Back in 2008, I got the Quake editing bug again: I wasn’t doing any level design at work at the time, it had been over 10 years since Beyond Belief had been released, and the Olympic Summer Games were on TV (I made some of my Doom levels while watching the Olympics, so there was some nostalgia there). So I embarked on Beyond Belief 2008 – my revisit to the days of old Quake editing.

The whole map was an exercise in “What If?”, and informed by my much improved understanding of game design and how systems design and level design interact. Quake didn’t have many strong connections between multiple runtime systems, but the zombie enemy type was one of them (it could only be killed in very specific ways, most notably the rocket and grenade launchers). What if neither of these weapons were given when the first zombies were introduced to the game? What inventive ways are there to still dispatch of these zombies? To my knowledge, no Quake level had ever explored this question. Well, BBelief2008 does!

Beyond Belief 2008 is a homage to the Quake style of old, and of course to my own level pack, which jump-started my game development career. Unfortunately, I lost interest in the map during the beta stage, and it took many more years for a final version of BBelief2008 to be released. Negke took my incomplete .map file, finished the map and released it. The end result is great continuation of the Beyond Belief legacy, which you can download on Quaddicted!