Quake’s community has released Q30 Deathmatch Jam, a map pack of 22 new arenas built for the shooter’s 30th anniversary, PC Gamer reports. Organised by the mappers Annihilazor and Infiniti, the pack is designed to be played with regular Quake rather than a total conversion.
The maps range across Quake’s interdimensional settings, from gothic castles through science-fiction kill zones to an industrial sewer called The Filth Pit. Several well-known designers from the fan scene contributed, including a collaborative arena named Overflow from Mazu and Makkon.
Both have form. PC Gamer notes that Makkon helped organise Quake Brutalist Jam 3, while Mazu built that jam’s standout entry, a five-hour mini-campaign with a story of its own.
How to play it
Q30 Deathmatch Jam is built to work with a number of modern Quake source ports, among them Ironwail, Netquake and Nightdive’s Kex port, the one used for the Quake remaster. In each case it runs as a standalone mod: drop the folder into a Quake directory and call it up from the in-game console.
Playing online takes a little more work. For Netquake or QuakeWorld servers, PC Gamer says the maps, loc files and skybox data have to be copied into the matching folders of a competitive multiplayer install.
A year of jams
The pack caps a busy anniversary year for the community. PC Gamer counts two Quickie speedmapping jams, a 1024 Jam whose entries had to fit inside 1024 cubic units, and a Limits Jam that held submissions to the same technical and design constraints as the original Quake campaign.
January opened with Quake Brutalist Jam 3, a concrete-megastructure themed release the site describes as effectively a new shooter in all but name. id Software marked the anniversary from its own side at QuakeCon with Dawn of the Machine, a new episode made with Machine Games and a successor to 2021’s Dimension of the Machine.
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