interesting is that Sonic Team had tried and failed to put Knuckles in the first game during the making of S&K, citing color palette limitations. To make matters even more interesting, there is another version which inserts Tails into the game, complete with spin dash and flight.
  • Hacking has enabled anyone who's interested to play through all three original-series games as Amy Rose, using her Sonic Advance moveset.
  • There is a robust community of modders creating ROM hacks of the original series of Sonic games, ranging from the simple, such as recolored levels and simple character replacement (by modifying other characters' sprites), to the intricate, such as creating new level layouts and/or art, adding new characters with unique special abilities, adding new abilities to existing characters, adding new music (either by porting it from other games or creating it from scratch), and even porting or creating new boss characters; some more ambitious projects have arguably converted a given Sonic game into what qualifies as a new entry in the series. Most notable is the heavily recoded Sonic the Hedgehog Megamix, a romhack of the original Sonic, which features saves, 4 new characters besides just Sonic, a new soundtrack, new level art as well as secret 4th acts for each level, new moves and abilities, super forms, new bosses, and a load of other features such as a heavily expanded Sound Test, more options, and Time Attack modes (including a Boss Rush Mode). It's so good that people have likened it to a 5th 2D Sonic game. Megamix has now become so expansive that it has been ported to Sega CD format, and will apparently (when the game is properly burned to a CD-R, of course) even play on an actual working Sega CD. Madness.
  • Sonic 2 Long Version, which includes previously Dummied Out levels such as the Hidden Palace. There is also a Knuckles version available.
  • Sonic 3 Complete, the optimized version of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, which was promised by Sega before time and space limitations forced them to split the game in two. It would eventually evolve into the Genesis equivalent of the Sonic & Knuckles Collection for the PC with much more content, including such features as:
    1. Single-player controlling of Tails' flight, including carry of Sonic, by using the Up direction. (Borrowed from the 2013 iOS/Android ports of Sonic 1 and 2.)
    2. An opening cutscene for Tails (he originally just started the game straight on Angel Island)
    3. Specialised activation of Super/Hyper mode, i.e. the player can't inadvertently activate it just by double tapping jump (as is necessary for all three characters), but instead by pressing a button to jump then a different button to transform (e.g. C first, then B).
    4. Consistent behaviour of monitors when attacked from below (original versions behaved differently).
    5. Consistent music throughout games.
    6. Swapping out the music for the Sonic & Knuckles Collection versions and the Main Theme/1-Up/Game Over/Continue themes to Masato Nakamura's original composition for the first two games.
    7. The option to use Sonic 3's Big Arms final boss phase, cut from Sonic and/or Tails' Launch Base Zone act in original combined edition.
    8. Improved Super Sonic sprite animation.
    9. The choice of using Sonic's old sprites from the first game or Sonic 2 (as was originally intended in the development of Sonic 3).
    10. Knuckles' intro cutscene with Eggrobo logically occurs on Angel Island Zone rather than Mushroom Hill.
    11. Optional opening of different paths for Knuckles for "research purposes".
    12. The ability to change gameplay styles to match that of the original game, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, or Sonic CD (both the original and iOS versions).
    13. The option to have Flying Battery Zone be the fifth zone in progression as originally planned.
    14. The Easy and Normal difficulty modes from Sonic Jam.
    15. A "Casual Mode" where the player cannot lose rings.
    16. A large degree of mix-and-match customisation for the player's ideal Sonic 3 experience.
  • Sonic Classic Heroes combines the levels from Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 back to back. More importantly, it allows for all three members of Team Sonic or Team Chaotix to be played in the three-at-once style of Sonic Heroes. Also present are sprites and power-ups from Sonic 3 (such as the elemental shields), the Super Peelout from Sonic the Hedgehog CD, special stages from both games, super and hyper forms for every character, and a plethora of other features. This is the combination of two separate hacks: Sonic 2: Heroes (which gives you the above features but only with the levels from Sonic 2) and Sonic 1+2 (Sonic 1 and 2 back-to-back) and is being developed by the creators of both hacks.
  • Sally Acorn in Sonic the Hedgehog puts Sally from the Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM) cartoon in the first Sonic game. And actually, the sprite work was extremely well done. Instead of spinning, she uses Nicole as a taser. That same hacker has now done several secondary characters in Sonic 1, including Amy, Vector, and Charmy Bee. Charmy's game is a complete Game Breaker since (just like in Knuckles Chaotix) he can fly forever with no cool down period. Other hackers have managed to implement characters such as Shadow, Metal Sonic, Mario and Motobug!
  • Sonic Generations is starting to develop a modding community of its own. In particular, one team successfully ported the Day levels of Sonic Unleashed to the game. Custom level editors like CPKREDIR and Sonic GMI are also starting to catch on.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 2 XL is an interesting hack involving onion rings. While Sonic still needs these rings for protection, collecting too many makes Sonic gain weight, and the fatter he gets, the slower he moves and the lower he can jump. This means players can't just blaze through the levels unless they want to collect all the rings along the way and make Sonic an immobile blob of fat. Speaking of immobile Sonic, he will die in a few seconds if he becomes too fat to move, possibly from a heart attack. Ring monitors also have to be avoided like the plague and Tails will make things worse for you if he keeps grabbing rings. Luckily, the hack has special monitors that reset Sonic's weight to normal. To prevent the game from being unwinnable in the water sections, fat Sonic has buoyancy and can jump even higher underwater.
  • Robotnik's Revenge is a Boss Game featuring every single boss from the first two games.
  • It is worth mentioning that Sega is aware of the booming modding scene for the Genesis / Mega Drive games. So much so that they released a centralized location for people to share their mods. (You do need to own the original games in order to play the mods, though.)
  • To add to that, one of the original Travellers Tales games' developers, Jon Burton made his own official game mod of Sonic 3D Blast; a "Director's Cut" which not only fine tunes some of the physics and more frustrating elements of the original game, but adds the ability to turn Super Sonic, tweaks a few levels and layouts (including editing and adding some of the games' badniks), adds a level menu to backtrack across the game, a Password function, and a Time Challenge mode, along with a Level Editor mode much akin to the four mainstream Genesis titles.
  • Sonic Mania & Hatsune Miku is a fan made modification of Sonic Mania which alters the sprites of Sonic to that of Miku wearing the 20th Anniversary Sonic outfit. It also comes with an altered storyline and visually revamps the levels, enemies and bosses to reflect the new plot, while also mashing Mania's soundtrack with popular Vocaloid songs. The custom opening video detailing the new plot has to be seen to be believed...
  • The Steam version of Sonic Adventure has the BetterSADX mod, which not only fixes everything wrong with the Steam port but also includes such things as improved Dreamcast models, toggleable Dreamcast DLC, Super Sonic playable in normal levels, and support for additional mods thanks to the included SADX Mod Loader. It has since been succeeded by SADX Mod Installer, which offers bleeding edge updates for mods, more customization for mods the end user wants download and install, presets ranging from converting the game into the Dreamcast version or enhanced the GameCube version's features, and supports PC releases of Sonic Adventure DX instead of just the Steam version.
  • The Steam version of Sonic Adventure 2 has seen a slew of mods being created for it thanks to the SA2 Mod Loader, which gave way to mods that has been fixing issues with the port while restoring features from the Dreamcast version, while other mods replace characters with custom ones, creating new stages or porting/recreating ones from other Sonic the Hedgehog games, and overhauling the game's Chao Garden.
  • Totino's Mania is another Sonic Mania mod, this time by the SiIvaGunner team. It is inspired in part by Totino's sponsorship of the Sonic 25th Anniversary Livestream, where Sonic Mania itself was first unveiled. The mod mainly features a Theme-and-Variations Soundtrack based on the song from Tim & Eric's bizarre Totino's music video, and also replaces the rings with pizza rolls.
  • Sonic 3: Angel Island Revisited (A.I.R.) is one part Game Mod (as it runs on top of the original Sonic 3 & Knuckles ROM) and one part fan remaster of Sonic 3 & Knuckles in the vein of Christian Whitehead's Sonic CD, Sonic 1, and Sonic 2 mobile releases. Featuring a plethora of upgrades such as widescreen support, smooth sprite rotation, remastered audio, and various Sonic 3 bugfixes and gameplay upgrades/quality-of-life enhancements in the style of Sonic 3 Complete. The game also supports game mods so fans can inject their own content as well.
    • The Extra Slot Mighty, Extra Slot Ray, and Extra Slot Amy mods adapt Mighty the Armadillo and Ray the Flying Squirrel from Sonic Mania alongside Amy Rose as playable characters in Sonic 3 A.I.R. The most significant selling point of the mods is that none of the characters overwrite any of the already playable characters in the game, using a special framework designed for that purpose. Mighty plays like he did in Sonic Mania, with the ability to ignore damage from spiky objects while rolling. His hammer drop move that originated from Sonic Mania, and his wall climb move from Knuckles' Chaotix. In addition, an alternate wall slide move inspired by the Sonic Mania mod, Sonic Megamix Mania. On top of this, Mighty has new character-exclusive levels in Angel Island Zone and Lava Reef Zone. Ray plays similarly to how he handled in Sonic Mania, with the ability to gain extra height if the player presses up on the Gamepad. If the player desires, they can have Ray replace Tails as the partner character for everyone except Tails. Amy takes inspiration from ANTONBLAST with new bouncing abilities. Note: while all play fine right now, the creator claims there'll be updates in the near future, with plans to add Metal Sonic Kai as a playable character. A special version of the mods were showcased at the 2022 Sonic Hacking Contest, where Mighty and Ray are combined into one mod. It won trophies for 2nd best and best character implementation in the 2D PC category.
    • Agent Stone in Sonic 3 A.I.R. adapts Agent Stone from the movies as another antagonist to deal with alongside Eggman and Knuckles. This mod not only reworks the minibosses into machines controlled by Stone, but it also has him control the Egg Cannon in place of Eggman, and he replaces Eggrobo in Knuckles's version of the game. There are even custom boss battles, some of which exclusive to Knuckles (though certain Extra Slot characters can fight them as well). Note that the mod is currently only available as a demo. The mod originally debuted in the 2022 Sonic Hacking Contest, with only up to Launch Base Zone changed. It won trophies for best graphical work and best new or modified boss design, as well getting an honorable mention among the contest's media panelists as one of the best mods overall for the 2D PC category. It returned the following year, this time with changes up to Lava Reef Zone.
    • Sonic 3 & Tenna replaces Dr. Eggman with VC!Deltarune's Tenna, with several custom bosses, additional characters from the game making appearances, and a few Unexpected Gameplay Changes for good measure. There's even a bit of special compatibility with Extra Slot Spamton. Note that the mod has no effect when playing as Knuckles.
  • The decompilation ports of the Sonic 1 & 2 and CD mobile remasters later not only allows players to enjoy these games natively on PC and other platforms, but later updates for them implemented a mod loader, allowing modders to create various mods for these games and fan remasters of these games.
    • Sonic 1 Forever and Sonic 2 Absolute are a pair of enhanced versions of the Sonic 1 and 2 remasters respectively that restores elements from their original Genesis versions, adds various unlockables and new modes, toggles for many gameplay options, extra playable characters, and an achievement system.
    • Sonic CD Restored is a fangame based on the decompilation port that aims to recreate an authentic speedrunning experience of the original 1993 version while retaining the improvements from the remaster, features Hybrid and Unified OST arrangements with an unlockable custom OST option, and promotes Amy Rose to playable. Sonic CD: Miracle Edition, on the other hand, is a mod for the decompilation port that provides a Sonic 3: A.I.R.-like experience with a wealth gameplay, audio, and visual options.
  • Sonic Origins Ultrafix is a mod of Sonic Origins designed to modify all four main games in the collection both mechanically and visually in order to address underlying issues and make things more consistent between games. The Classic Modes have also been modified to be more faithful to their original sources (for example, you can no longer access the Hidden Palace through Mystic Cave Zone Act 2 in Sonic 2's Classic Mode).
  • Shadow the Hedgehog Reloaded is an improvement mod for the Gamecube version of Shadow the Hedgehog. The mod features improved controls for Shadow, bugfixes, skippable cutscenes, and widescreen support. The last story can be unlocked by clearing three endings instead of all of them and Expert mode is unlocked by completing the final story instead of achieving A ranks in every level.
• Mega Man X3 got its own in the form of Mega Man X3 - Zero Project by Justin3009, which allows Zero to be fully playable just like in X5 onwards and gives him his Black Armor along with X's MAX Hyper Armor. As of this writing, he's been working on a 4.0 (and for now final) update, which adds a save function in the place of the passwords (And yes, it saves your Sub-Tank storage and the final stages you completed), and a very functional New Game Plus feature that allows you to keep all of the powerups (Including Zero's saber for X) you've obtained.
• Mega Man Zero 3 has been the target of various well done sprite hacks that replaces Zero with a completely different character such as Vent, or Copy X. First started off as a hack that allowed the ability to play as Omega Zero which was basically a palette swap of Zero and giving the player access to his exclusive attacks.
  • Rockman No Constancy replaces the environments, attacks, and even the music: rather than Mega Man 2's futuristic looking stages, the ones in Constancy look more mystic or dreamlike (think Sonic CD). Think the game is easier? Think again. The bosses have faster attacks, the stages have brand new gimmicks, the stages themselves are new, and the scenery is just beautiful, as is the music (Yes, it's taken from various sources, but the soundtrack is beautiful anyway). For a peek, look right here.
  • Rockman CX far outclasses the above, with a revamped gameplay style reminiscent of Mega Man X, even more new gimmicks, a completely new set of Robot Masters, a great soundtrack, and a new plot revolving around Mega Man's Evil Counterpart, Rockman CX. It really must be seen to be believed.
  • Rockman 4 Minus ∞ did the same thing for 4, but adds more new features than you or your grandmother can handle.
• Mega Man X6 has garnered an extensive ROM hacking project in the form of the Mega Man X6 Tweaks lead by acediez that aims to fix many of the game's criticized gameplay elements, rebalancing the game's brutal difficulty curve, toggle or even outright remove Nightmare effects, restore some of the Dummied Out features leftover in the game's code, provide an option to update the game's original character dialogue portraits with faithfully redrawn ones, and even re-translating the game's infamous English script. If that wasn't enough, there's also a custom patcher utility that allows players to tweak a wealth of features in the game, ranging from how the characters control, adjusting the rank system and Nightmare Soul requirements to trigger certain events, swapping the game's logo and title screen graphics, changing the appearance of X's Ultimate Armor, and much, much more.
• Kirby:
  • Kirby: Revenge of Dream Land originally started out as a hard mode hack, then grew into a mod that greatly increases the difficulty of the main game, replaces some tracks with remixes and adds new attacks for bosses.
  • Kirby's Halloween Adventure is a Holiday Mode romhack of Kirby's Adventure taking place during the fall season and greatly expanding on the original game's enemies and level tropes, pitting Kirby to traverse Horror themed locations and monsters, serving as a Halloween Episode for the series, exploding pumpkins and all.
• Eversion, having its source code in a text file for all to see, is very easy to modify. Common mods are designed to access its ten or so Minus Worlds or allow for flight or invinciblity.
• The PC version of Prince of Persia had an even harder level hack called 4D Prince of Persia back in 1994. In more recent years, however, hackers became capable of deeper modifications, and now you can get many new level sets, tiles and character sprites — you may play with levels and graphics from the excellent SNES version. Someone even made a launcher to use all of the stuff combined.
• Thanks to the way lots of data is found in separate files, Cave Story has a lot of mods, as its fan-forum can attest. Jenka's Nightmare is one of the most popular ones.
• Somari was a pirated Famicom port of Sonic the Hedgehog with Mario replacing Sonic. In turn, the company made a Doraemon total conversion of it.
  • A hack of Somari was released by the jabu titled Sonic The Hedgehog (NES) Improvement that improves the graphics and gameplay, and replaces Mario with Sonic. Another version of that hack was then released by Ti, which had improved music. Since then, other hackers have released a "Volume 2" hack which further improved the game as well as added more features.
• The Banjo's Backpack tool allows for custom Banjo-Kazooie levels. If you're familiar with the infamous cut worlds like Mount Fire-Eyes, it won't surprise you to know that people have been jumping to create said cut worlds, along with recreations of levels from other games like Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. However, these are only works in progress as the tool is still relatively new. Only a few original worlds not based on anything have been released so far.
• Custom levels for Super Monkey Ball 1 & 2 are possible, although difficult since you need to use Blender, a free 3D modeling program, with a bunch of plugins to get it to work. However the possibilities are quite stunning, with the ''Monkeyed Ball'' hack completely replacing every level in 2's story mode with brand new stages and worlds.
• The Commander Keen series was abandoned after the sixth game as Id Software went on to better things, despite a teaser of a new trilogy after the sixth game where Keen fights to save the universe. The show must go on, so the fans took it upon themselves to create the unofficial "The Universe Is Toast!" trilogy from mods of Keen 4-6.
• In Donkey Kong Country:
  • An official one, the Donkey Kong Country Competition Cartridge, was made as part of a Blockbuster video game competition. 2,500 copies were made, and after the contest ended, Nintendo Power mailed copies to subscribers. To date, it's one of the rarest video games ever made.
  • "Asshole Donkey Kong", a super hard ROM hack in the vein of Kaizo Mario World.
• Spyro the Dragon:
• Celeste has an active modding scene, with modders making various new chapters, custom mechanics for those maps, and even allowing players to play together online. Some notable mods include:
  • Cavern of the Ancients and Enchanted Canyon both feature new mechanics and follow the main game's structure.
  • Similarly, Shrouded Thoughts features a ton of new mechanics, as well as a factory theme and a small story that happens after Farewell.
  • The mod Partnership is a mod that requires the help of another player to make it through, which is notable for a game whose multiplayer only exists through mods.
  • Glyph was known as one of the most beautiful mods ever created in Celeste. It features detailed rooms, four B-side maps, and its own soundtrack.
  • The 2020 Celeste Spring Community Collab can feel like its own fangame, as it features new music, tons of new mini-chapters to play separated to five lobbies for each difficulty, uses lots of new mechanics and items, trains newer players in advanced tech, and has some of the hardest levels in the community. The Strawberry Jam Collab follows it up a few years later, ending up much larger and map-packed than it.
  • And then there is Guneline, whose sole purpose is giving Madeline a gun.
• The 2017 remake of Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap gained a mod based on Monica's Gang, referencing a Brazilian Dolled-Up Installment version of the original Master System game.
• Pizza Tower
  • One mod replaces the Toppins with Moe Anthropomorphic versions designed by Rule 34 artist minus8. The mod is very thorough, altering every graphic featuring to Toppins in some way.
  • Other aesthetic mods replace Peppino with characters such as NiGHTS and an Eevee. These mods can be quite thorough, even reanimating cutscenes, rank screens, and the opening, and they go so far as to give side character Gustavo the same treatment, as well as playable bosses.
  • And for those who want a challenge, there's Lap Hell, allowing you to do extra laps beyond Lap 2. More details in the Nintendo Hard section above.
• Alien Soldier: The 6-Button Controller Support mod does just that, remapping the fire-mode, Counter Force, and Zero Teleport to the X, Y, and Z buttons of a 6-button Sega Genesis controller (as opposed to their original assignments of down+A, double-tap B, and down+C, respectively). There are several variants of this mod: One that makes the fire-mode button a "hold" function instead of a "toggle" function (intended for controllers with shoulder buttons), one that keeps it a toggle, and a "Hybrid" variant that retains the original 3-button inputs in addition to the new 6-button ones. Other than that, the game is the same. It's generally regarded as a better way to play the game due to not having to cram all the functions into compound inputs.

    Racing 

• The Formula One F1 Challenge '99-'02 (known as F1 Career Challenge on consoles) has had numerous mods for it since its 2003 release, including mods for various other F1 seasons and even other motorsport disciplines such as NASCAR and prototypes. One mod, known as F1 Challenge VB, includes every Formula one season starting from 1950 up until 2024, with numerous extra track mods, including numerous year to year permutations of circuits F1 has run on as well as tracks that F1 hasn't even run on such as the Isle of Man TT course and Laguna Seca.
  • The similar driving simulator Assetto Corsa is also mod-friendly as well, despite being a paid game unlike the former two. In fact, the game was designed to support a wide array of game mods from cars to tracks.
• Despite being a console only franchise, Gran Turismo mainline games up until 6 has had a surprising number of mods once modders were able to figure out how to mod the games on emulator.
  • As expected from modding, Gran Turismo 2 mods ranged from silly to serious. On one side, there's the meme-themed Epic Turismo 2 that adds joke cars such as Top Gear's Hammerhead-i Eagle Thrust and the Subaru Outback Limo, ridiculous build cars like the 1000hp Fiat Seicento dragster and events featuring meme cars such as the Goofy ahh cup (yes, the name of the event is spelt that way). On the other side of the scale, there's Turismo 2 Plus and Gran Turismo 2 A-Spec. Plus was focused more towards numerous bug and texture fixes and restoration of Dummied Out content, while A-Spec serves as an unofficial expansion pack that adds dozens of all-new vehicles. Some are cars that are already widely renowned like the Le Mans-winning Alpine-Renault A442B and BMW V12 LMR prototype racers, but there's also plenty of obscure race cars such as a Lancia 037 GT500, a Joke Car for the JGTC championship inspired by a Japanese team's actual attempt to bring a Lancia 037 rally car to the series in 1994. A-Spec also modifies some events to make it more challenging (for example, the National League now features prototype race cars on latter races) and nerfed the JGTC race cars to fit their real world power outputs.
  • 4 has the Randomizer mod. As the name implies, the mod randomizes the prize cars that you got from events. The seed that you used are all completely randomized from what name do you input to your save file at the start of the game. This means you can win Group C or prototype race cars like Minolta Toyota 88C-V, Toyota GT-ONE, Mazda 787B or even the Formula Gran Turismo early or be rewarded with a shitbox and/or useless vehicles like the Benz Patent-Motorwagen or Ford Model T after winning an incredibly long event like the 24 Hour of Nürburgring or Le Mans.
• Grand Prix Legends by Papyrus Design Group continues to survive thanks to gradual improvements and hundreds of modded tracks and new car sets.
• NASCAR Racing 2003 Season, also created by Papyrus Design Group, has its own dedicated fanbase that continues to make mods 13 years after the original was released. Even though its a NASCAR simulation, it also has mods for other racing series, due to the physics engine the game had is realistic enough that it still managed to rival the physics engine from other racing simulation games released much later than NR2003.
• Need for Speed:
  • Early Need for Speed games quickly had their vehicle data reverse-engineered which made it able to modify them to an extent. Starting with Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit, the modding scene really kicked off for a number of reasons. One was that III: Hot Pursuit allowed for adding more cars than what it came with. This was intended for downloadable official bonus vehicles, but not limited to these, also because Electronic Arts never made enough vehicles to fill all 50 slots in the game. The fans made way more than that, so even "car managers" were developed that allowed for quickly switching between sets of cars outside the game. Also, upon learning about the car maker scene around III: Hot Pursuit, Electronic Arts released their own car-building tools to the public. At least one III: Hot Pursuit car maker was hired by EA to work on future Need for Speed games. But it wasn't only the cars that the scene dealt with: They quickly also cracked the track files and not only modded existing tracks, but successfully converted and imported Need for Speed II tracks into III: Hot Pursuit.
    • High Stakes largely uses the same file formats as its predecessor, III: Hot Pursuit, as many vehicles and tracks were carried over from it. But it was soon discovered (and made a lot use of) that High Stakes has got a much more powerful engine, so especially the car-building style itself changed. For one, High Stakes supports visual damage to vehicles which many car makers include in their vehicles. But they quickly went beyond the vehicles that came with the game, replaced the opaque black windows with clear ones, modeled the cars' interiors and switched from 2D-shaded low-poly to detailed hi-poly carbodies and from textured to modeled wheels. Since few racing games offer this degree of modding, mods for High Stakes are still being made. And it's still a pity that the game supports no more than 49 vehicles at a time.
  • The second-generation games of the franchise, particularly Underground 2, Most Wanted and Carbon, have equally received attention from the modding community with numerous mods that range from graphic reworks to add-on vehicles. Carbon, however, received by far the biggest mod out of the available in the form of Battle Royale, a complete revamp of the Career mode with new events, more interaction with rival Crews, new vehicles, and turning the game's division of Muscle/Tuner/Exotic cars into a proper Character Class System, with Muscle being renamed "Boost" and optimized for Speedtrap and Canyon Races, Tuners being renamed "Drift" and optimized for drift events, and Exotics being renamed "Race" and optimized for most races. Similarly, Most Wanted got a massive mod in the form of the meme-themed Pepega Edition, which completely revamps the Challenge Series (now called the Cancer Series), has 15 new Blacklist racers in the Career mode, new vehicles, new pursuit heat levels and (starting with V2) new race layouts.
  • Even the more recent titles, from the 2015 reboot to Heat, have gotten notable mods, which are now condensed into the gigantic Project Unite. Which is the biggest mod pack for the Ghost Game's Need for Speed games created by a Norwegian student under the name SRK online. These mod packs usually include expanded customization options, revised car sounds, improved graphics and textures, improved handling models, and revised pursuit systems. Unite 2015 can be found here, while Unite Heat can be downloaded from here.
• RFactor was built with the intention that as many add-on cars and tracks could be added to it as the community could provide. It's worked. There's (deep breath); Formula One cars, NASCAR cars, Indycars, the old CART-Indy/Champcars, Australian V8 cars, German DTM cars, rally cars... and most major race tracks in the world (and plenty of fictional ones too).
• The Re-Volt community is still creating custom vehicles and levels to this day. A repository of these add-ons can be found at Re-Volt Zone.They also created the fan-made Re-Volt 1.2 Patch, which allows the game to run on modern computers and adds widescreen support, among other optimizations.
• On the topic of racing sims, Richard Burns Rally lives on through countless custom rally cars from various leagues such as the World Rally Championship as well as new rally stages and tweaks aiming to either make the game's Nintendo Hard handling more bearable or bring the game up-to-date for modern audiences. The game's developers even praised the modders for their reverse-engineering of the model formats when they released a 3DS Max script for exporting custom cars into the game. RBR is now Abandonware at this point due to a rather hairy licensing row between the now-defunct Warthog, Gizmondo (which in itself is also quite a long and complicated story to say the least) and Square Enix (who now owns Eidos, not to mention the uncertainty with Richard Burns' estate over re-releasing the game after his death, so it's become a necessary evil for fans to just pirate the game and call it a day, short of buying a used copy on the secondary market.
• Test Drive Unlimited has long had their online servers shut down, but the community has put out many impressive mods that gave the game new life: the first big game mod for the original TDU was the Ultra Community Pack, which added new vehicles, new music and readjustments to the vanilla cars. This was joined by Project Paradise, a mod that reintroduces the game's online mechanics alongside other fixes such as improved mod support and other tweaks to make the game run more smoothly on more recent hardware. The Ultra Community Pack was later on dumped in favor of an even bigger project: TDU Platinum completely overhauls the game by adding even more new vehicles, a new physics engine, new weather effects and support for HDR on top of the UCP and Project Paradise's contents. Test Drive Unlimited 2 is also getting some love by modders with the Unofficial Patch - which fixes many of the bugs that were still left in the game, and the Autopack - which adds a whole slew of new vehicles, up to and including a full-fledged Formula One car. TDUWorld, a Project Paradise-esque mod that brings back TDU2's extensive online functions, is also currently in development.
• TORCS and its fork Speed Dreams, being driving simulators, allow the vast modifications of vehicles, tracks, and even driving physics to the users' liking, due to their open-source nature.
• Mario Kart has boatloads depending on the installment. The most notable rom hacks are listed below.
  • Name a Mario Kart installment, and they probably have a variant of CTGP, a collection of community-made courses bundled into hundreds of cups. The Mario Kart Wii version is the most noteworthy installment of the bunch.
  • Mario Kart 64 has Amped Up, which provides a full set of 16 custom tracks, new mechanics that weren't in the original such as purple coins, and more.
  • Mario Kart DS has a few full-on hacks. One of the first complete ones is Ermii Kart DS, featuring 32 brand new tracks, 6 brand new battle tracks, 12 custom characters ^note  Ermii, Fox McCloud, Lana, Yawshi, Haruhi, Lanky Kong, Shrek, Bowser in his Kyaru Pamyu Pamyu outfit, Rosalina, Mr. Bones, Phoenix Wright, and Doge. And that's just their base form, some of them have alternate costumes. and more.

    Sandbox/Open-Ended 

• While Grand Theft Auto is very well known for its moddability for the PC version, most famously realistic cars replacing the fictional, low-detailed cars in III, Vice City, and San Andreas, it also gained infamy in 2005 with the infamous Hot Coffee mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. In the game, CJ can have sex with various women, but the depiction is limited to seeing them entering the woman's house. Hot Coffee re-enables a Dummied Out sequence where the player not only gets to watch but controls the action to a degree. It was later patched. The discovery led to a brief revival of the Games Are Evil panic. Incidentally, PC players tend to avoid said patch not because they want to enable it but rather because it disables all modding function (although it has since been reversed). The Steam version of GTA San Andreas are pre-patched.
  • The PC release of San Andreas has considerable popularity in Japan because of or leading to the mass number of Touhou Project mods made for it.
  • Great Theft Car is a fan-made expansion of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that follows CJ who wants to find out who burned down his house one year after the canon storyline.
  • The Grand Theft Auto series of games has always appeared to be ripe for multiplayer, but it was never implemented by the designers. Enter Multi Theft Auto, a mod that allowed for the player of the PC version to play multiplayer with large numbers of players and its own custom game modes. Multi Theft Auto was released for GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas, and is massively popular with the PC players for all of them. Rockstar got the hint with the PSP version of Liberty City Stories, which had online multiplayer for up to six players. They completely polished it for GTA IV, with 16-player (32 for the PC) support and 15 game modes. GTA IV's multiplayer has some similarities to MTA, including customizable character models, the whole city to explore and fight in, and some game modes. Later for Grand Theft Auto V there are huge focus on online mode post-release, even more so than the single player story mode!
  • Grand Theft Auto IV has your standard set of mods, but the mod that turns the vehicle friction to -9 leads to some... interesting results.
  • Vice City plus Back to the Future. That is all.
  • GTA United tried to make Liberty City, Vice City, and San Andreas accessible in one game. Unfortunately it's a Perpetual Beta that is long since abandoned.
    • Fortunately there's a Spiritual Successor called GTA Underground, which not only combines the aforementioned cities but also Bullworth, Carcer City and even a few original locations. Sadly, that too has been deleted and no longer available.
  • GTA Anderius is a total conversion mod for San Andreas that completely changes the map to a different planet, with new vehicles, weapons and missions. Only available in Russian though.
    • Mushroomia, from the creators of the aforementioned Anderius. The title speaks for itself.
  • Also "GTA: Criminal Russia" has an all-new '90s post-CCCP fictional Russian city and countryside, complete with contemporary cars and music.
  • Things To Do in San Andreas overhauls the titular game with a lot of, well, things to do, a lot of which are Dummied Out/Beta content or taken from the other 3D Era games, including the Stories ones, as well as applying various bugfixes and restoring cut dialogue.
  • Darkmyre Gaming is a massive, massive modding community that sees fit to turn the game into a police sim replete with booking speeding motorists to delivering death notices to next of kin. Primarily focused on Australian police mainly New South Wales they have done other countries as well, and were actually in the news when the real police learned of this, took it the wrong way (as in playing a Cowboy Cop in a crime sim) and were uncomfortable.
  • LSPD:FR and LCPD:FR are similar to Darkmyre, but for Grand Theft Auto V and Grand Theft Auto IV, respectively. LSPD:FR and LCPD:FR focus on the LSPD/LSSD and LCPD respectively, but in a much more realistic manner than the regular in-game police, allowing the player to pull over other drivers, pursue suspects, call for backup, and get into the occasional shootout, with additional mods that can add different features ^note such as better responses, different uniforms, or a custom police radio or different call-outs, though most of the modding community focuses on replacing the game's fictional police vehicles with real police vehicles ^note such as the Dodge Charger for the Bravado Buffalo, the Ford Crown Victoria for the Vapid Stanier, etc.
  • While there are modders who replace the fictional cars with real ones, there's also modders who have expanded on the fictional cars Rockstar made, making "lore-friendly" versions of various real world vehicles that Rockstar hasn't. A lot of these vehicle mods can be found in Vanillaworks Extended.
• The Escape Velocity series featured the ability to mod the games simply by dropping the mod (or plug) into the Plug-ins folder, much like the Apple Macintosh's operating system could be modified by dropping new extensions/control panels into the System Folder. The most complex mods, however, require overwrite of key data files; ironically, the total conversion mods for the third game that allow you to play the first two games (mods that were released by the publisher) fall into this category. For the most part, it was not so much that it required overwriting as that it was easier to design total conversions to require you to switch out the core data files for the TC's data files than to have loads and loads of empty resources to keep things from the original game from showing up when they shouldn't. Perhaps notably, both sequels began life as total conversion projects for the previous game.
• Being an ASCII-based, non-graphical game, Dwarf Fortress is quite friendly to modders. Some of the more common changes to the game include new wildlife, plantlife, and races, the ability to play as non-dwarven races, and changes to existing animal stats. Like fire-breathing bears.
• Cortex Command, for now, is almost entirely a user-mod based game.
• Minecraft, having been open to modders since the beginning, has a very large modding community with lots of mods to add on. Some add simple things like improved crafting recipes, others add entire new worlds.
  • A community under the name of Bukkit has numerous plugins used on multiplayer servers (well, on the easier to manage Bukkit servers) with a variety of features. Some are for anti griefing measures, such as disabling damage to terrain by explosions and disabling fire from spreading, to having an in game economy for role playing purposes. The Bukkit community has gained so much attention and popularity that the developers of Minecraft have plans to incorporate the game with the Bukkit plugins to make modding easier. The plugins can be found here.
  • There are also modpacks (multiple mods bundled into one) such as Feed the Beast, Yogbox, and so on.
• Minetest is an open-world voxel game similar to Minecraft and even more moddable. It has had a "modding API" from the very beginning, also because its own built-in contents are connected over this API instead of being hard-coded. Essentially, Minetest itself is only an engine, but it comes with a game named minetest_game that takes its elements out of "mods". This means that you can not only add more mods to minetest_game, but you can also install wholly new games completely independent from minetest_game, ranging from countless more or less faithful Minecraft clones for those who complain that everything that makes Minetest different from Minecraft suck to games that simulate Australia or post-apocalyptic wastelands to Lord of the Test that takes you to Middle Earth.
  Starting with version 0.4, the focus on modding grew when the new Minetest developers threw lots of features out of minetest_game, making it fully playable but somewhat bare-bone, and leaving it to the community to soup it up with mods. Even with minetest_game, Minetest has been turned into a modding platform.
• A modding community has sprung up for Terraria on its official forums. As part of the Journey's End update, the modloader tModLoader was released as free DLC, effectively giving the playerbase the green light to keep modding the game.
• Starbound has its mods uploaded both on the official forums and the Steam Workshop, the former is usually installed by simply extracting the mods content into the mods folder of the game. It also has a mega-mod project, Frackin' Universe, which adds a lot of gameplay mechanic changes and features, for the cost of very long initial loading.
• The Simpsons Hit & Run has the Donut Mod, as well as many other mods. 2025 also saw the release of the Fully Connected Map: Full Game Plus, which reworks the entire game to take place in a map that connects all the three regions (suburbs, downtown and harbour) rather than restricting each level to a specific region, as well as restoring some unused objectives and cut dialogue.
• Factorio, by design from the devs, is highly moddable through Lua. Modders are able to easily create new prototypes and scripts by writing them in the mod's Lua files. These mods range from quality-of-life mods, such as extended reach, automatic research, and a creative mode, to difficulty-increasing mods such as Bob's Mods, Angel's Mods, and Marathon. All of these mods are hosted are on the official mod portal.
  • The modder known as Earendel, who is largely known for his Space Exploration mod, was hired by Wube to help them work on their official Expansion Pack, Space Age.
• Kerbal Space Program Has 3 different mod repositories, with the mods inside ranging from autopilots and info displays to extra planets to new parts or an overhaul of the parts that are there and completely new experiments to run and tech trees to unlock with those experiments. There are also mods that replace the default planetary system with ones like our own and make rocket engines function more realistically.
• Watch_Dogs may have had a handful of mods made for it unlike the juggernaut that is GTA, and the vanilla game was released to lukewarm reviews at best, but there has been a number of mods which aim to breathe new life into the hacker-themed open world game, like the LIVING_CITY mod which adds new sidequests and opens up previously-restricted interiors, a Chevrolet Camaro, and Elsa and Anna of Frozen of all people, not to mention Carl Johnson from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas from the very same modder who brought CJ and Big Smoke to Sekiro.
• The modding community for Saints Row isn't quite as big as Grand Theft Auto's, but it's there if you know where to look. One of the best known mods for the entire series is Gentlemen of the Row for Saints Row 2. Among other things, this mod adds additional clothing and other customization options, new weapons, graphical tweaks, and some desperately needed bug fixes. Given the game's trainwreck of a PC port, getting Gentlemen of the Row is strongly recommended.

    Simulation 

• Operation Flashpoint, a 'soldier sim' FPS by Bohemia Interactive was released in 2001, and still has addons and total conversion mods being made for it today. Its two sequels, ARMA: Armed Assault and ARMA II, maintain the modding community of its predecessor. The sheer volume of content people created for the former bears special mention. The developers kick-started it by including the mission editor, which allows players to create anything from a simple run around and kill a few guys scenario to full-blown combined arms battles far exceeding the complexity of the game's default missions. People soon went from creating their own missions to creating new weapons, soldiers, vehicles, and eventually whole new islands and a new Capture the Island mode, which is a pseudo-RTS game mode in which players battle for an entire island, using resources to build bases and buy equipment). In ARMA II the most "out there" examples would probably be naval combat and in particular submarine warfare of all things, both of which were probably never intended to be implemented by the devs... yet the modding community found a way. There's also been "cops and robbers" and Grand Theft Auto-style Wide-Open Sandbox "missions". The DLC for ARMA II: Operation Arrowhead was actually designed to facilitate this: British Armed Forces and Private Military Company consist of their respective campaigns and higher-quality textures/sounds for their respective units and weapons — which were already in OA, so that add-on creators could make use of them even without having the DLC.
• Tiny Life: Has an extensive modding API detailed here.
• The Sims and its sequels allow easy creation and importation of new clothes, faces, and furniture. Website after website can be found with downloadable items that players have designed themselves. Briefly, The Sims 3 was changed to make it mod-unfriendly, but a later update changed that, if not back to the original mod-friendly design. It's also worth noting that Sims is perhaps the most popularly modded game, with the top sites for modding it getting tens of thousands of views a month. Also, a lot of the mods tend to add special features that would've made the game Rated M for Money if they had been actually included in the base game — there's one which uncensors nudity, one which lets you kill people, one which gives your Sims realistic genitals, and one called the "Super Nude" which turns the "Woo Hoo" action (which is simply two people going under the covers, making moans and laughing as the bed shakes in the unmodded version) into a full-blown 3D hentai session.
• FreeSpace 2, thanks to the release of its source code by Volition (under the Freespace 2 Source Code Project), is a frequent subject of Game Mods in the space sim community. The original relase's multiplayer is still functional with dedicated server hosted by the community.
• SimCity 4 has quite a bit of mods available at Simtropolis. These mods can go from simple stuff like making the streets' dead-ends more rounded or making the water darker and more realistic, to downright cheating like ordinances that completely erase all pollution and crime from your city, to simple building addons, to entire expansion sets like the Network Addon Mod that adds avenue interchanges, diagonal-straight highway interchanges, roundabouts, walkways, train-street stacks, light rail and more, to completely new games like the SimMars mod that sets the game in Mars.
• The mid-1990s game Transport Tycoon Deluxe no longer even works on most computers without the help of DOS Box, due to its DOS-based format. However, OpenTTD is an open source emulation that still attracts lots of Game Mods called NewGRFs, from replacement graphics to entire new industry chains, alterations to the interface and even whole new modes of transport (tramways recently added to complement the buses/trucks, trains/monorails/maglevs, planes and boats already in the game). One of the simpler NewGRFs, to begin with, replaces the locomotives' in-game names with the real ones (e.g. "TIM" and "AsiaStar" are replaced with "TGV" and "Eurostar"). Other NewGRFs include train sets (sometimes at "encyclopedic" scales), landscape sets, town building sets and such inspired by certain parts of the world so you can make your OpenTTD game look and feel like North America, Australia, Japan or even more like England.
  • One of the requirements for the 1.0 release was that OpenTTD have full graphics, sound and music of its own under free and open licenses. From a Transport Tycoon Deluxe viewpoint, OpenTTD is fully modded by default. This can be reversed, however. Also, multiple alternate music sets have become available meanwhile.
  • If NewGRFs, AI scripts, game scripts and such don't cut it, and you need changes that require modifications to OpenTTD's code, there are so many patches for it that there have been and still are several patch packs that usually come with pre-compiled Windows binaries. Some past patches have found their way into the official trunk meanwhile, most notably Cargo Distribution.
• The Zoo Tycoon series has a large amount of fan-made mods made for it, usually to add creatures and objects not included in the game (such as many different extinct animals, mythological beings and cryptids and even some fictional monsters.). The first game even had an entire mod creation program created for it named APE — since the animals were sprite-based, it was fairly easy to recolor them if you knew how.
  • Zoo Tycoon 2 has had some particularly noticeable mods through the years, such as Radical Remake, which gives the game a complete makeover to make it look more realistic, and Paranoia, which focuses on cryptids and mythical monsters.
• Tons of custom content are available for Creatures and its sequels: Objects, creature breeds, and occasionally new worlds/add-on rooms. Official tools to make CC have been available nearly from the start.
• The Petz PC games have a dedicated modding community full of people, called hexers, who use hex-editors to create their own breeds of Dogz and Catz — and even other creatures, from Horsez to Dragonz. Eventually, a hex-editor called LNZ Pro was created especially for Petz editing, and a tool called "Petz Workshop" made it possible for users with no hex-editing ability to visually design new Petz breeds in a user-friendly interface. Aside from new kinds of petz, people also like to create custom food and toyz, along with pretty much anything else imaginable. This is also true of the sister game, Babyz, which runs on the same engine and is editable with the same tools. Although, most mods in Babyz tend to focus around making toyz, clothes, and hairstyles instead of whole new body shapes.
• Falling Sand Game 4.4, the original powder game, allows for its physics files (which are just text files) to be modified easily. A community has sprung up around modding the game.
• Wing Commander Secret Ops is another favorite of the space sim fan community, for its relative ease of modifications. Its immediate predecessor, Prophecy, has even had multiplayer activated by dedicated fans, the core code for which was Dummied Out due to production time constraints (but not before an ad was published hyping its multiplayer capability).
• Vega Strike got many mods in status from abandoned to frozen waiting for engine improvement to regularly updated. Includes Wing Commander/Privateer universe and whatnot. Aside of stats and models, has Python scripting for things like non-cockpit GUI, generation of dynamic universe and missions logic, XML-customizable AI, and XML+Python stock missions.
• iDomination is a game mod for the Total Extreme Wrestling series, which put you in charge of a Professional Wrestling promotion. Death Of The Territories is another such mod, which puts the player's promotion in the midst of the rise of WWE and the death of the other major promotions in the '80s.
• Orbiter is essentially just a framework on which mods can be installed. There are literally thousands of them available, from ultra-high-resolution planet textures (running into the hundreds of megabytes per planet) to accurate-to-the-second-and-centimeter recreations of every single manned spaceflight ever launched from Vostok to the Space Shuttle and everything in between, flyable versions of pretty much every experimental spacecraft, test plane, and lifting body to ever end up on a drawing board, fictional ships from every sci-fi universe imaginable and plenty of original ones as well, building block kits for constructing your own surface base or space station....the list goes on. The mods considered most essential are Orbiter Sound, and UCGO/UMMU, which add a cargo system and a life support/crew system to the game respectively.
  • For the player extremely concerned with realism, there's a fanmade scenario floating around that includes the full constellation of active satellites in Earth orbit in updated-in-real-time accurate position. They would have included inactive satellites and space junk too, but most computers would have been unable to handle it.
  • With the right mods and enough time on your hands, it's possible for you to play out the entire history of spaceflight in sequence starting with Chuck Yeager's first supersonic flight and continuing through the decades up to the present day and beyond.
  • The mods have also extended to the creation of fanmade cooperative 'campaigns' in which players work together, each one flying a mission in sequence, to accomplish an objective; the frequent 'Orbiter Forum Space Station' campaigns are an archetypical example.
• The open-source space simulator Celestia is also basically a frame to add mods, that range from more detailed textures or newly discovered celestial bodies to real or fictional spacecrafts and space stations, entire solar systems (also fictional or not), and even (pictures of) galaxies. Just search for the Celestia Motherlode as it's known.
• IL-2 Sturmovik's avid global modding community makes lots of new maps, skins, missions and campaigns, addon planes and total conversions on a regular basis. Some more complex mods are a bit harder to implement into the game than others, but generally, the modding community has made mods for anything related to prop and jet plane combat flight simulation of the 20th century (particularly things from the WWI era up to the 1950s).
• The WWII submarine simulation game Silent Hunter has a huge amount of mods, most of which are oriented to give even more realism to the game (and make it even harder). Plus they may add new ships or planes and -in the case of Silent Hunter III- you can even add sounds and short videos taken from the movie Das Boot.
• The MechWarrior Living Legends total-conversion mod for Crysis Warhead — which adds in battlemechs, jet fighters, power armor, massive maps, and a huge array of vehicles and weapons. After a number of aborted sequels to MechWarrior 4, it became the fandom's MechWarrior 5
• The X-Universe games contain a built-in script editor, and mods have been released that do everything from tweaking the AI to reduce Artificial Stupidity to (in one case) replacing the entire scenario with Babylon 5. Egosoft, the developer, is surprisingly open to mods, and for every game since X2, has released a Bonus Pack of signed scripts written and maintained by X forum member Lucike. This is important for two reasons. First, is that normally, adding scripts marks the game as modified, removing forum users from contention in rankings, which use in-game statistics uploaded to the forum. And second, having a modified game also disables Steam Achievements. Having the bonus pack scripts being signed, means they are 'vanilla' content and as such won't mark the game as modified. In the X3 trilogy Egosoft often added content developed for fan mods into the main game, making them Ascended Fanon. The OTAS corporation in X3: Terran Conflict began life in a mod for X3: Reunion, and X3: Albion Prelude's 3.0 patch will be almost entirely composed of content developed by a modding group called the AP Community Project.
• The Tachyon: The Fringe "Bloodstar Mod" would add a bunch of unattainable NPC ships to multiplayer, at the cost of replacing all the Bora & Galspan ships and breaking the single-player campaign.
• Vector Thrust is designed ground up for mods with text-based game configuration files, extremely adaptive AI that can learn how to use custom-made weapons, and fully functional mission, map and campaign editors. Being a Spiritual Successor to Ace Combat, it's practically begging for its fans to churn out remakes of the classic PS2 series.
• The X-Wing Alliance Upgrade is a project that replaces all of the game's models and backdrops with much more detailed versions. The mod began almost as soon as the original game was released, and has been continuously releasing new packs for fifteen years. Making the effort even more impressive is the fact that aside from commercial 3D modelling and graphics editing programs, all of the tools used by the project were made by the community, with no toolkits or other resources provided by the developers.
  • Both X-Wing: Alliance and X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter received further modifications in the form of new campaigns, ships, battles, and missions called ShipSets. And again, all using tools and editors developed internally by the modding community itself.
  • TIE Fighter Total Conversion integrate the TIE Fighter missions in X-Wing Alliance. It has very impressive visual updates and a remastered iMUSE soundtrack. They also added Reimagined missions which provide a whole new gameplay experience. Like X-Wing Alliance, you also have your own quarters and you collect souvenirs from completed missions.
• The Microsoft Flight Simulator series was built around this, with the default game providing a bare-bones world and developers stepping up to provide more detailed options. Microsoft Flight being completely closed off to third-party developers had a huge part in its Fanon Discontinuity status amongst die-hard flightsimmers.
• Story of Seasons: Most of the mods for the games in the series are done to add in the option to marry the same-gender as the player, something not possible for multiple games in the series initially after bachelors were added.
  • Harvest Moon: Magical Melody: Rainbow Edition is a patch that allows the player to marry a same-gender option bachelor/ette.
  • Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town: True Love Edition lets you marry the same-gender. There is also a Harvest Moon: Sunshine Islands version.
  • Harvest Moon: A Proud Life is a mod of Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life that swaps around the models and changes the dialogue so that the player can marry the same gender.
  • The Pride Parade mod for Harvest Moon: Animal Parade adds in the option for same-gender marriage.
  • The Tale of Two Hearts mod for Harvest Moon: A Tale of Two Towns allows the player to marry same-gender options (but limits it to that alone rather than any gender, due to the mod only swapping the player characters and adjusting the text to fit) and changes the childbirth scenes to be suitable for non-fertile couplings. It also changes the "fisherman" achievements to the more neutral "angler", allows trans-inclusive pregnancies in a secondary mod, makes Howard the Bluebell cafe owner nonbinary, and has Alisa, the devoted nun marriage bachelorette, state she's asexual.
  • Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns: True Love Edition is a patch that allows the option in Trio of Towns; additionally it also makes fox spirit Inari's gender match your own (rather than flipping to be the opposite of the player) and makes the dialogue fitting.
• Stardew Valley has a very large and dedicated modding community:
  • One of their best works being Stardew Valley Expanded. This mod is one of, if not the, most famous mod, which as the name indicates greatly expands the village of Pelican Town, and adds new characters with some of them even being romanceable.
  • Ridgeside Village is another popular fan-made expansion mod, which adds the eponymous neighbouring town to the game, introducing new characters, including over 14 new romanceables, locations and a new storyline.

    Strategy 

• The second most played mod after Counter-Strike, and also the second most played non-new release or MMO game online (after Counter-Strike) is Defense of the Ancients, or DotA. It has become far more popular than normal-style WarCraft 3 multiplayer matches.
  • The gameplay style got so popular that it got its own genre name — Multiplayer Online Battle Arena — and various games and companies have jumped onto the bandwagon. These include Riot Games' League of Legends, Gas Powered's Demigod, and Dota 2 by Valve Software.
  • In a funny case of History Repeats, a Dota 2 custom mod called Dota Auto Chess got so popular that various games and companies jumped on the bandwagon to create their own versions. These include Riot Games' Teamfight Tactics, Blizzard's Hearthstone: Battlegrounds, and Dota Underlords by Valve Software.
• Once upon a time Warcraft II had a mod called Kali, with the esoteric function of emulating a local area network between all players who were using Kali across the Internet. Blizzard took notes and built Battle.net.
• The release of Warcraft III Reforged removed a lot of well-liked features, chiefly the ability to play custom campaigns. The Quenching mod was made in response to that particular issue.
• Total War:
  • In general, for every Total War game released, savvy players know it's only a matter of time before a bunch of modders get together to put together and release a mod that aims to correct any historical inaccuracies and gameplay issues.
  • The Europa Barbarorum mod for Rome: Total War began with the intent to revise the game scenario to be as historically correct as possible. The current 1.2 version is a hugely ambitious mod incorporating retextured units, an extremely detailed trait system intended to simulate various aspects of cultural and political life of the time, building descriptions giving considerable amount of historical background information and, perhaps most notably, having original unit voices and commands replaced with new ones in Latin, Attic Greek, Gallic, Q-Celtic, Punic, Pahlav and Proto-Germanic. They have even offered their expertise to Paradox Interactive for the title Europa Universalis: Rome Another mod, Rome: Total Realism, aims to do much the same. Explaining the differences between the two would take up this whole page, and in the end which one you use is a matter of personal preference. Both are excellent, however. The Extended Greek Mod also aims for realism and enlargement of the game, but also seeks to preserve the "look and feel" of vanilla Rome.
  • There is a very popular mod based on The Lord of the Rings called The Fourth Age: Total War. This mod takes an abandoned manuscript for a LotR sequel by J. R. R. Tolkien called "The New Shadow" and runs with the concept by interpreting Middle-Earth as it may be in a Total War scenario, with Gondor dealing with its people turming evil. It is also filled it with tons of references to Tolkien's work and keeping it true to the spirit of the stories. Even six years since Rome: Total War was released, this mod is still being worked un and updated due to the developers' insistence on detail, making sure it is released as bug free and finished as possible and also due to the flexibility in design that Rome was. Currently the team is on version 2.6, which has the factions of Rohan, Dunland, the Gondorian regions of the Reunited Kingdom and other factions which have all be fleshed out and fit into the world. Due for release this year is version 3.0, which will add Elves, Dwarves and Dale as playable factions, as well as opening up the western and norther regions of Middle-earth, including the lands of Arnor, the northern part of the Reunited Kingdom.
  • There are numerous mods for Medieval II: Total War, some of the most popular being Stainless Steel, Broken Crescent, and Third Age: Total War. Third Age has become what many consider to be one of the biggest and most comprehensive mods ever. It transports the base game from medieval Europe to Middle-earth, complete with hundreds of new units, generals, and game mechanics meant to simulate Middle-earth.
  • The Chinese fanbase's mods that usually explore periods of time that a Western player may not have heard of in other video games (aside from Three Kingdoms, because well... it's Three Kingdoms). There are mods that focus on the fall of the Song Dynasty and the fall of the Qing Dynasty that ranges from the 2nd Opium War up to the Boxer Rebellion. Future mods will also include the Ming Empire, the Imjin War, and even something more obscure: The First Sino-Japanese War. Late 1800s Korean military probably has never showed up in a video game, let alone in historically accurate dress.
  • A hugely ambitious mod for Napoleon: Total War — a game that is far more difficult to mod than its predecessors — sets the game in the First World War. It includes period-accurate artillery, gas weapons, flamethrowers, tanks, and mass swarms of infantry. It can be found here.
  • The Total War: Warhammer games have received extensive modding, ranging from map tweaks to new units to balance overhauls to the introduction of entire factions. The most individually notable is Simply Fun Overhaul: Grimhammer (usually shortened to SFO or Grimhammer), a game-wide rework of units stats, game balance and abilities intended to make the game play much closer to its tabletop inspiration, and which more recent mods are often designed to be compatible with.
• The Battle for Middle-earth is a popular modding target, given the setting and concept of a Lord of the Rings strategy game, with most mods attempting to tweak the gameplay, add new canonical factions, or make the overall game more like the books or films. The two most famous are likely Edain, which retools the second game to add systems from the first, and Age of the Ring, which focuses more on heavily upgrading the gameplay of the second game. Both also end up significantly upgrading the number of factions on display, going from seven major factions in the base game and expansion to nine in the former and eleven in the latter.
• Dawn of War: When the game first came out, fans knew that they weren't going to get all of the 10+ different armies (not counting sub-armies) that are available for the tabletop wargame. So naturally, mods to put the other armies into the game were begun before the game was even finished, as soon as the beta was released. Of course, due to the Expansion Packs that came out late, nine of those armies presently are or soon will be in the game, including many ones that had mods in progress. This doesn't stop the modders, who are shifting to gameplay tweaks, adding units not in the game, and making present units closer to their tabletop abilities.
• The Heroes of Might and Magic franchise has a number of mods, particularly mods for the third game.
  • In the Wake of Gods is a massive mod for III that mainly focuses on adaptable script language, but with new creatures and adventure objects as well. Its very flexible, and is the basework that many other mods are built on.
  • Horn of the Abyss is arguably the most popular mod for III. It adds tonnes and tonnes of new content, including new playable towns without replacing any existing ones (something previously thought impossible), new neutral creatures, new terrain types, balance changes for lots of old content, and fully-realised campaigns with animatic cutscenes. It also heavily focuses on lore-friendliness and a feeling of consistency with the base game.
  • Heroes of Might and Magic III: The Succession Wars is a full conversion mod that resdesigns III's Real Is Brown aesthetic into a near one-to-one version of II's cartoony 16-bit graphics. It also restores many features lost in the transition between games.
  • Equilibris is a mod for IV that finishes many of the features that were never added to the original game due to 3DO's bankruptcy. As the name suggests, the main goal is balancing the game properly, but it also adds new features to the map editor, creature dwellings that were previously absent, and new map objects.
• Command & Conquer: Various games have total conversion mods that usually use a later engine for an older game: Tiberian Dawn on the Tiberian Sun engine, all previous games on the Generals engine, Tiberian Sun (Reborn) and Red Alert (A Path Beyond) on the Renegade FPS engine, and I didn't mention Tiberium Wars yet.
  • There was a Generals-to-Red-Alert-2 TC but when news of Red Alert 3 came out, development ceased. Another promising project was Halogen, a Generals TC to Halo — however, Executive Meddling on the part of Microsoft (more specifically a cease-and-desist letter, no doubt due to Halo Wars being in development) destroyed all trace of it.
  • The Tiberian Sun/Red Alert 2 engine is practically a modder's wet dream, with all unit, etc. parameters being written into INI files in plain English and requiring nothing more than Notepad. While many things are hardcoded into the executables and are thus untouchable, modders found a way around that too with RockPatch (buggy EXE hack), NPatch (even more buggy EXE hack) and more recently Ares (DLL injection, still in alpha version).
  • While not technically a mod, there has been an open-source recreation of Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert, and Dune 2000. This same project is trying to extend the engine to be capable of recreating Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2.
• Games from Paradox Interactive have a lot of mods. Paradox make life easy for the mod community by storing most of the game data in text files, so they can be edited with nothing more complicated than Notepad, and have dedicated sections on their official forum.
• It's not surprising that Total Annihilation had a large number of mods, including total conversions, given the game was popular; it is rather more surprising that its much less successful sequel, Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, had just as many. The versatility of the engine often resulted in additional races or total conversions that many believe are better than the original game.
  • A team of fans has reverse engineered the Total Annihilation engine to create their own Spiritual Successor, titled Beyond All Reason. It also has some Supreme Commander vibes mix into it.
• Spring, a TA-inspired engine positively saturated with great games (most of them free) that are all referred to as "mods".
• A strangely popular pursuit is taking one RTS game and making a total conversion mod to essentially turn it into another RTS game 'as seen through the first game's engine'. For example, there are mods that turn Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 into Red Alert, Total Annihilation into Red Alert, Total Annihilation: Kingdoms into Cossacks: European Wars, and so on and so forth. Attempts are being made to make StarCraft run on Linux by using the Strategus engine. Strategus doesn't support free-roaming units, idle animation, critters, or many of the mechanisms used in Easter Eggs at all, and the creep, Pylon power, and building liftoffs would require at least some minor modifications to the engine itself... good luck with that.
• Jagged Alliance 2:
  • v1.13, whose name is derived from v1.12 being the last official patch. The mod, continually updated to this day, which completely revamps the game and even adds an online multiplayer mode! Some of the gameplay changes such as the New Inventory system (revising characters' gear so that they would have to wear Load-Bearing Equipment "containers" such as vests, backpacks, and rucksacks), the revised equipment system and the 100-point Action Point system were great. To get an idea at how huge this mod is, it adds in around 725 new firearms into a game that originally had around 20.
  • The Unfinished Business expansion was built specifically to support new campaigns. It even included tools for editing things that were previously hard-coded.
  • Two major mods were created by hacking the original game's source code. They are Urban Chaos and Wildfire, both developed simultaneously by two different teams for several years after the release of the original game. Eventually, the company that owned the rights to JA2 at the time offered both teams the chance to release their mods as commercial expansions (similar to the Half-Life/Counter-Strike deal). The Russian team that made Wildfire eventually took the offer, their mod was released commercially, and the package included the source code for the game executable (published under a semi-open license, paving the way to 1.13).
  • By 2010, Jagged Alliance 2, Unfinished Business and 1.13 have several dozen campaigns available between them, not to mention many MANY item packages, map packages, and other enhancements. JA2 is easily one of the most heavily modded games released before the year 2000, overtaking even such games as Fallout in sheer volume.
• For a game released in 2003, Homeworld 2 has a lot of mods. These come in two flavors, discounting total conversions:
  • The first are mods that aim to enhance how the two races play out. The most popular are arguably the Complex Mod, and the Point Defense System (PDS) mod. Both added tons of extra features and customizations, essentially making the game more complex (especially in, well, Complex, where rank, soldier population, and morale system is introduced). PDS started out as...a small mod for point defense systems, which became the popular mod they are now. The Tactical Fleet Simulator mod aims somewhat differently unlike the former two. While Complex and PDS emphasizes grand strategy with a lot of decked out units and careful planning, TFS gives decked out units purposely built for intense, fast-paced combats which ups the "tactics" aspect more than "strategy" aspect, which the game is already good for anyway.
  • The second flavor are mods that try to insert additional races, while mostly retaining original units. These can either mean original units, or factions from the original Homeworld. So far, the most successful one is the Chinese-made FX mod, which adds almost all of HW 1's factions, some of them having completely new starships. Their crowning awesome is that they added the Progenitor race from HW 2, which, in-game, only consists of 4-5 separate units at best. They expanded the race using both unused concept sprites, mishmashed existing units (which they did VERY well), or design from scratch.
  • As for total conversions, there's a rather sweet one here: Battlestar Galactica Fleet Commander, a total conversion for — shock — Battlestar Galactica. Here's a nice video displaying gameplay, in this case Pegasus taking on three Cylon basestars.
• Civilization:
  • Civilization II was probably the first game which deliberately made it easy to make mods, with a "cheat" menu that allowed you to mod the map, the tech tree, and various other aspects of the game. The two expansions for the game included a selection of fan-made mods on the CD.
  • There are hundreds, if not THOUSANDS of mods for Civilization IV. Firaxis, the developer company, actively encourages modding:
    • Fall from Heaven, a mod that replaces historical recreation with dark fantasy, and adds more than a few layers to the game. Also contains a healthy dose of World Half Empty and horror for flavor.
    • Several mods were developed by dev team members themselves and came bundled with the original game, including Next War (a heckuvalot like Nineteen Eighty-Four) and Final Frontier (a space-based mod with an original storyline, which has itself been modded for various science-fiction things, such as Babylon 5). Additionally, "Rhye's and Fall of Civilization," the Civilization IV form of the great Civilization III mod "Rhye's of Civilization," was also bundled despite being a fandom mod.
    • The Better AI mod is used in the base of the Beyond the Sword expansion.
    • Not only are there mods of Civilization IV, but there are modmods of these mods, and on top of that, modmodmods.
  • Civilization V:
    • An in-game mod browser includes the Vanilla Enhanced Mod (game balance), the Unofficial Patch (bug fixes), and NiGHTS (reworks the whole game; no relation to the Sega game of the same name). There are even mods that cross the boundaries of designer, genre, and setting, such as bringing in Asari, Geth, Quarian and Turian civilizations, although by the nature of the game, most of the units still look human.
    • The Vox Populi, which completely reworks a number of mechanics (including city-states being more complex and the tech tree being heavily overhauled), improves the AI, adds systems like corporations and vassal states, and offers a Balance Buff to many civs.
    • There are various "ethnic units" mods, which do exactly what they say, making it so that, for instance, Zulu don't have white-guy spearmen until they're upgraded into Impi. There are mods that add in whole extra mechanics, often from the old games, such as tech trading and disease.
    • There are mods that add new civs to the game, which number in the hundreds if not thousands. On the serious end of the spectrum, you have new civs that add important or obscure historical civs that the base game skipped (from the Goths to the Congo to the Papal States to Nubia to Australia to Sumeria to Scotland), or even split up the base-game civs to reflect different or notable periods in their history (for instance, breaking up India into the Gupta Empire, the Mughal Empire, and modern India). Then you have ones that add in fictional civs like the Seven Kingdoms, Mordor, the Militaires Sans Frontieres, or the NCR. And then you have ones that just take random characters and base a nation on them - including the entire Puella Magi Madoka Magica cast, Hatsune Miku, Batman, Bateman, CIA, and the notorious Game-Breaker, Gabe Newell.
• Master of Orion 3 coded an incredible amount of its game data in easy-to-modify spreadsheets. Given the number of Game Breaking Bugs and incredibly odd mechanics in general, many players found a modded game the only playable version.
• Magna Mundi, a popular mod for Europa Universalis III, got an upgrade to "full game", developed by the mod team but for commercial release instead. As did Arsenal of Democracy and Darkest Hour for Hearts of Iron 2. In fact Paradox encourages moders to form teams that will create something for them to publish.
• Red Alert 3: Paradox was a highly ambitious Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 mod notable for its accompanying wiki project, which is slowly building a detailed 1960s Cold War world out of the highly limited basis of the original game.
• The Space Empires series from III onwards. III shipped with a modding tool, while IV and V run on text files.
• The 4X game in space game Galactic Civilizations 2: The Dread Lords, especially after the expansion packs are added, can be modded quite significantly. Mods can include new technologies, whole new tech trees, weapons, planetary buildings, ships, races, and more. There are many total conversion mods that turn it into Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, and more. The game's data is stored in organized text files and can be edited using Notepad, however many editing tools, including some official ones, are available.
• Rock Raiders was built primarily using .wad files, and so extraction tools have been made to reveal simple English code, easily changable models and animations, levels that editors were made for, easy images, etc. Now more building, monsters, levels, raiders, new models and animations, even overhaul mods are being made.
• Myth II came with a couple of very good editors; it was actively modded for many years, and to some extent still is. In this player's experience, it has more stand-alone mods than any game made before 2000 except Doom, Quake, and Half-Life... and the fact that it's the only non-FPS on that list says something. Moreover, many of those mods (The Seventh God, Jinn, Chimera, Bushido) are large campaigns on par with the originals, and have been included as bonus content in commercial releases such as The Total Codex and Myth II: Worlds.
• StarCraft has several mods as well, with the Gundam-inspired Gundam Century (ultimately having gotten killed while still in beta from a combination of disillusionment on the part of the creator and a cease-and-desist letter on the part of Bandai) being only one of them. Huncraft is an Hungarian-exclusive game mod, that works in the spirit of an actual expansion pack, only with fully translated unit speeches, menus and tooltips.
• The Fire Emblem series — particularly the Game Boy Advance installments — has quite a prolific Romhacking scene, to the point where there are multiple communities dedicated to Romhacks. Some hacks are simply translations of games that didn't get exported, but some are a little more complicated. Particularly ambitious ones include Elibian Nights, an extensive Mission-Pack Sequel to Blazing Blade, Project Ember, a full remake of Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade that revamps almost every character and system in the game, and Sun God's Wrath, Vision Quest, and The Last Promise, which have completely new stories, maps, and casts, blurring the line between a mod and an outright fangame. And then there's Dorcas Emblem...
  • Randomization mods are quite common, with the exact settings varying from the game being fundamentally the same but with the playable cast having different classes or swapped join times, to a complete anarchy where iron swords have siege weapon range and single-digit hit rates.
  • "Reverse Recruitment" is something of a variation on the above, in that it swaps the order of recruitable units: typically leading to the 11th-Hour Ranger now being the main protagonist and vice versa. To avoid completely destroying the game's challenge, these mods also increase or reduce the stats of the new unit in line with the one they're replacing, which can lead to the surreal experience of the max-level master Swordmaster or mighty Sage being a level 1 weakling who needs to be spoon-fed XP. Binding Blade's reverse recruitment is particularly famous, as it swaps the main character for Karel, a character infamous for boasting the highest growths in the franchise by far—meaning that when de-leveled, he ends up with a base statline of mostly zeros.
  • For the most hardcore players, 0% growth mods are quite easy to make. These mods remove the game's stat growths on level-ups, effectively locking characters to their join-time stats and resulting in a kind of fanmade Harder Than Hard mode. This forces the player to rely on Crutch Character units and the few forms of guaranteed stat growth that do exist, such as statboosting items or class-change bonuses. The exact level of difficulty this provides varies heavily from game to game, though that hasn't stopped some people from outright speedrunning them.
  • While mods of the 3DS games are harder to come by (mostly due to Nintendo's policy on homebrew), one of the better ones known out there is a mod that allows the randomization of classes and the order one receives units, in addition to the growths, and in the case of Fire Emblem Fates, the personal skill of the character. There's also the 'Gay Awakening' and 'Gay Fates' mod that, despite the name, allows for same-sex marriage supports and other marriage supports that otherwise wouldn't be possible in game (such as Chrom/Cordelia and any marriage with a character that only marries the Avatar normally).
• Advanced Strategic Command have sets ranging from Battle Isle recreations to its own "more realistic" group, and beyond, being optimized for easy creation of rulesets. Even if you can set one sprite per weather, a custom sound for each weapon, etc, only one sprite per unit/building/object/terrain is really necessary and abstract elements of Tech Tree don't need even that. Data packs are additive and can be cherry-picked on each map, and raw game data other than sprites and maps is all written in plain text and with object inheritance, so properties universal for e.g. all infantry, all drydocks or all anti-air cannons are written only once, in parent class. And what you can't do in data, you can do on a map by using Lua.
• Super Robot Wars usually tends towards translation patches, but a few modded games exist. One noteworthy example is Super Robot Wars: Original Generation 2: Axel Version, which swaps the roles of Super Robot Wars A's main characters, having Axel Almer get amnesia and join the heroes while Lamia Loveless stays with the evil Shadow Mirror.
• The Game of Thrones mod for Crusader Kings II, making the game of thrones literal.
• There's also the mod After the End: A Post-Apocalyptic America, which transplants Crusader Kings mechanics into a Feudal Future/After the End North America (the map also includes parts of South America).
• FTL: Faster Than Light has an impressive modding community, with an entire sub-forum on the official forum just for mods. The mods range from purely aesthetic mods (such as "Better Planets and Backgrounds"), to new ships you can play the game with (anything between "old-school fighter-planes from World War II" and "the TARDIS" have been created), all the way up to total-game-overhauls, such as "Captain's Edition," "Infinite Space" (no, not that one) and "Descent Into Darkness".
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown's community brings us the Long War mod, which extends the campaign, but more importantly, makes it FAR more difficult, to the point that the readme for the mod has several warnings that no matter how good you are at the base game, you're going to want to play the mod on Normal difficulty the first time. A deeper tactical focus and expanded class and item trees makes the game genuinely different. The game's developers themselves said that it "takes the game to a whole new level".
• OpenXcom started as an engine remake for X-COM: UFO Defense and X-COM: Terror from the Deep, but with easy moddability in mind — using YAML (whitespace-formatted text) and common multimedia formats (MP3, OGG, GIF, PNG). Mods vary from minor cosmetic fixes — like uniform colour scheme for all laser weapons or auto mode for heavy laser — to changing terrain — like adding extra UFO floor plans or accelerating operatives' speed on the damned exit ramp — to total conversions — like Xeno Operations, Piratez or The XCOM Files.
• Anbennar brings Europa Universalis IV's colonial era setting into a Dungeons & Dragons-esque world.
• Stellaris:
• Hearts of Iron:
  • Hearts of Iron 4 might as well be the Garry's Mod of Strategy Games. The simple "focus tree" system, alongside the events, allows to anything from simple and silly "change your ideology, conquer the world" trees, to complex, story-driven mods with tight continuity. The simple way of crafting stories and the facility of adding new leaders made the mod a goldmine not only for mods set into alternate histories, but there are popular, massive mods on fictional universes such as Fallout and My Little Pony.
• Modders of Star Trek: Armada have made the ultimate showdown between Star Trek and Star Wars. Choose between the UFP, the Klingon Empire, the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance. Can be found here.

    Survival Horror 

• Amnesia is a series that is no stranger to game mods, having official Steam Workshop support and allowing for custom campaigns since the original game. However, one mod in particular is worth delving into; Sclerosis, a mod that converts the entirety of The Dark Descent into a fully fledged virtual reality game. The environment is fully interactive with both of your hands, the controls have been completely overhauled to support a VR control scheme akin to Half-Life: Alyx, sanity effects are overhauled to allow them to work in the new perspective, and so on and so forth. The mod is such a success at bringing Amnesia into VR that it makes it feel like the original game was always built for virtual reality. It even has an alternative presentation mode that makes the game look as if it were running on an original PlayStation, just for the heck of it.
• Lethal Company: Dozens of mods exist for the game. These include removing the four player cap (the popular More Company mod), cosmetic changes like changing the Bracken to Freddy Fazbear or Goku, and the Coil-Heads to a literal Weeping Angel, to adding costumes for you and your team to wear, to new maps like an abandoned SCP facility or a Minecraft world, to anti-trolling measures (ie using the air horn or clown horn in excess has a chance of making your head explode and thus killing you), to new monsters (ie the Boomba or Mimic, the former being a land mine on wheels and the latter being a monster that disguises itself as a fire exit). to new enemy behavior (ie the infamous Skinwalkers mod which records your mic and then lets enemies play them back later to scare or trick you, most effective with the masks). Some just swap sound samples (changing the loot bug audio to Yippee! or Mr. Krabs grumbling). And cosmetic ones that just replaces the posters on the ship with pictures of Ryan Reynolds or furries.
• The "Welcome to Hell" mod for Resident Evil 4 turns nearly every normal mook (not counting the ambient snakes in containers and set bosses like Mendez, Del Lago, etc.) into their Demonic Spider cousins instead; Dr. Salvador for Village inhabitants, Super Salvador for Island inhabitants, and Garradors for Castle inhabitants. Only those who truly want pain and suffering or a nightmarish challenge would ever try this mod just because of those changes.

    Miscellaneous 

• Starting around April 2020, AI Dungeon 2 updated with the ability for users to make custom scenarios/prompts public for others to play. Naturally, a vast majority of these prompts consist of either Rule 34, shitposts, or, oddly enough, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure of all things. Its imitators such as NovelAI also included such features.
• Guitar Hero has a rather active modding community focusing around custom songs: the use of an MP3 and a custom note chart to create songs not on the game disk. Said community was the inspiration for the custom song feature in World Tour.
  • And speaking of World Tour, the Definitive Edition mod not only brings quality-of-life improvements to the game, it also ported over most if not all content from previous and subsequent Guitar Hero installments. On top of that, it also adds support for custom content such as new concert venues and characters, which naturally led to some interesting Massively Multiplayer Crossover band lineups.
• Both the arcade and PlayStation 2 versions In the Groove can be hacked to include custom themes and songs. As it is based on a DanceDanceRevolution simulator which requires fan-made content to play, it is very easy to port content made for StepMania over to In the Groove. Even without hacking, the arcade version allows players to play custom songs and custom stepcharts for pre-existing songs.
• Most DanceDanceRevolution arcade cabinets can also accept custom stepcharts from either USB or PlayStation memory cards. A hacked cabinet can also have custom stepcharts built-in, as well as allow modifiers like Fuwafuwa (usually found only in Oni courses) selectable in regular play, and change the color scheme/theme.
• Tomb Raider has a level editor, which was released back in 2000, but to this day still has many users developing content for it. It is easy to use due to its Invisible Grid system, but this is somewhat restrictive and gives a very "blocky" appearance. The level editor is for an old PS1 game engine, but modifications and patching have allowed for almost-PS2 quality graphics. Notable levelsets include:
  • Tomb Raider 1: Revised and Unfinished Business Remake, almost perfect recreations of the original game and Gaiden Game keeping as faithful as was possible with the engine at the time (some things had to be modified or removed). They were created because the games were totally unplayable on most modern computers without the use of extra programs (which cost money)
  • Himalayan Mysteries, an Original Flavor epic that took five years to make, elaborating on the story behind the original continuity's claim that Lara was involved in a plane crash at age 17, rather than age 9 as stated in the Continuity Reboot.
  • TR Search HQ: Emergency, a bizarre, Painting the Medium-esque game in which Lara must stop the level editor itself from being hacked. Contains "British Mountain Ranges" just a few minutes away from Lara's mansion in Surrey.
  • Tomb Raider 4 Gold: Fading Light, notably based on the developer's concept for a Tomb Raider: 4 Gold that was cancelled.
  • Tomb Raider Anniversary: Retold, a fan-made remake of the original Tomb Raider which comes from fan disappointment with Crystal Dynamics' remake (Tomb Raider: Anniversary). The goal is to produce a more faithful and respectful remake of the original game, with elements of the cancelled remake that was being made by Core Design prior to the Continuity Reboot. After almost two years of development, the first quarter of the game has been released to mixed reviews due to flaws in the control scheme and dull (by TRLE standards) lighting. The project leader was a bit delusional about the quality of his work, and developed an ego problem. That's not a mean thing to say because he's the one typing this. It would appear that TRLE users hate it, while standard-fare TR fans adore it.
• Heboris started off as a simple clone of Tetris: The Grand Master 2 — The Absolute PLUS. Official development of it stagnated in 2002, but 2ch posters decided to take it upon themselves to add many mods to it such as more rotation systems and more modes. These additions were collaborated into Heboris Unofficial Expansion. Unfortunately, development has stopped because the code—a mix of C++ and a Japanese game script—has turned into a complete mess, and attempts to expand on it have proven futile. For this reason (somewhat), a new Tetris clone, NullpoMino, has been produced, and is much more add-on friendly due to the game data being more modular. Many mods for NullpoMino, such as the Tetris: The Grand Master ACE modes and the infamous Phantom Mania mode, were incorporated by the author into later releases, with credit given to the original modders.
• FCEUX, an NES emulator, features Lua scripting. Lua scripts can directly modify the game's variables. They can also accept user input. The result: Mario, meet Kirby Canvas Curse. Another example is Neill Corlett's script for Metroid, which adds some elements of Super Metroid, like automapping, and even allows mouse interaction on some screens. SNES9x, an SNES emulator, also does Lua scripting, as shown here.
• Midway produced unofficial sequels of Pac-Man despite only being the distributor of the games for Namco. One of these was Ms. Pac Man, based on a hack of the original game called Crazy Otto, developed by another company with no official connections then to Pac-Man. Incidently, of the Midway Pac-Man games, only Ms. Pac Man was adopted by Namco.
• PC sports games have active modding communities, mainly FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer: every new season of each game is shortly followed by hundreds of mods adding kits for unlicensed teams, faces for generic-looking players, additional teams and leagues that were not represented in the vanilla game, or even gameplay tweaks. The list goes on and on. By the way, PES mods aren't restricted to PC, and can be made for PlayStation 2 too, with certain specific editors.
• Darius Gaiden got an official (allegedly) hack called Darius Gaiden Extra, which cranks up the autofire rate, rearranges the stages, and adds an option to play all 28 stages, instead of just 7 of them. Strangely for an arcade game, it also adds a pause function.
• Star Trek: Bridge Commander starts out with only a few dozen ships of okay quality. Players have added HUNDREDS of ships with quality that makes most older computers cry (due to high numbers of polygons and large textures). There's even new play modes and campaigns, as well as UI and interactivity improvements. Star Trek Online (and Cryptic's next major project, Dungeons & Dragons Neverwinter) have the Foundry, a custom mission creator that works the same way that Neverwinter Nights' Aurora toolset does.
• The Glider PRO scenario "SeaCaves" was more than just a custom level; it included a patch for the game program which changed the graphics for just about everything to fit in with its Under the Sea environment. Only the glider itself still looked the same, except for a temporary transformation into a dolphin.
• Aquaria has a built-in level editor and a menu option set aside for accessing mods. The modding community doesn't really extend far beyond the game's official forum, but there have been some fairly decent mods created, including a fan-made prequel to the game proper.
• Ultimate Knight Windom XP lives from this. Being essentially a Gundam VS-based game on its own, it was just a matter of time before packs like SEEDmod, Wind00m and a buttload of various graphic, robot and pilot mods appear. And there's still more to come.
• Robot Arena 2 has the DSL: Total Conversion mod, which completely revamps the game, ironing out some bugs, adding all new components to make the game more realistic, and even including replica robots of such famous machines as Biohazard, Razer, Nightmare, Chaos 2 and Hypno-Disc. Said modded version is far more popular than the original version.
• Having character Cameo appearances in games continues to be a popular hobby among amateur modders, particularly with First-Person Shooter and Wide-Open Sandbox games. For instance, a number of Half-Life 2 players (mostly those who play the single player games like Episode 1 and Episode 2) have substituted Alyx Vance with other famous characters such as Samus Aran [1], Princess Zelda [2], Miku Hatsune [3], Renamon [4], and Ayane [5], to name a few examples, just to watch them perform actions normally not expected of them.
• Oni has a mod community dedicated to producing the Anniversary Edition which replaces some Dummied Out content and seriously upgrades the original combat AI.
• Thanks to the Exult engine, mods can be made for Ultima VII.
• Many a Creepypasta deals with a hacked (or haunted) game.
• Marble Blast Gold has a massive database of custom-made levels, most of which also include custom-made pieces. There are also modifications to the game engine as a whole, most notably Marble Blast Platinum.
• M.U.G.E.N was built to be customized, with a highly extensible and completely transparent scripting language. Though released as a fighting game engine, it was originally intended to be a shooting engine, and total conversions have included turning it back into one, among other game types.
• Star Wars: Battlefront has a rather large community, mostly focusing on II, ranging from smaller mods such as single maps to the total overhaul that is Battlefront Extreme.
• Veggie Kart is a currently-in-progress conversion of Mario Kart 8 that replaces the entire cast of Super Mario Bros. characters with characters from VeggieTales. Yes, this is an actual mod, and a trailer for it can be found here.
• The Binding of Isaac Rebirth has all of the game's assets and parts of the source code open to the community, though they first must be unpacked. Because of this, the remake is significantly easier to mod for than the original game and thus has a dedicated modding community. Alongside other details, most mods include new rooms, custom characters and even new enemies. Afterbirth+ has built-in Lua support and integrated Steam Workshop.
  • Of note is the Antibirth mod, which would later be upgraded and turned into the official Repentance expansion.
• The Pro Cycling Manager series will get a number of fanmade mods released every year, due to the fact that Cyanide Studios does not have license to use every real team and rider in the game. The mods from the biggest communities usually includes real names for every rider and team already in the game, as well as the inclusion of many other teams and riders, as well as balancing the stats differently.
• Unofficial mods for ATOM GRRRL!!, The Fruit of Grisaia, Nekopara, Everlasting Summer and Littlewitch Romanesque have been released that restore the adult content removed from their Steam versions.
• Vs. Skate Kid Bros, by Two-Bit Score Amusements, is a 1988 arcade add-on for Vs. Super Mario Bros.. Changes to the game sprites include Mario being replaced with a guy on a skateboard who turns into a man in a red wifebeater and boxer shorts after picking up a quarter, who also collects soda cans, stomps on tanks, and infiltrates the castles of America to defeat football players and pick up hot babes until one finally takes off her top and invites seven of her friends.
• One of the most common and popular mods for Battle Garegga is a visible Dynamic Difficulty (known more commonly as "rank") counter, as keeping rank managed is one of the most important aspects to securing a no-continue clear.
• Among Tabletop Gamers, this is known as "homebrew," and can range from an Obvious Rule Patch (AKA "house rules") to custom gear, to fan or Crossover armies, to entire settings.
• NG+++ is a very popular mod to the video game Antimatter Dimensions linked here. It adds ton more content including 2 more prestige layers and several more mechanics. The mod page also has several more mods of that game, with many possible combinations, but some can break.
• Within the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater community, THUG PRO is considered to be the definitive way to play the series, especially in light of the much-maligned Pro Skater 5 instalment. Loads and loads of characters and parks abound, which includes those from the first few titles from the series as well as some bonuses like Andy's room ripped from Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure among others.
• Prestige Tree has several mods that involve different resources and introduce new gameplay mechanics, with some of the more complete ones having pages on this wiki.
• Among Us has seen a number of different mods spring up in 2020 and 2021:
  • One of the most widespread and popular is the Town of Salem-inspired Town of Us. This mod adds 13 different roles specific to Crewmates, 6 neutral roles, 8 roles specific to Impostors, and several modifiers that any player can potentially get; this greatly changes up how the game is played and adds a lot of new strategies. Role examples include the Mayor^note Crewmate: can abstain from voting in meetings, adding their votes to a "bank" that can be used to add extra votes to other players, Sheriff^note Crewmate: has a kill button, with the condition that if they try to kill a Crewmate instead of an Impostor, they die, Jester^note Neutral: they win the game if they get voted out, The Glitch^note Neutral: similar to an Impostor but can kill any player and must be the last surviving player to win, Miner^note Impostor: can create additional vents/holes, and Assassin^note Impostor: can kill people in meetings if they know their target's role; if they get it wrong, they die instead. Modifiers include Tiebreaker^note if there's a tie, the player you voted for will be ejected, Torch^note keeps your vision from being restricted when electricity is sabotaged, and Giant^note makes your character twice as large and very slow. A full explanation of the roles can be found here. Its creators also created an entirely new map called Submerged, an underwater facility with two floors that can be accessed by elevators. It features several entirely new tasks, twists on existing tasks, and is compatible with the Town of Us mod.
  • Another popular mod is "The Other Roles". This mod is very similar to Town of Us, but adds in even more roles such as the Jackal^note essentially the Glitch, but with the ability to change any other player into a Sidekick who becomes the Jackal if the original dies, Lawyer^note acts as a "third Impostor" for one player and wins along with their client if the client survives to the end of the game, and Bait^note a Crewmate who causes their killer to instantly self-report the body, makes some roles both Good and Evil, such as turning the Assassin into Good and Evil Guessers and adding Good and Evil Minis, and tweaks other roles, such as changing the Mayor's ability to getting an extra vote in meetings instead of banking votes and making Town of Us's Torch ability into a role called Lighter.
• The Rhythm Game Friday Night Funkin' has an extremely large modding community, to the point that it might be one of the largest in the entire gaming community (as well as for being more popular than the video game itself). The reason for this is that it's very simple to do, letting the modders add/replace characters and sometimes change the storyline to their hearts' content.
• Alex "trap15" Marshall produced some well-known Arrange Mode hacks of various shmups (notably, he would later make official arrange modes of some CAVE games for their exA-Arcadia Updated Re-releases). Notably, all of these mods, while playable in MAME, are also compatible with the actual arcade hardware:
  • Ketsui Arrange is a ROM hack of Ketsui that adds option formation control like in Battle Garegga and rank control and rewards for turning up rank like in DoDonPachi Resurrection Black Label.
  • Same! Same! Same! NEW VER! is a hack of Fire Shark (Same! Same! Same! being the original Japanese title) that aims to alleviete some of the game's more frustrating mechanics, such as built-in autofire that correctly interacts with the flamethrower weapon, starting the player's ship off at a faster speed and eliminating speed-up items, and only requiring one 'P' token to Power-Up instead of three.
  • Radiant Silvergun EXTRA is a hack of the Sega ST-V arcade board and Sega Saturn releases of Radiant Silvergun. It backports the Ikaruga-based alternative scoring system (player can change colors every three enemies destroyed without breaking the chain, but chain bonus caps at 25,600 points instead of 100,000) from the HD rereleases, and also adds a "Special" scoring system that combines the best of both worlds (original scoring's 100k chain cap, Ikaruga's color changing). It also adds an "Overseas" mode that replicates the behavior of the game being put into a non-Japanese-coded ST-V board, wherein the player only has access to three weapons instead of seven (Vulcan, Spread, Radiant Sword; and Spread gets a third rear shot not available in the other variants of the game), but it also restores some of the cut content like boss intros.
• The author of the fanfic series Vow of Nudity released a Minecraft skin for one of the protagonists. The other protagonist is downloadable for Koikatsu Party, the game the author uses to make her story illustrations.
• Yandere Simulator has a fairly active modding community, particularly on YouTube, where many creators make mods to show off their concepts about what they think the finished game might look like.
  • Academy High is a full scale playable mod of the game, with both a fully complete 2020s and 1980s mode, featuring the same gameplay as the main game, but with a brand new cast at a college in New York.
• Puyo Puyo is known to have sprite-swaps of characters, though the complexity between, say, Puyo Pop Fever and Puyo Puyo Tetris varies due to the engines they run on. Some examples include Miku and Haruhi in Fever, the Squid Sisters in Puyo Tetris, to a Persona 5-themed UI mod for Champions.
• Plants vs. Zombies and Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time both have quite a few immensely popular mods providing reworked levels, harder difficulty, and new plants and zombies, including Plants vs. Zombies Hybrid Version, Plants vs. Zombies 2: Reflourished, and Plants vs. Zombies 2 ECLISE.
• Balatro has garnered a sizable amount of mods (to the point where there's a fan wiki for all of them), with one of the most notable being Cryptid, a mod that completely overhauls the game, adding brand new everything: Jokers, Decks, Consumables, Stakes, Boss Blinds, Tags, Achievements, even Poker Hands... and with how overpowered some of the new Jokers are, it's no surprise it tells you that there's a good chance you'll crash the mod before you lose.
• Many, many mods exist to convert existing games into fully playable virtual reality versions of said games, including fully articulated hands, reworked controls to work with new movement control schemes and attacks, model overhauls, and so on. A few of the games to receive this treatment include Doom and Doom³, Half-Life and Half-Life 2, Minecraft, and Left 4 Dead 2.

A player applies a Nicholas Cage mod, which makes the entire game nonsensical.

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