In my youth I cut my teeth on the quake 2 sdk. And even without a 3D suite and a c compiler I could get creating.
When the Rage toolkit became available, almost none of the community were as besotted with eagerness as they had done before. It was a 30GB+ download with some hefty base requirements. While rage could run on a 4 core machine, not many gamers at the time had 16 core Xeon’s and 16gb of ram!
The worst the HL2 modding scene had to contend with was running Perl on windows.
