No? Well, here’s a quick re-cap. At the end of May 2008, 3D Buzz - responding to an evident lull in the Unreal mod community – held what we dubbed the “Old School Level Design Contest.” The contest was so-named in honor of the game modding community from roughly a decade past, before so many people became almost casually comfortable with 3D design and texturing tools.
For which, by the way, we like to think we can take at least some small credit.
In any event, the contest put up some PlayStation 3s (courtesy of Epic Games), some autographed copies of UT3, and cash prizes. But the real slice of pie at the top of the pile was that the winner’s map would get reviewed by none other than Epic Games’s Lead Designer, Cliff Bleszinski.
The rules of the contest were simple. Make a deathmatch level for Unreal Tournament III, using only the assets included with a clean install. No custom content. The idea wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it did level the playing field and forced contestants to get creative within a specific set of constraints. And boy, did they get creative!
When the dust settled, we had a winner and two runners-up:
- First Place: DM-WhiteRealm by Vytautas Katarzis (DanteAlighieri)
- 1st Runner-Up: DM-Calibrah by Kevin Cytatzky (sklare)
- 2nd Runner-Up: DM-Nimius by Samuel Méndez (Ignotium)
Prizes were doled out, and everyone went home happy. Except for one small thing: we still needed to get Cliff to review the winner’s level!
As you might imagine, it’s not always easy to get one of the gaming industry’s leading minds to sit down and do something like that. Cliff’s a pretty busy guy, and at the time, Gears of War 2 was in pretty heavy production.
So we waited. Then, good as his word, Cliff came through and produced a knock-out review of the winner’s level. However, the review came in when we were already pretty tied up with some pretty serious work for Epic. You know, little things like nearly one-thousand page books and, more recently, some new training videos over UDK.
But we’re now happy to say that we have compiled Cliff’s review with some video footage to show off the splendor of DM-WhiteRealm in all of its splendor. A huge “congratulations” goes out all of our contestants, especially our winners, and a tremendous “THANK YOU” to Epic Games and Cliff Bleszinski!
Map Download: http://vs1.3dbuzz.com/data/unrealcon...WhiteRealm.rar
Video Download: http://vs1.3dbuzz.com/data/videos/OldSchool_Winner.rar
UT3 Old School Contest Winner Reviewe By Cliff Bleszinski
Running time: 00:02:37
