If you’re a fan of both the colour grey being draped all over designs that could be accurately described as both angular and slabby, you’re in luck. A third brutalist map jam has hit Quake, with this one being less of a fan-made map pack and more of a huge overhaul mod – the concrete cavernousness of which dwarfs the original game.
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Quake’s first two brutalist map jams, which dropped in 2022 and 2023, contained 35 and 30 maps respectively. This third one contains 77. Imagine the sheer weight and density of all of those floors and walls. The maps aren’t all this “megalithic community project more than a year in the making” has to offer, either.
“The goal for QBJ3 was to make something uniquely ambitious for the community to build with us,” reads the project’s intro blurb. “Beginning production in the winter of 2024, the team slow-cooked a total conversion mod in (semi) secret. In October 2025 the work-in-progress mod was unleashed upon the community, who spent the next six weeks exploring its tools, testing its limits, and ultimately creating the worlds for the mod to take place in.”
Among the stuff being tested were a bunch of new weapons, monsters, powerups, and “a complete visual overhaul of Quake’s existing roster”. The armaments, which you can see shown off in a suitably grey armoury in the video below, include a pipe wrench dubbed Skullcracker and dual-wielded automatic nail guns. Oh, and in case those aren’t brutalistic enough for you, there’s the Rebar Cannon. It’s an “industrial crossbow” which fires rusty metal bolts with a satisfying churm-kachunk sound effect that belongs woven into the percussive mix of some 90s German heavy metal.
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To get your hands on the Rebar Cannon you’ll need to pick one of the two options by which this third brutalist jam can be grabbed via Slipseer. The recommended version works like a regular mod, bolting to your copy of Quake and a source port of your choosing (the modders suggest Ironwail). Then, there’s a version which works like a standalone game that you can extract and run right away, since it comes already set up with Ironwail and open source Quake remake project LibreQuake.
As with Alice O’s writeup of the first Quake Brutalism Jam, I’ll end this newsing by disclosing that this third jam also includes a map by Robert Yang, who’s written for RPS about Quake and level design.
