During the fall of 2022, the Quake mapping community held a mapping jam hosted by Makkon themed around brutalist architecture named the "Quake Brutalist Jam". I've never made a Quake map before; and I was always fascinated by brutalist architecture. This is because I grew up in Memphis, TN, and one place I was fascinated with was the Crosstown Concourse, which has brutalist-esque design. This; alongside my love of cyberpunk and metropolitan cityscapes & architecture made me very interested. So I decided to figure out how Quake mapping worked and made a map for the jam in less than a week.

It's a very simple map, that only lasts less than 5 minutes (since at the time, level design wasn't exactly my strong suit), but it was still somewhat fun to create. The map is called "Flatzone Maximus", with the name being a play on "Crosstown Concourse", being "apartment" (or "flatzone") mixed with something exaggeratedly large ("maximus"). I was originally going to make the map EXTREMELY HUGE (almost apartment/tower-esque) with some Metroidvania-esque backtracking, where there'd be mulitple rooms and areas to explore that slowly leads to a final room to complete the level in, but I didn't have the time to do something like that. So I'd just kept it super simple within my own abilities.

The other unique part of this map is the fact I also made music specifically for it, heavily inspired by a certain Future Sound of London track. You can listen to the music for this map here.

At the end of the day, I had fun making it. Sure, it wasn't super gigantic, it's very simple, but I still had fun making something like this. Will I ever make another Quake map? I dunno. I'm distracted working on my own passion project, alongside other life duties. But hey, if someone begs enough, then fine. But I dunno regardless.