It was a short hop from picking up Castle of the Winds II at a dollar store to finding out about resource editors and win32 when I wanted to edit the images. The game itself was from 1993, but this was in the late 90s/early 2000s when you could Google stuff like this and land on programming forums. And likely a post from someone else who wanted to do the same thing.

I still had to know about it. If I'd never found Rick Saada's experiment in win32 packaged as a game for a dollar, would I know about any of this? I wonder if the growing availability of the internet has closed the gap any.