An Untold Story of a Creative Community of Level Designers: Designing and sharing imaginary navigable virtual environments with game technologies

The following paper describes and critically reflects on the remarkable production of a creative community of level designers who designed and published 3D game levels (3D real-time virtual navigable environments) during the end of the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s. During those years, many level designers from several countries created an impressive number and variety of custom levels (user-created content), characterised by imaginary architectures and places informed by narrative elements. This international community was supported by various websites that are no longer available. However, an open-source website, Unreal Archive, constitutes “an initiative to preserve and maintain availability of the rich and vast history of user-created content for the Unreal and Unreal Tournament series of games” (Unreal Archive, 2022). The number of levels available on Unreal Archive exceeds 34,000. For the first time in the architectural research community, this paper aims to shed light on the creative production of that period, and to identify and critically reflect on aspects that could have cultural, creative and educational value for architecture and architectural education. The author directly experienced the achievements of that historical period, and created and published a number of virtual environments using early versions of the Unreal Editor/Engine and 3D modeling software. This research is part of a larger project that investigates transdisciplinary expressions of spaces and architectures, as well as concepts, methodologies and tools in the video games field that can inspire or be transferred to the architecture field.