I had always been big on customization. I guess what REALLY started it all was making my own Wolfenstein 3D maps with Wolf Edit. I'll tell the story, however, form the standpoint of my Half Life career. Half Life(CS really) for me started about 5 years ago:
I started with CS, not knowing about Half Life untill a few weeks after when my brother bought it. Thus I found out that Half Life was the original and CS was this mysterious thing called a "mod", which apparently was a changed version of the original game. With this new knowledge of "mods" I decided I wanted to make my own! yeah! it would be the coolest game, it was going to be called "Meat". It would have been a deathmatch game where you run around as cows and pigs and chickens picking up weapons like sausage launchers and Slim Jim whips, etc. Yeah! best fuckin' game ever! Well I didn't know how to make a mod. So I googled "make your own mod for Half Life". I found the link for Worldcraft and installed it. But at first glance it only let you make maps. I needed code, modelling programs, the works. So I thought the mapping program, Worldcraft, to be useless. However I got bored one day and decided to open it up and try to make something, just for the hell of it. My first attempt failed miserably, I had no idea what I was doing. My textures paths were all wrong, my compile paths were screwed and I had holes all over the map, which at the time though didn't make a difference. Through the course of what I'm not at liberty to say I came to want to map something more and more until I was driven to map icegalaxy, an unfinished HLDM map and the predecesor to de_icegalaxy. I fixed my paths and compiled the map. It worked! Except for the gaping hole where the sky should be. But how was I supposed to know how to make a sky? I was an infant in the mapping world and didn't know to cover the sky with the "sky" texture. And even browsing through the textures I wouldn't have found it, being as small as it is. I was determined! I googled "sky for Worldcraft", "Sky for Half Life", and such. I found a few other sites that didn't really help, some that weren't even related to half Life. Eventually I found TWHL, saw their tutorials(yes, when I was a we-little noob, I actually did look at the tutorials) and saw that they were helpful. I bookmarked the page and began my never ending quest that is now my mapping career.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.