Related Sections: Culture Shooters
If Dutch post-Impressionists made Counter-Strike levels
The picture above is "de_vangogh", a level for Counter-Strike made by a guy who goes by the name "Nipper". The level was created from images of Van Gogh paintings. You can watch a walk-through here, where you get a much better sense for how great that "Starry Night" skybox looks.
In an interview, Nipper cited his inspiration:Almost all my maps are inspired by some movie or tv show or commercial or a building I saw in real life. It doesn't matter if it's not an action movie or even if I hated it. Like de_cliffcabin was inspired by some horrible Sandra Bullock movie.
It'll be a shame how this sort of third-party level design is a dying art. What id accomplished with Quake -- an open game that encouraged people to roll up their sleeves and make something new -- is slowly but surely being supplanted by paid downloadable content, professional and invariably safe. If it weren't for YouTube, how many of us would have ever seen de_vangogh?
You can see (and download, if you play Counter-Strike) more of Nipper's levels here.
By Seth at 1:13 PM ON 11/24/08
Haha, Thank you!!! That brought me back to the days of playing CS.
I remember spending a couple hours downloading a huge map pack of Nipper's maps and then spending weeks playing them all!!
By Troy Goodfellow at 3:33 PM ON 11/24/08
That's a beautiful thing. And you can only really do that on a PC.
I just finished re-reading Masters of Doom and this is the sort of thing that Carmack loved and pushed, fighting against internal pressures to patent everything and restrict moddability.
By Aeon221 at 9:56 PM ON 11/24/08
I liked how several of the rooms were also references to other Van Gogh paintings. I'm no art critic, but I recognized at least ten separate paintings, either as rooms or on the walls. He should submit that level to MoMa and see if they'll set up an exhibit.
Aeon221:
I liked how several of the rooms were also references to other Van Gogh paintings. I'm no art critic, but I recogni...More »