One of the most wonderful aspects of modding, and often the end result of programmers taking a Minecraft modding course is that they are helping to keep a game from disappearing into history.

Sid Meier, the creator of the hugely successful Civilisation series and previously a staunch critic of modding, conceded that the reason both his flagship series and his name as a creator lives on is because of modders who express their unconditional love for a game through the creations they make.

Two of the most popular games for modding in history, Doom and Minecraft, live on today in no small part because it was relatively easy to add creative, expansive new content and push a game with so much care behind it to its limits.

With that in mind, here are some mods that extended the life of a game.

DayZ For Arma 2

Before it became a standalone release, DayZ was a modification for the military simulation ARMA 2, which was a game mostly only popular in its own niche.

It caused the then-three-year-old game to spike in sales and reach the top spot for several months, whilst the survival gameplay and inherent interesting multiplayer aspects made it one of the greatest zombie games ever made.

Counter-Strike

Half-Life was a game-changing first-person shooter in its own right, but arguably its greatest contribution was how it demonstrated the life-extending effect of mods for a game.

According to a marketing director at Valve, without modding, a game would typically only be on the shelf for between a year to 18 months, but mods could dramatically extend this, and no game proved this more than Counter-Strike.

The adaptation of the sci-fi single-player action game to a tactical multiplayer shooter transformed Half-Life and would become one of the first game mods to be bought and turned into its own game.

Defence Of The Ancients

The 2002 real-time strategy game Warcraft III was popular in its time, especially after the release of The Frozen Throne expansion in 2003. But what kept the game thriving and hugely popular many years later was one of the most successful mods in history.

Defence of The Ancients, much like DayZ and Counter-Strike, helped to create and popularise the game it was based on, but in DOTA’s case, it created a game experience so fundamentally different that people who had no interest in RTS games would buy Warcraft III just to play it.

It was the standard-bearer and namer of its genre, later known as the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA), until the release of Demigod and later League of Legends in 2009,