Reismanis was motivated to start a new website by the difficulty of searching for mods on the then-dominant search engine, AltaVista, much less mods released to the public. The website became defunct on 17 December 2001, when its network was shut down after its hosting service, Playnet, filed for bankruptcy. Launched in 1998, ModRealm was initially dedicated to Counter-Strike cheat codes before becoming a modding website. The network comprised over twenty websites, one of which was Mod DB's predecessor, ModRealm.
Afterwards, he purchased the domain and formed the Realm Network. Scott Reismanis, a website developer from Melbourne, Australia, first pursued web development as a hobby, creating two websites dedicated to video games.
