Celebrating 10 years of ModDB! news

It's hard to believe that ModDB is 10 years old, after launching way back in June 2002 when Altavista was still the no.1 search engine, Google was just an up-and-comer and Twitter / Facebook didn't even exist. ModDB was first created because while attending various lan parties in the Counter-Strike heyday, my friends and I wanted to try and play heaps of different mods. Finding them was impossible, so creating a database of mods was our solution and hence ModDB.com was born.

Since then we've survived all manner of doomsday scenarios, such as the 2006 "PC gaming is dying" catastrophe "closed-off non-modding friendly consoles" are taking over. We've survived the great DLC avalanche of 2010 when previously mod-strong games like Call of Duty and Diablo announced you'll have to buy updates from them. Despite this modding is as strong as it has ever been, because people love tweaking and changing their favorite games and modders continue to innovate with timeless classics such as Counter-Strike, DOTA and more recently DayZ evidence of this (check out our Hall of Fame for some of our favorites).

To celebrate we've created a wallpaper with some of the more famous (and obsecure) characters from mods over the years, see if you can identify them all:

You can download the full wallpaper here!

Now for some random facts:

• We reached 1,000,000 members 20 days ago. At the moment between 2000 and 4000 members join a day so we expect to reach 2,000,000 in 1 years time
• The most downloaded mod of all time via ModDB is Garrys Mod 9
• Our biggest day ever was 230,000 visitors thanks to the release of The Stanley Parable which got much love from Reddit, RPS and other gaming communities
• Of the over 17,000 mods registered nearly 33% have released something
• We've received 3 death threats (modding can be serious business it seems)
• We also receive hilarious emails such as "hi i'm willing to work for you, lets have a talk" just last week
• ... and we still respond to every email sent our way
• As well as ModDB we also run IndieDB, Desura, IndieRoyale and have a new site on the way

If you are looking for a detailed and colourful look at the very beginning of ModDB, how we came to be the site we are, we have written a detailed retrospective for the diehard fans here:

So to everyone who has ever made or played a mod THANK YOU. It's been an amazing journey and we're looking forward to another 10 years!