A lone concrete spire stands in a shallow bowl of rock, sheltering a rusted trapdoor from the elements. Standing on the trapdoor causes it to yawn open like iron jaws, dropping you through a vertical shaft into a subterranean museum. Here, dozens of doors line the walls of three vaulted grey galleries, each leading to a pocket dimension of dizzying virtual architecture and fierce gladiatorial combat.

Welcome to Quake Brutalist Jam, the hottest community event for lovers of id Software’s classic first-person shooter from 1996. First run in 2022, the Jam started out as a celebration of old-school 3D level design, where veteran game developers, aspiring level designers and enthusiast modders gather to construct new maps and missions themed around the austere minimalism of brutalist architecture.

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

‘Brutalism won by a wide margin’ … Quake Brutalist Game Jam. Photograph: id Software

Ben Hale is the event’s concierge, a professional game developer working as seniorenvironment artist on the forthcoming survival game Subnautica 2. As a child, Hale learned to build Quake levels with the encouragement of his older brother. “He was very supportive, despite how often I bluescreened his computer,” Hale recalls.

The idea for a brutalism-themed “jam” – a hobbyist term for an intensive, community game development session that takes place over several days or weeks – came from another Quake mapper named Benoit Stordeur, inspired by a set of concrete textures Hale designed for Quake. “I posted a poll [of themes] for the community to vote on, with brutalism as a choice. Brutalism won by a wide margin,” Hale says.

The first Quake Brutalist Jam captured the community’s imagination, with participants producing 35 levels in two-and-a-half weeks using Hale’s concrete textures. In a game that already features oppressive gothic and industrial environments, the moody stylings of brutalism proved powerful creative fuel. “So many brutalist buildings look like cool sci-fi structures or evil lairs,” Hale says. The second jam ran in 2023, spawning 30 more proudly grey levels for players to blast through.

But as he began planning a third jam, Hale ran into some health issues. “I pitched to my friend, Fairweather, to be my cohost this year,” Hale says. “They made the suggestion that we do something a little different this time.”

‘Ideas began to grow’ … Quake Brutalist Game Jam. Photograph: id Software

Fairweather is Lain Fleming, a veteran modder who has led numerous community Quake projects including Dwell, Remix Jam and the Coffee Quake series. Rather than simply make new levels for Quake, Fleming suggested giving the Jam’s participants some new tools to work with. “When we began, we simply wanted to visually overhaul some weapons and monsters. But as we did more and more, ideas began to grow,” Fleming says. “We analysed mechanical gaps in the arsenal and enemies, which resulted in many new enemy paradigms you rarely see in Quake.”

This type of mod, known as a total conversion, proved far more ambitious than Hale or Fleming anticipated. “What was supposed to be a quick six-month mod to host a jam in became a two-year monstrosity. The list of people contributing grew bigger over time, with a team of about 15 near the end,” Hale says.

Despite the challenges, the team ultimately produced an almost entirely new toolset for Quake. Virtually every available weapon is new or heavily modified, including a shotgun with bouncing projectiles, a gun that launches iron rebars, and a cluster-missile launcher. Enemies, meanwhile, mix redesigned Quake staples with entirely new foes.

The overhaul proved hugely successful. Quake Brutalist Jam 3 had more than double the number of participants for previous jams – so many that Hale had to radically alter his plans for the Start map, the playable mission-select screen that’s something of a Quake tradition. “I opted for a museum or gallery approach,” Hale says. “We had to pack the maps very tightly, which I struggled with a lot.”

The range of levels contributed by the community is enormous. There are quickfire experiments that last a matter of minutes, high-intensity “slaughtermaps” designed to test player reflexes, ambitious, narrative-driven exploration levels that pay tribute to the form and shape of virtual architecture, and gargantuan gun-fests that last an hour or longer.

‘Doubts would lead to slower progress’ … Mazu’s Quake Brutalist level. Photograph: id Software

Indeed, the featured map, Escape from KOE-37, is almost a game in its own right – an epic three-hour affair heavily inspired by Half-Life with its own storyline and more than 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. “Environmental puzzles and set-pieces are just really fun to do. [I] really wanted to have interactive environments for players to explore,” he says. “I just allow my creativity to put ideas into my map without axing too many of them. Doubts would lead to slower progress.”

Maps such as KOE-37 highlight the remarkable work that community members have been doing for years in a space that professional game design has long since abdicated. Once the most popular genre around, linear, single-player first-person shooters have become relatively rare in mainstream game development, pushed to one side in favour of sprawling open worlds and multiplayer experiences. As such, the particular level design that games like Doom and Quake specialise in – complex 3D mazes where navigation is as much a part of the challenge as combat – is at risk of becoming a lost art.

Yet events such as QBJ3, alongside other Quake mods such as Arcane Dimensions and The Immortal Lock are not only keeping this style of virtual architecture alive, they often surpass the achievements of the old masters, twisting and warping and spooling out 3D geometry in ways that wouldn’t have been possible 30 years ago: “With these games, you have such a rich, decades-long history of levels to play that you can refine your own designs to a razor’s edge,” Fleming says.

‘Everyone shows off’ … from David Yang’s contribution. Photograph: id Software

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

“It’s the underground Met Gala of concrete murderzone design, the biggest event on the Quake calendar,” Yang says. “Everyone shows off, everyone nurtures the new faces, everybody eats. I love it.”

For his contribution, One Need Not Be a House, Yang created an open-ended map that, were it not for all the heavily armed soldiers milling about, wouldn’t look out of place in an adventure game like Myst. “My map started as a study of the architect Louis Kahn’s ‘brick brutalism masterpieces – the National Assembly complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad [in India],” he says.

Open-ended levels can be tricky, and highly unusual for a Quake map. To help solve this problem, Yang looked to one of the most famous levels from Halo: Combat Evolved – The Silent Cartographer. “I wanted to make a similar non-linear map but with many branching paths, so you can mix and match your own route, get powerups out of order, and feel like you’re getting away with something.”

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

It may not be long before Hale, along with Fleming and the other organisers, put such an idea into practice. Their next planned project is their own video game, one that’s fully independent of id Software’s shooter. “After this jam, we’re taking a bit of a break from modding and mapping for Quake,” Hale concludes. “We love the community and the continuous celebration of each other’s work and aren’t going anywhere. But also, we want to just make a game. We’ve been wanting to do that for so long it’s starting to hurt.”