Johnsto’s Law states: if a game has a level editor, someone will recreate de_dust2. The iconic Counter-Strike map is, I have argued, “one of the fundamental shapes of video games”. Recreating levels from other games is a mapping tradition as old as creating your house (not to be confused with MyHouse). I am delighted to see this done en masse, with a twist. A new player-made map pack for Quake offers 30 new singleplayer levels based on multiplayer levels from other games including Unreal Tournament, Valorant, Perfect Dark, and Mario Kart 64. Yes, of course it has a de_dust2.
Over the past few weeks, dozens of mappers built new singleplayer Quake levels around the layouts of multiplayer maps from other games. Released for free on Sunday, the Remix Jam map pack contains 30 of these remixes. It’s quite an interesting mix.
I’ve enjoyed jumping blindly into maps and trying to identify their inspiration. Some, I can tell you exactly what level they are. Others, I have a sense of the style and might hazard a guess at the game. Many, I have absolutely no idea at all. I did enjoy how some maps used custom textures cluing into the inspirations, while the guessing game was made even trickier on others by sticking to base Quake textures. How many will you recognise? It’s also interesting to see mappers create singleplayer Quake flow out of multiplayer levels which are largely far from linear, how they pick monsters, place items, and force paths to create interesting combat encounters. Some even attempt recreate elements of their source games. Even when I didn’t particularly enjoy playing a level, I enjoyed seeing what it was doing. Some lovely little touches on sound effects and music, too.
Robert Yang (who has written a fair bit for us about level design and about Quake) wrote on his blog about his process in making a Quake map from Counter-Strike’s de_aztec. It’s a really fun Aztec adaptation, that, definitely one I’d recommend prioritising from the pack. If you’re planning to play, mind, do save that blog post until after you’ve played that map, because he explains some of the playful parts that are best as surprises. Ah, it’s very fun.
Since folks tend to ask: for you, I did quickly try the Remix Jam pack on Bethesda and Nightdive’s official “enhanced” version of Quake, and it mostly worked but lacked the cool Walkman key model so I suppose other parts might be wonky too. Myself, I played using the updated engine Quakespasm, same as ever.
If you don’t know how to play custom maps, oh hey, two years back, Robert Yang wrote about how to start playing Quake in the modern day, including recommendations for other community map packs. I’d also like to throw in the first Brutalist map pack for fun exploration of a theme (the second had a phenomenal start map but its many concrete hells didn’t grab me as much).
