Inspired by my recent Beyond Belief retrospective, Negke decided to combine all Beyond Belief SP levels and combine them into one large map. The content is ultimately unchanged, but it’s neat to see the entire episode stitched together this way! You’ll need a modern Quake engine port to play this, of course.
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!
This is an unfinished (but fully playable) Unreal 2 level (based on the PC Games tutorial I wrote in 2003) that I released to the community. No scripting or particle effects, but the map is fully playable and provides at least 30 minutes of gameplay. See if you can find all secret areas, there’s three dead hidden scientists! More information can be found in the Solaris Base readme.
The 9-level SP episode for Quake that got me my first job in the gaming industry. Back in its days this got over 10000 downloads in the first two days. There’s also various speedruns available. Start map, seven regular levels and a secret map. More information and links to level reviews can be found on Quaddicted.
Requiem was a troubled production. Several team members, including the moderator, dropped off the face of the Earth for intermittent periods. When it was finally released it was branded as a beta, and I don’t think there ever was an update. Despite its troubled history and late release, Requiem is a really good map pack with some impressive levels by the greats of the Doom editing. It was included in DoomWorld’s Top 100 WADs Of All Time. I created 4 levels for Requiem.
The second MM “mega-WAD”, which brought together ~20 of the best level designers of the time (many of which are working in the industry these days). I made four levels for this. Included in DoomWorld’s Top 100 WADs Of All Time.
This was a quick beautifying pass of a pre-existing level. Looking back at the level in 2008, I’m not sure why I did it. There isn’t much gameplay here. But I guess the level has historical value.
My Doom 2 episode. Nine levels with new textures, a new enemy type and some Dehacked work. Included in DoomWorld’s Top 100 WADs Of All Time. I recorded a level retrospective about these levels in two parts: here and here.
