Dimension of the Past is a short expansion to the original Quake. It was released in 2016 by MachineGames to celebrate the base game’s 20th birthday. They apparently have an internal group called Quake Club that get together to create free new levels using a level editor called TrenchBroom. This seems like such an unusual thing for a large games company to do, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Getting a chance to refresh your skills on the absolute basics of level design, or even try out creating music or textures sounds great. Especially when modern games development means you spend time hyper focusing on one tiny detail in a giant project for years without much control. I suspect it’s a lot of fun as well.
This expansion is quite small, and only uses the weapons and enemies from the base game. It works more like episode 5 of Quake than a full expansion pack like Scourge of Armagon. It’s also really quite difficult, I found myself constantly low on ammunition and having to use every weapon at my disposal.
Overall this was pretty good, though after having seen what they did 10 years later for the newly released Dawn of the Machine expansion it’s amazing how much simpler this is. They clearly have improved in the meantime.