The advent of first-person shooters introduced a wild frontier of unregulated video game level packs, and it ended in a lawsuit that changed copyright forever

Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.

For most of PC gaming history, there were three states of PC game—your regular old video game, expansions/DLC, and mods. But for a brief period in the 1990s, there was a fourth state, the level pack—collections of levels for the early first-person shooters like Duke Nukem 3D and Quake.

These level packs were sold on shelves as boxed products just like their video game counterparts. But they occupied a far more amorphous position between the other three states of PC gaming. In form and structure, they were similar to expansions, and are sometimes bundled into the same category. …