I've written an article called "Alone Together in the Quake Brutalist Jam" for Eteo Archetypes, a video game world design website / newsletter run by Gregorios Kythreotis and Emma Kent.
My article is about Quake Brutalist Jam 3, maybe the most popular Quake-related thing in recent memory -- with more downloads than all the previous installments combined, attention from big YouTubers, and coverage from big mainstream newspapers like The Guardian.
In the article I begin with Quake's haunted 1996 origins that burned out many of the core staff at id Software, before diving into the 2026 mod's design and weaving in the 1950s origins of brutalist architecture theory. What was "brutalism" actually about, and how does it actually relate to Quake?
