Quake is 30 and the mappers have gone mad
Quake is timeless. But also, technically, it is 30 years old. This eldritch ur-game is the beast rumbling beneath the skin of every first-person shooter you have ever played, and if you know what's good for you, you will sacrifice a small farm animal in honour of its anniversary this week, or maybe just an avocado. I don't want to get you in trouble.
Nobody is making a greater fuss over the birthday of the first proper 3D shooter than its diehard mappers. Even in a normal month, you'd see a steady flow of new singleplayer maps frothing to the surface, thanks to the game's immortal modding and mapping scene. Maybe a collaborative jam would plonk 10-20 maps in your lap at once. But this month is wild. Since the "Q30" festival of mapmaking began, there have been over 100 new levels. And the absolute monsters of mappery are not even finished. Here's a handy roundup of what has come out so far.
Quake 30th Anniversary 1024 jam
Every jam has a theme or a gimmick to challenge the mapmongers. In this case they had to create a map that would fit into the space of 1024 x 1024 x 1024 units. That's not a lot of Quakometers. Yet you'd be surprised how many dragon heads and Romo-Greco colonnades these wizards can stuff into it.
There are 13 monsters in Quake, each with their own dirtbag damage techniques. The idea of this jam was to make one whole level devoted solely to each freakish pest. It is like a trip to the zoo, but the meerkats are rabid, covered in tar, and explode.
The level names of the original Quake are a mix of B-movie schlock ("The Crypt of Decay"), sinister dark fantasy ("The Underearth"), heavy metal band name ("Azure Agony"), and straight-up joke ("The Bad Place"). In this pack of levels, the mappers were told to remake each level based on the name alone. I wonder how "The Cistern" turned out...
Brendan Caldwell
The idea here was to take the geometry and design of some original maps, but completely re-texture them. Essentially redecorating the canyons, killzones, and corridors that players know inside-out in a way that makes you go: "wuhhh???".
Quake 30th Anniversary Limits Jam
For those who hate progress. These mappers were told to make a level "within the same limits that id Software were constrained to for the original game." That means the map file had to fit on a floppy disk. Are you JOKING? On top of that: "No coloured lighting, fog, lightmapped liquids, external skyboxes, fence textures, transparent liquids, alpha-transparent brushes, or any other engine features that weren't supported." I cannot emphasise enough how much I would hate doing this, but damn do I respect it.
Quake 30th Anniversary "Quickie" Speedmapping Jam, part 1 and part 2
These two jams were each completed superfast, done in 48 hours and 30 hours respectively, with their own weirdo rules. In one, you had to use exactly 30 monsters. In the other, designers could only build in Quakeoshapes of 64 units. That means super chunky levels.
This is not technically a 30th anniversary thing, but a single thwack of maps by Chris Holden. Holden has been Quaking a long time. Long enough to clean up and improve six unfinished maps from previous jams then stuff them into a single vanilla episode.
Too much has been written about Quake for me to summarise the game's significance in a post I am hastily scribbling as I walk the streets of Belfast with a small human baby strapped to my belly (I promise I will stop bragging about my baby some day, but not today). So let's forgo the historical deep dive and all the juicy studio drama that remains compelling to game likers even three decades later. Instead, I'll just say it is one of the best games for amateurs to play about with level design, since the mapping scene is unkillable to the point of being mildly concerning, and the mapmaking tools are so handy (recent AI flirtations by the maker of the Trenchbroom level editor notwithstanding). Here's to another 30 years of mapper madness.
Comments ()