Why I make Quake maps

One of my long-standing hobbies is level design, basically I enjoy creating game environments for myself and other people to play in. Since I have been doing level design on and off for about 7 years (since the age of 15), I am quite familiar with different game technologies and tools utilized in the process. However, I tend to stick to older games like Quake and Unreal Tournament when it comes to creating and playing custom game content and I am not alone.

Many people unfamiliar with level design (and unfortunately quite a bunch of hobbyist level designers as well) seem quite shocked by the fact that someone could possibly be interested in working with a game from 1996 and they try to "convert" us, old-school designers to use newer games using arguments that vary from "Quake is old and ugly" to "Nobody will ever see your work". Hereby, I am trying to explain some of the reasons why me and quite a bunch of other people are "stuck in the past".

Quake is fun: it is a great game. It has fast-paced and brutal gameplay not seen in newer games (Painkiller comes close in this department, but it has other serious issues). It runs on a wide range of hardware and operating systems, you can play it on a P200 running Windows 95, an iBook running OS X or even the PSP (not to mention the more obscure hardware systems). You can drop into a deathmatch game for a 10 minute FFA match and you have instant satisfaction or you can play a large single player MOD like Nehahra that takes several hours to beat. OKAY, I admit that gameplay preferences are a matter of taste, but I think I've made my point clear: WE LOVE THIS GAME.

Mature technology: the software used to make levels for older games like Quake has matured a lot and it's now possible to do things most people wouldn't be able to imagine doing back in 2000, let alone 1996. These days the editor utilities are way more full-featured and easy to use. In 1996 Quake was a 320x200 game without a hardware accelerated renderer and most maps were in the 150-200 polygon/scene range. Today you can play it at 1600x1200, in full OpenGL glory with custom map projects pushing 1500 polygons/scene in some areas with 24bit textures and whatnot.

Easy to get into: If you want to make a Quake map, I can assure you that it's not very hard to make one. Pretty much anyone can grasp the concept of brushes and entities. All aspects of the game are well documented and the developer community is experienced and very helpful.

Working on a map alone: one of the problems with newer games (think Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and the like) is that in order to make a decent custom map, the designer has to be a level designer, texture artist, modeller, programmer jack-of-all-trades. Basically, unless you are multi-talented you are going to need lots of help from other people. With Quake you can make great stuff with just the level designer skillset (although programming experience could come handy if you are working on a project of big scale) and focus on the gameplay.

Cult following: Quake is far from dead, every half-decent map release gets at least several hundred downloads provided you notify the news sites of it's release and sparks discussions on message boards and IRC.