| I have a passion for a very small niche within this - Preserving user-created levels for the game Quake III Arena. When I was a kid we got our first PC just as Quake (1) released. We didn't have a modem to get online, but magazine cover disks sometimes included custom user maps and mods. I'd run around them offline, wondering in awe at these empty spaces and amazed at being able to explore a 3d space that someone somewhere else in the world had conjured from their own imagination and effort. In time I figured out the tools and techniques, and even released some of my own content to add to the mix. That sense of wonder has stuck with me for over twenty years, and while I very much enjoy playing the games, it's not just about that - Accessing and exploring the spaces themselves is fascinating and hold inherent value to me. I recently came back to spending more time with the games, and see a great deal of that custom content dropping offline never to be seen again as the sites that used to host them wind down and dry up. A lot of it has likely already been lost. I'm digging through every available source I can to try and dig out as much content as possible, but of course it'll never be 'complete' in the same way that a ROM collection for a classic console might be. Then, quite aside from finding and saving, there's the question of how to make it accessible (and interesting) to anyone else. I'd like to think it's of interest to more than just me, but maybe it isn't? Perhaps daves_awesome_map_v5.pk3 and the thousands of others I have stashed don't really have an audience beyond that one weirdo that saved them =) On the offchance you're reading this and have any old Quake 3 custom content stashed away in your closet, please get in touch! |