Quake Gets 22 Free Deathmatch Maps for Its 30th Birthday

Thirty years on, Quake just got 22 brand new multiplayer arenas. Free, no mod required, and not one of them came from a publisher.

The pack is called Q30 Deathmatch Jam. It went out on August 15 and landed on Slipseer, the community's main library of Quake add-ons, over the weekend. Two mappers going by Annihilazor and Infiniti ran the whole thing, and they roped in the QuakeWorld crowd, the folks who have kept the game's competitive servers alive since the nineties. Build time was three and a half weeks, July 12 to August 8. That is faster turnaround than most studios manage on a patch.

What's actually in it

Twenty two arenas built specifically for deathmatch. Nobody was chasing screenshots here. What matters is flow, sightlines and how long it takes to get to a weapon, and the maps are laid out with that in mind. Settings run from gothic castles to sci-fi kill boxes to an industrial sewer called The Filth Pit, which is exactly as pleasant as it sounds. My pick is Overflow, a joint effort from Mazu and Makkon. If those names mean nothing to you, Makkon helped organise January's Brutalist Jam and Mazu built its standout map, a five hour mini campaign hiding inside a jam entry.

Getting it running

Dead simple. The maps stick to the original id1 format, so you drop the folder into your Quake directory next to id1 and call it from the console. The authors tested everything on Netquake, on QuakeWorld clients and on the 2021 rerelease running the KEX engine, which is the version most people own today. Ironwail works too. Online play is the one fiddly bit, since you have to scatter the maps, loc files and skyboxes into the right folders of your multiplayer install. Grab revision 1.01 while you're at it, it fixes a lighting glitch on one map.

The birthday that keeps going

This pack is not a one off. The scene has been shipping all year: Quake Brutalist Jam 3 in January, big enough to pass as its own shooter, then two Quickie speedmapping contests, a 1024 Jam where every level had to fit inside a 1024 unit cube, and a Limits Jam that forced mappers to obey the original campaign's technical ceilings. Even id Software joined in, dropping Dawn of the Machine at this month's QuakeCon, a free new episode made with MachineGames and available on every platform.

A 1996 shooter is currently out-shipping half of this year's release calendar. Played any of the 2026 packs yet? Tell us in the comments which arena is worth the evening.