“It’s an underground Met Gala to design a concrete killing zone”: Welcome to Quake Brutalist Game Jam | games

A The lone concrete tower stands in a shallow bowl of rock, protecting a rusty door from the elements. Standing on the trapdoor causes it to open like iron jaws, dropping you down a vertical shaft into an underground museum. Here, dozens of doors line the walls of three domed gray galleries, each leading into a pocket dimension of stunning virtual architecture and ferocious gladiatorial battles.

Welcome to Quake Brutalist Jam, the most exciting community event for fans of id Software’s classic first-person shooter since 1996. Debuting in 2022, the Jam is a celebration of old-school 3D level design, where veteran game developers, aspiring level designers, and passionate modders come together to create new maps and missions centered around the stark simplicity of brutalist architecture.

This third iteration of the jam goes much further. In an intense six-week session, contributors designed 77 brutally themed maps where players battle new enemies with new weapons. For context, the original Quake, created by legendary game designers like John Carmack, John Romero, Tim Willits, and American McGee, featured 37 levels when it was first released.

The event’s concierge is Ben Hill, a professional game developer serving as senior environment artist on the upcoming survival game Subnautica 2. As a child, Hill learned to build Quake levels with the encouragement of his older brother. “He was very supportive, despite the number of times I checked his computer,” Hill recalls.

The idea for a monster-themed “jam” — a hobbyist’s term for an intense community game development session that takes place over several days or weeks — came from another Quake map designer named Benoit Stordeur, inspired by a set of concrete textures Hale designed for Quake. “I posted a survey [of themes] To be voted on by society, with brutality as an option. “The brutality won by a wide margin,” Hill says.

The first Quake Brutalist Jam captured the imagination of the community, with participants producing 35 levels in two and a half weeks using Concrete Hill materials. In a game already featuring oppressive gothic and industrial environments, the brutal, moody stylings proved to be powerful creative fuel. “A lot of brutalist buildings look like cool sci-fi structures or evil dens,” says Hill. The second jam went live in 2023, bringing up 30 more greyish levels for players to traverse.

But when he started planning a third jam, Hill ran into some health problems. “I offered my friend, Fairweather, to be my host this year,” Hill says. “They suggested we do something a little different this time.”

Fairweather is Lain Fleming, a veteran designer who has led several Quake community projects including Dwell, Remix Jam, and the Coffee Quake series. Instead of just creating new levels for Quake, Fleming suggested giving Jam participants some new tools to work with. “When we started, we simply wanted to make visual fixes to some of the weapons and monsters,” Fleming says. “But as we did more and more, the ideas started to grow.” “We analyzed mechanical vulnerabilities in the arsenal and enemies, resulting in many new enemy models that you rarely see in Quake.”

This type of modification, known as mass conversion, proved to be far more ambitious than either Hill or Fleming had anticipated. “What was supposed to be a quick, six-month approach to hosting a jam became a two-year monster,” Hill says. “The list of people contributing grew over time, with a team of about 15 people towards the end.”

Despite the challenges, the team eventually produced an almost entirely new toolkit for Quake. Almost all of the available weapons are new or heavily modified, including a shotgun with bouncy projectiles, a rifle that fires iron bars, and a cluster rocket launcher. Meanwhile, enemies mix redesigned Quake foods with all-new enemies.

The reform proved very successful. Quake Brutalist Jam 3 had more than twice as many participants as previous times – so many that Hill had to radically change his plans for the starting map, the playable mission selection screen that’s something of a Quake tradition. “I chose a museum or gallery style,” Hill says. “We had to pack the maps very tightly, which I struggled with a lot.”

The range of levels at which the community has contributed is enormous. There are rapid-fire experiences lasting a few minutes, high-intensity “carnage maps” designed to test the player’s reflexes, ambitious narrative-driven exploration levels that pay homage to the look and feel of virtual engineering, and massive gun fests that last an hour or more.

In fact, the featured map, Escape from KOE-37, is almost a game in itself – a three-hour epic story heavily inspired by Half-Life with its own story and over 1,000 enemies to fight. Its creator, who goes by the online handle Mazu, is a veteran of the Quake mapping community who spent about 400 hours building it. “The environmental puzzles and set pieces are just real fun. [I] “I really wanted to have interactive environments that players could explore,” he says. “I just let my creativity put ideas into my map without taking too much away from them. Uncertainty will slow down progress.”

Maps like KOE-37 highlight the amazing work that community members have done for years in a field that professional game design has long abandoned. Single-player linear shooters, once the most popular genre, have become relatively rare in mainstream game development, pushed aside in favor of sprawling open worlds and multiplayer experiences. As such, the specific level design that games like Doom and Quake specialize in – complex 3D mazes where navigation is as much a part of the challenge as combat – is in danger of becoming a lost art.

However, events like QBJ3, along with other Quake mods like Arcane Dimensions and The Immortal Lock, not only keep this style of virtual architecture alive, but often surpass the achievements of the old masters, warping, warping and caching 3D architecture in ways that wouldn’t have been possible 30 years ago: “With these games, you have a rich, decades-long history of levels to play so that you can refine your own designs to the razor’s edge.” Fleming says.

Quake Brutalist Jam 3 isn’t just for hardcore Quake fans and shooter addicts. This year’s starter map has a section dedicated to newcomers with little or no mapping experience. On the other end of the spectrum, it has also seen contributions from industry professionals such as game designer and former instructor at NYU’s Game Center, Robert Yang.

“It’s an underground Met Gala with a concrete kill zone design, and it’s the biggest event on the earthquake calendar,” says Yang. “Everyone is showing off, everyone is patronizing the new faces, everyone is eating. I love it.”

For his contribution, One Doesn’t Have to Be Home, Yang created an open map that, if it weren’t for all the heavily armed soldiers wandering around, wouldn’t look out of place in an adventure game like Myst. “My map began as a study of the masterpieces of brick Brutalism by architect Louis Kahn – the National Assembly Complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad [in India]”, he says.

The open levels can be challenging and very unusual for a Quake map. To help solve this problem, Yang looked to one of Halo: Combat Evolved’s most famous levels – The Silent Cartographer. “I wanted to create a similar non-linear map but with many branching paths, so you can mix and match your own path, bring out irregular power-ups, and feel like you’re getting away with something.”

Yang says he doesn’t particularly like playing Quake as a shooter, but he likes the way Quake Brutalist Jam 3 hints at a potential alternative way of making games, one driven by community rather than profit. “Brutalism, especially in the UK, is about building for the public,” he says. “It doesn’t need to add pretty embellishments because building and nurturing the future is already beautiful.” “And that’s what Quake Brutalism is about too, a socialist utopia in which handcrafted video games are a free public good that brings people together.”

It may not be long before Hill, along with Fleming and other organizers, puts this idea into practice. Their next planned project is their own video game, a completely independent take on id Software’s shooter. “After this jam, we will take a short break from modding and mapping for Quake,” Hill concludes. “We love the community and the constant celebration of each other’s work and we’re not going anywhere. But also, we just want to make a game. We’ve been wanting to do this for so long that it started to hurt.”