// PC GAMER — GAMING
The advent of first-person shooters introduced a wild frontier of unregulated video game level packs, and it ended in a lawsuit that changed copyright forever
Revisiting the forgotten fourth state of PC gaming.
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Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
For most of PC gaming history, there were three states of PC game—your regular old video game, expansions/DLC, and mods. But for a brief period in the 1990s, there was a fourth state, the level pack—collections of levels for the early first-person shooters like Duke Nukem 3D and Quake.
These level packs were sold on shelves as boxed products just like their video game counterparts. But they occupied a far more amorphous position between the other three states of PC gaming. In form and structure, they were similar to expansions, and are sometimes bundled into the same category. The Master Levels for Doom 2, for example, are regarded as an official expansion to that game.
Others, however, were marketed as "Official Mission Packs," like Quake's additional episodes Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity. On top of these were unofficial mission packs, like those published by Wizardworks for Duke Nukem 3D.
Some of these level packs played small but important roles in FPS history, acting as the primordial soup from which some of the genre's latter-day designers emerged. But they also represented a digital Wild West, varying greatly in both quality and legality, and it all ultimately ended in tears.
The best of these mission packs were generally created by sanctioned third-party developers like Sunstorm Interactive. Specialists in Duke Nukem 3D level packs, Sunstorm were responsible for Duke Caribbean: Life's A Beach, Duke It Out in DC and Duke Xtreme—three of the most well-regarded level packs for 3D Realms' 1996 FPS.
It was at studios like Sunstorm where many of the second generation of FPS level designers would cut their teeth. One such designer was Charlie Wiederhold, a college kid who was obsessed with making maps for games like Rise of the Triad and Duke 3D, who would go on to work on games like Duke Nukem Forever, Borderlands, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
Wiederhold was recruited by Sunstorm after designing a level for a LAN tournament he was involved with called the Duke Nukem 3D Rodeo Shootout, which was attended by the likes of Randy Pitchford and Richard 'Levelord' Gray. In fact, there is an archived Usenet post on Google Groups written by Wiederhold advertising the tournament: "I got hired by Sunstorm to write an installer for the Duke addon pack that they were making," Wiederhold recalls. "I got the chance to do one of the levels for Duke It Out in DC, and [combined with] the installer, I looked around and thought 'why am I still going to college?'"