Exactly, I have never come across a mod that didn't work when tinkered with a little bit. I first started collecting mods and mappacks nearly 10 years ago when I noticed a mod called "Akimbo Half-Life" was no longer available. I'm sure you know - it gave you two pistols and slowmotion which was a cool gimmick but not nearly enough for me to put it to my mod collection, which was seperate from my archive.
When it was deleted by the cretor I felt the urge to preserve the addon, It felt weird that a mod / addon I once played was completely lost so I found it once again and started to archive anything and everything just like yourself until a couple of years ago, when I felt that 75% of the mods and maps were pretty low quality and neither was fun to play nor worth keeping around, pity this topic was created after I purged most of them.
I still check out mod sites daily to see new mods / mappacks / addons, I am confident that I played "nearly" every mod that was released to this day and kept the best ones within my personal collection. The most obscure ones either come from the creators' personal sites which was pretty common back in the day or from sites with foreign languages.
Some of the most obscure mods I still (possibly) have come from sites such as these, some of which are:
- Lost in Black Mesa (the original version not the FX merge) - A typical BM escape type mappack
- CSM Mapping Contest 2011 - High quality maps from various users
- Down-Time - the mod is available on RTSL but it is different from a , in creators own words, harder version which was deleted, luckily I archived it.
- Sewer - An abandoned project that is mostly puzzle solving
- Various CS maps like cs_assault and de_dust remaked into singleplayer maps, gruntfests - the names escape me
- One horror type of mod in which a retextured gonome tries to catch you in an old hotel, it has some cutscenes - the name also escape me
I have been going through my archive for some time now to see whether or not there are some lost or rare mods that could be archived on your list, I will let you know if I come across anything but I doubt it. It seems that even the creators themselves lost the files, our chances are pretty slim.
Will let everyone know.