The Quake Fan who built the map editor everybody uses - Articles
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The Quake Fan who built the map editor everybody uses Posted by webmaster · Oct 20, 2026 06:11pm Back in 2010, a Mac user named Kristian Duske wanted to make Quake maps again. Small problem though: nobody had built an editor Duske actually liked. ToeTag by Warren Marshall was out there, but the workflow just did not click. So Duske, who already had some 3D programming under the belt, did the only sensible thing: wrote a new one from scratch. Fifteen years and a couple of full rewrites later, that editor is TrenchBroom. If you have played a custom Quake map in the last ten years, there's a good chance it was born inside of it. Mappers swear by its 3D first workflow. Indie teams used it to build modern retro shooters like Wrath and GRAVEN. Godot projects have been using it with Qodot and other extensions. And the Quake scene, which by all means should now be gathering dust next to the Voodoo2 in your parents garage, is having one of the best runs in its history, with TrenchBroom sitting right in the middle of the party.
The punchline?
Duske never made another map.
Not one.
Not in TrenchBroom, not in anything else. We caught up with Duske by email, somewhere between a full time programming job at a music company, a family, and a worrying number of hours in Control Resonant. We talked about the spark that started it all, the code that should have stayed simple, the move from wxWidgets to Qt, the CSG algorithm that refused to be tamed, and the fine art of maintaining a project of this scale.
Grab your rocket launcher.
Here we go.
What was the spark that made you create TrenchBroom?
Was it a small itch, or had you planned it for a while? I started TrenchBroom in 2010 because I wanted to make maps again, but I was (still am) a Mac user and couldn’t find a level editor that I liked. There was ToeTag by Warren Marshall, but I wasn’t super happy with the workflow. Plus, I had already experience with 3D programming and wanted to improve my skills. So I started TrenchBroom as a macOS (then called Mac OS X) app, written in Objective C and C only. This version was released in 2012. People were interested in the 3D only approach, but since most Quake modders and mappers used Windows at the time, they couldn’t use it. I decided I would start over, but this time using C++, which I also wanted to learn, and with portability in mind. TrenchBroom 1.0 came out a year later, initially for Windows and macOS: TrenchBroom 1.0 release. The Linux builds came out a bit later. Since then, there has been one major rewrite (TrenchBroom 2.0 in 2018) and in 2020 we switched the UI frameworks from wxWidgets to Qt. Ironically, I never made a single map again, using TrenchBroom or otherwise... It's been 15 years since April 2, 2011, the first commit on GitHub. What would the Kristian of 2011 be most surprised by in TrenchBroom today? That it’s so successful and that I’m still working on it. I wasn’t expecting that at all when I started it. And maybe the 2D views, because I originally didn’t want to add those at all. Any design decision from the early days you would take back? Lots! TrenchBroom has a lot of over engineered code that I’m still cleaning up to this day. I wish I had kept things simpler back then and used much less object orientation. I have spent enormous efforts in undoing past mistakes. How has your relationship with the project been all those years?
Any moments you stepped away or nearly quit? What made you come back?