What is noclip.website?

noclip.website is a celebration of video game level design and art. It's a chance to explore and deepen your appreciation for some of your favorite games.

Why did you make this?

I've always had an appreciation for the incredible worlds that game developers make. Sometimes staring closely at levels might help you understand the challenges the designers were facing, and what problems and techniques they used to solve them. You can learn a lot about a game by looking in the places they don't show in the game itself. It's also a ton of fun to test your memory, seeing if you can remember how a level is laid out, or where two rooms might connect to each other.

It doesn't work!

Oops, sorry about that. Please let me know through either the official noclip.website Discord or Twitter. Try to let me know what OS/browser/GPU you were using, and what game you tried to view, and I'll investigate.

Can I request a game?

Maybe. Check around to see if anybody has looked at the game files before. If there's existing community documentation, that helps a lot. And if you're around to help answer questions or provide map names, I'm even more inclined.

Even having documentation, games can take months of my time to add. So I have to be very careful with which games I choose to spend my time with.

If you have some programming skills and want to try to add a game yourself, I fully welcome that. Join the Discord and I will be happy to help you get set up with a development environment and walk you through the code.

Why do some levels look broken?

In order to put a game on the website, I first need to take apart the game, extract the data, and then figure out how to put it back together. Some of these games, especially the newer ones, are really complex with their levels and their models, and that often means it takes more work to make it look correct. The line between "game engine" and "game data" is only getting blurrier and blurrier.

My dream is that the site contains fully accurate versions of each game, and I try to get closer to that goal when I can, but the effort and time involved to make an accurate recreation can sometimes be far too much, or would push me more into recreating large parts of the original game's engine, which I'm less interested in doing myself.

How do I export models from the site?

You can't. From the technical side, there is no one consistent file format that has all of the features that an accurate model would require. From a personal perspective, I'm not ready to take on the support burden of writing an export tool.

That said, if you would like to use my work as a base to build your own tools, the website is open-source and source code can be found at GitHub.

If you are looking for art for your own projects, there are some fantastic artists out there in the community that are always looking for work. Hire them instead of using art assets from other games.

This is cool! Any way I can help you out!

Absolutely. Join the official Discord and ask around if you would like to help out. The easiest things to help out with are providing savestates and naming maps, and can be done even if you do not know how to code. There's also some work that would be appreciated to help me improve accuracy, like running games in certain modes to help me compare the two.

If you have a more tech-y background, there's always coding work to be done. All the source code to the site is available at GitHub, whether you want to browse around, use it for your own purposes, or help contribute.

Are you afraid of being taken down?

Less than you might think. Companies take down fan projects when they're competing with their in-house projects. I don't see noclip.website as competing with any game out there — it's more of a museum, not a game. The worlds on display are incredible and I hope they encourage you to go out and buy a copy of the game itself.

That said, I have enormous respect for the developers and dev teams and if I received a take-down request, I would honor it. It is their work on display, after all.

Developers are only able to make these fantastic worlds if we collectively support them. noclip would not exist without their hard work and dedication. To ensure that they remain healthy, please try to buy games instead of pirating them. I also put in extra effort to ensure that all assets available on this site cannot be used to pirate the game itself.

Do you accept donations?

No. Use the money to buy some games instead.

Any affiliation to noclip, the documentary people?

I chatted with them once, but the name is a coincidence. The name comes from an old Quake command that would let you fly through the levels here, just like in the game.

Have you seen the YouTube show Boundary Break?

Of course! I love that show. I'm ecstatic to see that exploring video game levels from different angles has captured the imaginations of such a wide audience. And I hope that this site encourages that same curiosity that's visible all throughout Boundary Break, trekking through these levels on your own adventures!

Who made this site?

In my opinion? The artists and game developers. They made everything you actually see here on display.

All icons you see are from The Noun Project, used under Creative Commons CC-BY:

• Truncated Pyramid by Bohdan Burmich
• Images by Creative Stall
• Help by Gregor Cresnar
• Open by Landan Lloyd
• Nightshift by mikicon
• Layer by Chameleon Design
• Sand Clock by James
• Line Chart by Shastry
• Search by Alain W.
• Save by Prime Icons
• Overlap by Zach Bogart
• VR by Fauzan Adaiima
• Play Clapboard by Yoyon Pujiyono
• Undo by Numero Uno
• Redo by Numero Uno
• Zoom In by Tanvir Islam
• Zoom Out by Tanvir Islam