So, what to talk about this week? There’s a whole bunch I could cover in this second part, so let’s just talk about modding as a whole, from the activity’s past to its present community. I’ve already covered one of the first popular mods to be passed around the community titled, “Castle Smurfenstien”. 
This mod took the original Castle Wolfenstein and replaced the Nazi sprites with that of Smurfs.
This comedic and lighthearted tone will carry on in modding throughout the ages. The process of swapping sprites and models will live on as well. For example, in Skyrim, there is a mod that swaps the Dragon models with Thomas the Tank Engine. Yes, you heard me. Watch at your own risk. Once the immensely popular Doom came out, modding soon followed, replacing sprites with anything the user could dream up. The developers of Doom even gave a package of easily accessed game files to the community in order for them to be able to make their own levels. Mod-friendly developers have been a godsend to the community because you’ll never really stop the modders, so might as well help them. You may ask why a developer would go out of their way to allow their fans to easily replace their dragons with trains. Well, having a healthy modding community extends the lifetime of your game by spades. Heck, Fallout: New Vegas has been out for eight whole years and still has a large player base thanks to its constant release of awesome mods. Actually, a team just released a huge mod for New Vegas called Fallout: New California.
In 2007, a website called Nexusmods went live right before the release of Fallout 3. This site has since become the place that most modders go to upload and share their mods for a variety of games. This site hosts 263,928 files for 619 games from 85,195 authors and it’s open for anyone to join and download from. This place has gathered mods together for easiest access and reaches the largest player base as it can. The site has also released its own tool to make the downloading of mods much easier for the casual fans who may not know too much about files and folders. The Nexus Mod Manager allows for you to connect to your game and the site. A simple button press on the site will send the mod’s files right to your NMM and apply the files to your game. Some mod installations are as simple as two clicks. I anticipate that the mod I will be working on will be just as simple as that. I honestly can’t wait until I can share my finished mod to the world on this site and finally enter the modding community as an author.