Hidden Fortress first appeared in the Dreamcast port of Quake III in 2000 as dc_map07. The Dreamcast port of the game found a great following and was critically acclaimed on its release despite only supporting up to four players in multiplayer games, which this arena is a little large for, being better suited to medium sized team deathmatch games of three versus three at least.

QZDM20 (as it was named in the beta version) was the first in a series of six levels released during the summer of the beta version of Quake Live, as id's official intro to the level describes:

“We're kicking off our ‘6 new maps in 6 weeks’ campaign with Hidden Fortress. Although new to QUAKE LIVE, this arena first appeared in the Sega Dreamcast version of QUAKE III Arena. Already considered the best new arena created for QUAKE III Dreamcast, we chose to make very few changes in bringing this classic map to QUAKE LIVE. The arena was originally created by Martin Kaai Cluney, a designer for Raster Productions. Kaai is now a designer at id Software working on the RAGE team. Hidden Fortress is a medium sized map with three main rooms - perfect for 6-10 player team deathmatch, clan arena and free for all gameplay. Although we chose to start with a classic map from the Dreamcast, we'll be debuting a mix of new and classic maps in the weeks to come.”

The night skies of the original version have given way to a new dawn in this reappearance of the level, along with a number of other small visual improvements as is customary in the Quake Live levels. It wasn't the only new level in the Dreamcast version that wasn't included in QuakeLive, as well as DC_MAP15, DC_MAP17 (actually Evil Playground from Quake III: Team Arena) and DC_MAP23, a series of nine offline maps that Sega officially left out of the game but included on the disc, known as the ‘ss-offline’ maps, are available, but Hidden Fortress is surely the fan favourite and most suited to the reworking.

A series of promotional screenshots were created to mark the release of Hidden Fortress, which are archived below: