2026 has been a truly astonishing year for Quake mapping, with both fans and professional game developers delivering some incredible death arenas for id Software's 1996 FPS. We've had the enormous Quake Brutalist Jam 3, numerous map packs celebrating Quake's 30 anniversary, and even a new official campaign called Dawn of the Machine.
You'd think the Quake community would be out of ideas by this point, but if anything, the Quake community is only growing bolder. On Friday, the community released one of its most ambitious map packs yet—a level design extravaganza all about rooftops.
Quake Rooftops Jam adds 19 custom maps to id's shooter, all riffing on the theme of the part of your house that stops the rain falling in. While rooftops might not seem like the most exciting subject for a mapping jam, it is fascinating in the context of Quake. As a corridor shooter, rooftops are rarely glimpsed in Quake. Skittering across a virtual skyline is more the domain of games like Thief: The Dark Project and its spiritual successor Dishonored.
Hence, creating Quake maps where rooftops are the primary play-space is an interesting challenge. The Quake community has taken the idea and run with it, producing wildly different designs. One example is Robert Yang's Mermaids in the Basement, a sun-soaked nonlinear map set in a Mediterranean coastal village semi-submerged in water. Other highlights include Once, But No More, a sprawling cityscape with multiple architectural styles stuffed with platforming sequences, and City of Traitors, a maze of gothic spires set in a misty purple void.
If you fancy giving Quake Rooftops Jam a whirl, you can download it from Slipseer. It's designed to be used with a Quake sourceport like Ironwail or vkQuake, so you'll need a copy of those too. Once you've got both, all you need to do is extract the Rooftops Jam files into your Quake folder (in a new folder titled 'qrtjam'), create a shortcut to your Quake sourceport with the additional command line "-game qrtjam", and boot it up from there.
While Quake itself is thriving three decades on from its release, the future of the series more generally is difficult to discern. There were rumours a while back that Machine Games might be working on Quake 6, but all signs point to the studio's next game being Wolfenstein 3. Meanwhile, multiplayer spinoff Quake Champions recently ceased its live-service updates, though it's still playable as a one-off, paid title.
