Hello friends,
Ever since I was little, I was always deeply fascinated by retro game modding, and harbored dreams of being able to do it myself. As I got older, I came to understand how hard it was, and for a while I gave up that dream.

But a couple of years ago I switched educational tracks, and I am now pretty deep into a computer science degree. I can actually directly thank SimPE for making me comfortable with bytecode before I had an actual course in assembly.

But now I am wondering; how was SimPE itself, and other such fan-developed modding tools for all sorts of different video games, made? How do you start determining how levels, models, scripts etc. were compiled, how to decompile and edit them?

I have learned about project management, and various coding languages and data structures, but still I wonder what circumstances and skills cause people to fall into this kind of deep modding. Because even now these people still seem like gods at times, but it is also such a long standing tradition in gaming that it's got to be something new people are able to pick up with enough hard work.