The first mods I tried to play on Steam were either:

-Capture the Flag
-Riot Act
-Lost Ravenholm Chapter

I think only Riot Act worked, but even that crashed a specific point. That was because I tried to install these mods on the SteamAppiDs of HL2DM or the episodes… i didnt own hl2 back then. I also only found this answer by finding the website I asked at HOW to install mods for steam. XD

Simpsons Doom.

That or Christmas Doom.

leon

Poke646
Azure Sheep
The Xeno Project 1
The Xeno Project 2
They Hunger 3
Time Line II: Iced Earth
Todesangst2
USS Darkstar

My personal favorite HL1 mod is still going to stay as The Trap. That was sheer brilliance.

First Intro to Modding: Baldur’s Gate 2.
Technically, my first mods were two that I made myself by removing two files from the override folder that the WindowsXP patch for the game included; clck26.itm and contigx.2da. Removing clck26.itm changed the cloak of spell deflection back to the cloak of spell reflection that it originally was. Removing contigX.2da allowed a Wild Mage to put 2 castings of Nahal’s Reckless Dweomer into a Spell Sequencer. Casting this sequencer would lock open the spell selection of the wild mage and allow him unlimited access to cast any of the spells in his spellbook as many times as desired until another action type was chosen (making a physical attack, finding traps, moving to a new level, maybe talking)
As far as fully packaged mods, that would most likely be Weimer’s Tactic’s Mod, though I don’t even use it at all anymore. Alternately I might have first used Weimer’s Item-upgrade mod which I still use to this day. My favorite mod specifically for BG2 is Revised Hell Trials that is now part of Ding0′s Quest Pack. BG1tutu is my favorite mod when considering the entire Baldur’s Gate series, since it allows you to play BG1 using the BG2 engine and rules.

First Public Mod I’ve Made: Grey Acumen’s Kit Improvements. (which actually seems to be down now, I’ll need check into getting that posted back up)
It’s nothing huge, but I had always been bugged by how weak the Beastmaster and Wizard Slayer kits were, not just in terms of power, but in terms of how poor they were at their supposed specialties. I changed the Beastmaster to be a better melee fighter and have better influence over animals, and the Wizard Slayer has abilities that would actually make it worth using in battles with Mages both directly and by assisting team members. This Mod also adds a Mime kit to the Bard class, which silences enemies in place of the bard song. The mime kit also has a number of special spells granted through magically infused pantomime.

First Intro to Valve Games: Portal First Slice – I’m a Valve gamer of less than 2 years yet. I first signed up for Steam for this demo in Jan ’08. I later was gifted HL2:e1, which was perhaps the best intro to the Half Life series for me. It wasn’t too long, but gave me the gravity gun(AND SUPER GRAVITY GUN) to play around with right off the bat, and then let me take out both a gunship and a stalker. It really wet my appetite for the entire rest of the series.
I later got HL1 during the 10th anniversary deal, and then Opposing Force and Blue shift during the Xmas deal for a total of $3. It was in the middle of all of this that I discovered I could use -dxlevel 81 to improve the bad framerate that Portal:first slice and HL2:e1 were getting. With this knowledge I finally decided it was worth purchasing a physical copy of the Orange Box sometime in or just before Jan ’09.

First Source Mod: Uncertain. The Flash Version Map Pack for Portal, Portal: Prelude, Union or Awakening are the earliest mods I can remember. I have over 40 now, probably verging on 50 source and goldsource mods.
At first the only thing I knew about looking for mods was using steam’s mod list, and I also only wanted to play mods that passed themselves off as being part of Half Life cannon.
Then once I finished all of these I started hunting down more, browsing through “Best Half Life Mods!” lists and the like. These led to gems like USS Darkstar (which I think was the first mod to really break me out of the need for the mods I played to be connected to the Half Life storyline), They Hunger, Point of View, Sweet Half Life, Redemption, etc.
Finding Source mods was a lot more difficult. There still isn’t any really comprehensive search method for Source Games and there are thousands of them out there that aren’t worth the time it takes to download them. I still manged to stumble across gems like Minerva, Research and Development, and The Trap based on recommendations by other people. Then I stumbled into Planet Phillip and have only just started finishing off the last of the “Mod of the year” lists.
In the past year I’ve probably gotten nearly 1000 hours of gameplay(and still counting) from an initial investment of only $33. I don’t think I’ve EVER gotten that quality and amount of content for such a low price before.

It’s been a long road since then, and I hardly play any HL1 Mods nowadays, unless they get a good recommendation on here. It’s at times like this that I think we all should be reminded just what a gold mine Phillip maintains here!

Simply the only place to check when trying to find a HL 1 or 2 Map or Mod….definitely the best!

My first mod must have been rocket arena 2 for quake two. The first hl1 mod was counter strike. Back in the day when it still was new and fresh. ahh good times, yes.

Unreal I thought was a big stepping stone in the development of SP FPS games, given us the big outdoors and one, if not the first, to break away from the confinements of enclosed combat and encounters.

For me it was a big disappointment when both Quake and Unreal went MP, although both included what was then known as BOT options, however the story line had gone alone with the adventure.

I never originally bought HL1 having been off work and recovering after a major operation, a friend purchased the game for me, and I have never looked back since.

As for custom mods, it was the pursuit of more HL experiences that drove me to search for more of the same, in those days there was no PlanetPhillip and a much lower lever of releases.

It was the gaming magazines that were the chief source of information, such mags has PC Gamer included articles on custom mods and links to online sites that covered HL1 and offered downloads. The magazines were one of the biggest sources of custom mods and included cds most months with both demos and custom games.

The first time I came aware of custom mods was when looking through a bin fall of cheap cds in a retail stationery and book chain store called The Works, to my surprise I found cds containing Quake, Unreal and HL custom mods, most of which in those days were small and basic.

My next line of source became the online sites these included, and here only abbreviations of their names remain in my records, F-Eden, H-King, EH/10, Pixel, H16, and LM, with H16 i.e. Hanger 16 being the most popular at the time and I can recall downloading many a mod from this site. Often starting the download late at night then going to bed and hoping by the morning all had worked ok, so long were the download times in those days.

This of course was the beauty of the give away magazine cds, longer mods were now easy to load as author got more ambitious, also the online site begin to dry up as site owners found the task of updating too time consuming, also MP was taking over online, we are lucky to have Phillip.

For a time TenFour became my only source of HL1 downloads and while this site still exists, least it did last I looked, its updates became few and far between.

I am not sure how I find PlanetPhillip, think it was a response to browsing and the joy of finding a site that had not been over taken with MP.

The hardest part of all this is trying to remember the first custom mods I played, after 10 or 11 years the mind is rusty and with 420 plus HL1 mods under the belt I just don’t remember, I do remember finding the work of Barry Bollinger in the early days who gave us the Resistance series and Dark Operations, it would be nice to find out what became of these early authors, maybe a project for Phillip, not that he has much else to do, joking.

Duke Nukem 3D
Unreal1
Chasm
Half-Life1

The first mods were for Unreal & Half-Life1 in good old modem and ISDN days but don’t ask me for the titles of those mods I don’t remember.