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. MachineGames apparently has an internal group called Quake Club that get together to create free new levels using a level editor called TrenchBroom. This seems 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 in fact trying it out when you spend your day job hyper focusing on one tiny detail in a giant project for years sounds like a great idea. I suspect it’s a lot of fun as well.
This expansion is quite small, it works more like an episode 5 of the main game 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. It also only uses the base games weapons and enemy sets.
I found this pretty fun, though after having seen what they did 10 years later for Dawn of the Machine it’s amazing how much simpler this is. They clearly have grown their skills in the meantime.