summer of 2002, when the Battlefield 1942 demo was released, the activity in the main modding website for Bf42 (
www.bf42.com, don't search, sadly is gone) was hectic and wonderful. DICE had not plans to add mod support to their game but the modders cracked its format and released modding tools, rexman (
http://rex3d.net/bf/index.htm) was the most famous of them, but the Editor 42 and even Battlecraft were created by the modders.
Ok, all the famous Bf42 mods were born in that page, the 3 first mods to be announced were Codename Eagle (a Rexman's mod about the ancesstor of Bf42), Eve of Destruction and Forgotten Hope. In those boards started aswell the famous Desert Combat mod (first called Desert Conflict), with a famous thread, in wich Frank DeLise (if my memory is right he was a programmer at Discreet, the developers of 3d max, later the boss of Trauma Studio and creator of Frontlines game) posted his first pics of Abrams, Humvees and A-10 Thunderbolts in the Alamein map, some guys claimed those screens were fake photoshop pics, it was really funny.
About FH, it was created by our first boss, Senor Ding Dong, a canadian guy, and two other dudes, they recluted some modelers in the boards and the long and awesome travel began. At first the focus of the mod was the first stages of the war, 1939 to 1941, and add other armies like french, polish or italians, and a realistic aproach to the gameplay, not arcade like the original.
Me and other modeler/skinner, Mange, joined a couple months later, and we were guilty of the crime of expand the mod to all the WW2, because we modeled a bunch of american airplanes, haha. Major hartmann joined and becomed the main coder of FH, a master. Very soon Senor Ding Dong stepped out as leader and ArminAce becomed the new leader. We released our first version, 0.5, in 2003 fall.
Some time later we merged with Pacific Shores, four talented guys that were doing a Pacific Campaign mod, zero is still in the team, D_fast was their leader, he, later, created Point of Existance. Rad also joined around that time. And unfortunately we merged with Merciless Creations, and won't talk more about that mistake because I want to keep the cool vibe.
Major Hartmann and ArminAce left, ctz joined and becomed the new main coder, and we released the final version for Bf42, 0.7 and the fan pack 6 (unofficially 0.8, for its undebated quality) and we decided to go on in the new Battlefield game, BF2. Some guys quitted, others joined, like Toddel, Knoffhoff, Mr_Cheese, etc, and you know the rest of the tale, here we are, armed and dangerous.
Now the grandaddy must go, kids, I must polish my Grand Torino.