Art Pass Contest

The Art Pass Contest was a mapping contest hosted by TF2Maps.net. Announced to the community on the TF2 Official Blog on Template:Bl, the competition ended on September 25th, 2010 and the winners being announced on Template:Bl. Participants were asked to take an attack/defend map created by Valve, texture and detail it while maintaining the original layout, and then submit it for the chance to have it included in a Team Fortress 2 update.

Guidelines and Deadline

Various guidelines and rules had been drawn out, such as no advertisements, collaborations, or use of other artists' content without permission. Maps were to be submitted by September 25 2010 at 11:00am UTC. A complete list of guidelines can be viewed here.

Prizes

The only prize initially announced for the Art Pass Contest was the map's inclusion into the game, however, it has been revealed that all participants (people who submitted a finished map) are going to be awarded an in-game item, the Mapper's Medallion.

History

The Art Pass Contest was not originally going to be a full map to detail, it was just going to be a mini-contest. Mappers would get an out of bounds area of a unfinished map and would be allowed detail it. They would then give it back to Valve, where it then might be included in an update. Dario Casali (level designer at Valve), liked the idea which was proposed to him by ZPQ (Former Staff of TF2maps.net), which led ZPQ to begin organising the contest, trying to overcome legal issues such as having mappers having to give total rights of the map to Valve.

On the 21st of January 2010, Valve claimed they thought the idea of a detailing contest would be a good idea, but said that they did not have a suitable map for it. This meant it was not on the list of priorities as Valve was busy working on the Engineer Update.

Robin Walker emailed ZPQ on the 29th of January, informing him that Valve had an old map which they hadn't worked on for a while, and didn't have time to do an art pass (detail) on. He asked ZPQ if TF2maps would run a contest where Valve gave the mappers a VMF (Map file) to work on and compete for the best looking art-passed version. If the end result was good, it would be shipped as an official map. ^[1]

The two winners' maps were added to the game as a part of the Scream Fortress update.