Video game mods are similar to musical samples in that they take a small part of a whole (the whole being the game) and make something new. By editing or expanding the existing programming code of a video game, modders can make something that is completely different than the game they started with. The best example of this is the popular PC shooter Counter-Strike, which began it's life as a mod for the seminal PC game Half-Life. Half-Life was a purely single player game, but Counter-Strike used it's engine to create a multiplayer shooter that people could play online. Eventually, Valve (the publisher of Half-Life) bought the rights to Counter-Strike, and made it is own standalone game. Here is a video comparing Half-Life and its various incarnations with Counter-Strike...
Mods have become more and more prevalent over the years as gaming developers have become increasingly open to allowing amateurs to mod their games. Bethesda Softworks has become a leader in the mod community, and their latest title Skyrim has over one million mods hosted on sites like the Nexus, despite being out for little over a year. Shortly after Skyrim was released, Bethesda released software dubbed the Creation Kit that allows users to easily make their own mods. This kind of support has made the Skyrim mod library one of the most prolific in history.
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