Every journey towards a game that people will play for hours begins with a single line of code, and for many programmers and designers, that line of code may not even be their own.

Developing for a game with mod support such as Minecraft is a great way to get creative, as so many of the building blocks to development are already in place, and you can try out different ideas and see results very quickly.

A lot of games are based on mods, including Minecraft itself, which began as a mod of a game known as Infiniminer before taking on a life of its own.

However, one game mod managed to make history and be the first game to be given away for free in a cereal box.

In 1996, cereal brand Chex decided to make a game based on the gridded square cubes of rice, wheat or corn, taking advantage of a boom in computer games at the time.

With a small team and a total budget of $500,000 including the cost to put the CD-ROMs into cereal boxes, the best option to make a game that was substantial and high-quality was to make a mod of something that already existed.

The result was Chex Quest, a child-friendly first-person shooter that was, in actuality, a very close modification of The Ultimate Doom, an ultraviolet and controversial 1993 computer game that managed to be very popular regardless.

Outside of removing the blood, the horror, the chainsaws and the guns, replacing them with colourful space settings, slime guns and anthropomorphic cereal squares, the games are functionally identical, and many unmodified levels from Doom are still in the game, accessible via warp codes.

Whilst not the first, with Super Noah’s Ark 3D converting the similarly violent Wolfenstein 3D into a setting involving cartoon animals, it was hugely successful and influential, increasing sales of the cereal by nearly 300 per cent during the promotion, and even inspiring a remake in the 2020s.

It goes to show the power of modding. A game mod is the most successful PC game ever, and another one helped encourage children in the 1990s to not forget the most important meal of the day.