Interesting question, I googled and found a history of gaming mods and the 1st example is a mod converting ‘Castle Wolfenstein’ to ‘Castle Smurfenstein’ (replaced all the Nazis with Smurfs). Link: https://www.evl.uic.edu/aej/smurf.html

Personally for me it was using the level editor that shipped with Jetpack or adding my own textures and level editing Wolf3D.

I remember using my game genie to come up with hacks for SMB1.
Modifying the Qbasic games that game with DOS, changing the sun in Gorrillas to smile when hit with a banana. (Guess this doesn't count for this thread).

Excitebike for the Famicom (not the NES) keeps popping in my head for some reason... but that's a console that's allegedly a family computer

BinaryDemon wrote on 2020-04-25, 23:45:

Interesting question, I googled and found a history of gaming mods and the 1st example is a mod converting ‘Castle Wolfenstein’ to ‘Castle Smurfenstein’ (replaced all the Nazis with Smurfs). Link: https://www.evl.uic.edu/aej/smurf.html

Personally for me it was using the level editor that shipped with Jetpack or adding my own textures and level editing Wolf3D.

That's pretty cool! 1983 strikes me as a little late to be the "first" though; Pinball Construction Set (1982) was already around at least. I had a look at the original Salon article they quote which is interesting, but it cites Ultima Underworld (1992!) as the "very first first-person game", which is categorically wrong, so I'm guessing there's a lot they missed.

Still, interesting example of an early mod that must have been well-distributed & is still around.

DosFreak wrote on 2020-04-26, 00:04:

I remember using my game genie to come up with hacks for SMB1.
Modifying the Qbasic games that game with DOS, changing the sun in Gorrillas to smile when hit with a banana. (Guess this doesn't count for this thread).

I got started the same way! Really wish I could track down my 4-player verison of Nibbles with weapons & savestates I hacked up in high school...

Come to think of it, a hack of Donkey.bas (1981) might be a good candidate for the title on the "IBM"/MS-DOS platform, although I'd be surprised if something hadn't originated on the Apple II a bit earlier than that. Of course, 99.9% of those mods wouldn't have been distributed beyond the author's front door, so I guess we'll never know about them now. 🙁

xjas wrote on 2020-04-26, 00:41:

Come to think of it, a hack of Donkey.bas (1981) might be a good candidate for the title on the "IBM"/MS-DOS platform

Since when was Donkey.bas a commercial game? It wasn't sold but came free with PC-DOS.

But Apple II is most likely the right direction. With Akalabeth ("Ultima 0") being one of the first commercial games on that and written in BASIC, you can bet this was already modded by people.

People for sure were hacking commercial games before the end of the 70's on TRS-80's. As long as there's been games there's been user mods.

Check out the story behind Colossal Cave Adventure.

In the strategy game family, The Ancient Art of War in 1984 was among the first (if not the first) to have a campaign editor.

The game allows players to create their own maps, formations, and missions.

Heh, a comment on this episode of Shovelware Diggers pointed me to Eamon from 1980, a text adventure for the Apple II that came with its own construction set & had an entire little community building adventures for it. Mobygames suggests this is the first 'adventure' game that includes a built-in editor, but that doesn't exclude hacks from existing earlier (or other genres.) Still haven't dipped into the '70s, but 1980 is pretty early.