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?
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| Villa Göth (1950) was the first "brutalist" building |
So for this article I actually did some reading and homework, and learned that literally the first building ever to be labeled "brutalist" had a shitload of bricks in it.
When people argue brutalism is only about concrete, it erases not just historical fact but also the movement's original ethos. In fact the first brutalist thinkers proclaimed brutalism was "an ethic, not an aesthetic." Concrete was just one material and method, of many possible materials and methods, to help build a more ethical society to serve the public good after World War II. In this way, brutalism was a leftist movement against fascism. Hmm, I wonder, who would want us to forget this context, and sanitize brutalism of its original socialist politics??
And so Quake is also just another material and method too. What really counts is what you do with concrete, or what you do with Quake -- and who you do it with. Maybe the real brutalism... was the friends we met along the way?
