Happy Birthday Beyond Belief!

10 years ago today, Beyond Belief was released. How time has passed!

I knew that I wanted to make a Quake episode from the moment the game got released. I kinda had to, after all the Doom design work I had done before. And those were interesting times – the mapping and modding community was still in its infancy and a tight-knit group. There weren’t that many games to mod for, anyway – Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem. Quake was the only true 3D game. We’d hang out in the #Quake and #QuakeEd channels a lot, trash talk about various things and generally discover the exciting internet world that was out there. I’d clog up my parents’ phone lines the entire night, using a long phone extension cord that ran from my room to the lobby. It’s hard to imagine these days, but back in 96, talking to people from all over the world was something incredibly new and exciting.

Initially, I wanted to make two Quake episodes with 8 maps each, but eventually I settled on only one. Building these levels took a lot of time, and while I didn’t exactly kill myself with my university workload, I had other things going on in my life that also required attention. The tools weren’t quite up to par to what they are today – I made most of my maps in Quest. A very capable editor, but it lacked basic niceties such as shaded 3D view. All my levels were build in wireframe, and in the beginning I had to align textures by hacking the text file and manually typing in the UV offset. I’d compile the level, run it and see if the texture looked correct. If it didn’t, I’d count the number of pixels that I had to adjust for. Back then that was possible because the textures were low-res enough and there was no bilinear filtering to disguise the shapes.

Compile times were another huge factor. Building the Potential Visible Set (PVS) for a level required analyzing the entire map with id Software’s VIS tool. For complex levels, this could take several days! Many times, I left the computer running overnight to check the results in the morning. I invested over 500 German Marks to upgrade my system RAM from 32MB to 96MB because the VIS tool kept crashing on one of my levels. When it still crashed, Udo at Comtron (OCR|Sputnik for those who remember) set up remote access for me to one of his machines and I could run PVS calculations remotely.

After 7 months of work, I was ready to release Beyond Belief. It had been hard to keep back all the work when I saw other people release amazing single levels all the time. I’d cracked a bit earlier and decided to release a single map as a preview of the episode, but that was it. I sent the levels to two internet friends to do some QA for me – and then didn’t wait for their feedback because I couldn’t wait any longer. I released everything on the web the next day.

Joost Schuur, who was the manager of the CDROM.com FTP server at the time, had connections to Blues News, and got Blue to make a small post about my episode on his page. That was huge at the time, everybody was reading Blue’s News! The post helped tremendously with spreading the word.
I had over 10,000 downloads in the first week. Feedback started pouring in. I loved it. It was intensely gratifying to see people play my creation. I had released high-profile mods for Doom, but my contributions came somewhat late in the game and were usually part of a bigger collection of work, so there wasn’t the same amount of instant feedback.

Sometime while I was working on the level pack, it must have entered my mind that I could actually do this work for a living. Companies started contacting me, I got invited to Quakecon 97 by Ritual Entertainment – the whole time is a bit of a blur, but in the end I moved to Dallas, TX. The rest is, as they say, history.

Beyond Belief isn’t my proudest achievement, but Beyond Belief is has a special place in my heart because it’s what ultimately got me my first industry job. It was my calling card that got a lot of companies interested in my work. It took everything I had learned during my Doom days and applying it to the brave new world of 3D level design. Playing the levels, even today, is still fun. People have made speedruns and other conversions for it. And even today, I can’t think of many things I would have done differently in those levels. If you still got Quake installed, why not download the levels and play them (again)? I think I will.

Happy Birthday, Beyond Belief!