Quake

Quake is 30 and the mappers have gone mad

Mapmaker, mapmaker make me a map

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

The best singleplayer levels in first-person PC games

Let me level with you

Last week we confronted Jank readers with the 17 best multiplayer FPS maps in living and possibly unliving memory. Did you think we were finished? You imbecile. You clown. Now it's time for all the brilliant singleplayer levels. And some of them aren't even about shooting.

We had originally sat down to hash out all the finest levels in first-person games without caring how many players were enjoying the view or dying from a ruptured skull. But after compiling that megalist we realised: my god, if we split this monster into multiplayer and singleplayer maps... we will have TWO articles. It was a revolutionary idea, and one that has made Jank approximately 0.05% more efficient this week. We provide stupid jokes and shareholder value.

Fort Frolic - BioShock

A bunny eared enemy with hooks waits outside the doors to Fort Frolic.

Graham: Someone, somewhere is going to say: what about The Cradle, the most beloved level from Thief: Deadly Shadows? To them we say: sorry, we haven't played it. But we have played Fort Frolic, the BioShock level from the same level designer, Jordan Thomas, in which the player is trapped in a district by Sander Cohen, an artist who works across mediums, from "creepy living statues" to "classically