They didn’t have much, but they could create. Money was tight for the family, so they built their own board games growing up in Saskatchewan, Canada. One year, Matthew Fehr’s father created his own little golf board game out of huge bristle boards with holes drawn in and different clubs tapered off. They rolled dice to see where the ball went, with sand traps and water hazards and trees along the way.

It lit a spark in Matthew. Sure, he liked golf as a game, but there was more pulling him in — he could create new worlds this way. Soon he was 7 years old drawing up golf courses on sheets of paper. In high school he discovered the website Golf Club Atlas and practically lived on what he called the “greatest resource ever.” He scoured through photo profiles of courses around the world, places he couldn’t go, and read through discussion boards on the best golf architects.

The world of golf architecture is exclusive. And expensive. One does not simply just jump into designing golf courses. So that was a dream Fehr had to put aside, settling for old-school computer games like Sid Meier’s SimGolf as he pursued a career as a chef.

“There has to be something out there that will allow me to build golf courses,” he thought.

Then, seven or so years ago, Fehr found an independent game called “The Golf Club.” It wasn’t very popular outside of the niche gaming world. It didn’t have licensing deals at the time like EA Sports did. But it did have a remarkably in-depth course designer tool.

He wasn’t a gamer nor was he particularly tech savvy, but this was his calling. He taught himself how to do the one thing he always wanted to do. The kid playing bristle board dice golf was designing golf courses. “It just blew my mind,” he said.

The game grew in popularity and was bought by gaming goliath 2K, which just released a new version — “PGA Tour 2K25”. Fehr — he’s better known by his tag, MattyfromCanada — is one of the most respected designers in an international community, so much so he’s been contracted by 2K to design official courses for each new version of the game. He is, no matter how you want to define it, a professional golf course architect, his courses put alongside Pebble Beach, Royal Portrush and Oakmont in the game.

“I’ve told my boss at work,” Fehr said, “my dream, if there’s ever even a chance I could ever design a golf course for real life, I will run out of the building and you will never see me again.”

He’s just one member of a fascinating world of obsession, a group of creatives that range from 15-year-old high schoolers to 70-year-old retirees spending their lives on message boards, Discord chats and YouTube streams to interact, create and discover the best courses in the game. Some can build a course in 10-20 hours. Others will sweat it out for more than 200 hours to create their masterpiece. Some courses are hyper realistic, forming homages to their favorite golden age architects. Others are fantastical, only possible in a video game world.

But over the last decade, these people have created a community. This summer, Fehr and a few others will fly to Scotland for a golf trip to play St. Andrews and North Berwick. Others meet up each year, taking turns hosting the others. Some were die-hard gamers. Some don’t touch a single other video game. Some turned this passion into jobs at golf architecture firms. Others got hired by gaming studios. But the story of this design world isn’t about any of that. It’s about getting to be who they always thought they were.

The montage launches with five minutes of clips of every course you wish you could play. There are heathland style tracks, and some sandbelt beauties. There are absurdist gems in the mountains with rocky creeks and tee shots into cliffs. There are stadium courses that look like TPC Sawgrass on steroids and parkland courses inspired by Augusta National.

Then the Twitch stream begins, and a soft-spoken Englishman in his 30s begins to speak. His name is Ben Page. Others know him as b101. Either way, “everybody wants to be like Ben,” one fellow designer said.

Today is the group stage draw for the World Cup of Design 2025. The average person will have no clue this ever happened. But for the 300 people who did watch, this is their Super Bowl. Forty of the best designers in the PGA 2K world will be drawn into eight groups to compete through a knockout style format to crown the best course of the year. That opening montage? Those were the previous six winners.

Page then welcomes his co-host for the draw.

“If you don’t recognize Andre, he once designed golf courses,” Page says in a dry tone.

“Once,” quips Andre Quenneville, another 30-something man with glasses and a light beard.

Quenneville, or CrazyCanuck, is something of the godfather of this community. He’s the Velvet Underground of 2K course design. Maybe not that many people actually watched his videos, but everyone who did felt compelled to become a designer.

But he’s more of a background figure now. Part of that is having children and a family. Much of it is becoming disillusioned or disappointed with recent editions of the game and its design tool. But the executives at HB Studios, the creators of “The Golf Club” that 2K Sports acquired in 2021, were smart enough to know that to get people back on board and excited with this newest game, they needed CrazyCanuck on board. They looped him in early to preview the new design tool, and suddenly he’s back. His excitement has others excited too.

Quenneville was far from the first to launch this community, but he ended up being the whole who brought in new audiences. He’s a teacher by trade, teaching high school math and science. Yeah, he golfed, but not too intensely. He didn’t know the design world. He’s not a huge gamer, either. But like Fehr and so many others, he had a fascination with courses and drew them out as a kid.

Then, in 2014, the first edition of “The Golf Club” came out. That game is a story of its own for another day. It was cool and new and anti-establishment, with gameplay that felt like golf — as frustrating as it was rewarding. But the big sell was the “Greg Norman Golf Course Designer,” a partnership with Norman’s design company that allowed the firm to render course proposals for potential clients. The tech initially was not very good, but improved quickly.

Quenneville’s first courses were “absolute garbage,” and there was nobody making videos explaining how to use it. They were all on their own.

But he had an idea. He went into forums and said, “Hey, if you post your courses here I’ll review them on YouTube.” Quenneville was far worse than the guys he was critiquing, but by reviewing these courses he could hone in and figure out how these people were making them. How’d they do that bunker lip? How’d they plant it that way? This was a decade ago, so the tools were far behind. “It was like the dark ages,” he joked, so the best designers were the ones discovering tricks to create visuals.

Quenneville becoming the primary “reviewer” coincided with the creation of a niche website called TGC Tours. See, the original games didn’t have any career mode or tour system, so a group of buddies created their own online league where people played the same courses and submitted their scores to the website. It grew and grew to where there are now thousands of members, with dozens of different tiers and tours and competitions. TGC Tours became as important as “The Golf Club” itself, enough so that later versions of the game have added an “online societies” mode where these created online tours were actually inside the game.

But possibly the most lasting element of TGC Tours is that it became the primary hub for designers to meet in the forums and talk. That’s where they shared courses, gave notes and tried to create ones good enough to be picked for the next TGC Tour season. It created community.

Quenneville got better at making his own courses. Much better. “Then I went on my teaching knowledge and said, ‘There’s an opportunity here for me to make some really simplistic, easy-to-start tutorials because there’s a massive hole in that.’”

Those videos gained popularity around 2019 as “The Golf Club” was on its third edition, but the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed a new wave. Suddenly everyone in the world was stuck at home, and wanted a hobby. Some of them found this game, and then they found Quenneville’s videos.

One of the people constantly commenting in those early streams was Page. He didn’t even have the game yet. A CrazyCanuck video popped into his feed and he was hooked, because unlike Quenneville, Page is a true golf architecture nerd through and through. In the description of his newest club, Ferncliff, he cites Myopia, Sleepy Hollow, Boston GC, Essex, Beau Desert and Ohoopee as inspirations.

But like Quenneville, Page is also an educator, teaching high school French and German in England’s midlands. He thinks that’s why he was able to pick it up so quickly. Within weeks, he was one of the better designers. The natural, if you will. By the time 2K Sports bought HB Studios and created “PGA Tour 2K21”, they were hiring Page as a designer.

“You’ll see a lot of people where they have command of the tools and can make everything look very pretty, but the golf is not very interesting, one dimensional,” Page said. “Or there’s the reverse where the golf is great but the visuals aren’t. Or, because it’s a video game, you have people almost trying to do too much and throw everything at one course because you can. It’s all about finding a balance.”

But the beauty of the community is the variance inside it, though it remains mostly male. What was once 10 top designers has become closer to 70.

There’s Page (@b101tgc), perhaps the top dog nowadays. He has a combination of visuals and architecture know-how many are trying to catch up to. And the teacher found his own niche creating tutorials that focus on taking designers from good to great.

There’s Adam Benjamin (@articfury1). He’s the elusive artist, hardly ever talking in the community but popping in out of nowhere to release a new course with spectacular, jaw-dropping visuals.

There’s Tanner Bronson (@DTannerBronson), a younger designer who turned his hobby into a job working at a golf architecture firm.

There’s Christian Andrade (@SleepyPanda_7), a former golf pro who found Quenneville’s videos, got really good at design and got hired by HB Studios as a senior level editor. He gets a lot of credit for taking the criticism of 2K23, looping in the design community and creating a design tool for 2K25 that has them all giddy.

But the cool part is the ways the designers have created their own world inside a world. They’ll have contests where you have to make a course as a specific designer. Or a certain era or region. Many have gotten in the habit of sending each other plots of land to adapt to and create inspiration.

Quenneville was on the first trip to Myrtle Beach organized by the TGC Tours founder. Now most of them go on a different trip each year. Quenneville has become so close with one designer that their wives hang out. Some people don’t even design courses anymore but still go on the trips as friends.

“Every time you’re just like, oh my god, is there any axe murderer in here? Who are these random guys?” Quenneville said. “But you’re so comfortable with them.”

“They are genuine friends,” Fehr said.

“You’re all golf geeks that have an extremely niche interest inside of an extremely niche interest,” Page said. “So people tend to want to chat about the same things.”

Yes, there is sometimes tension in the forums. Sometimes the fantastical designers and the realists disagree on judging results. Sometimes players don’t take criticism well, because it’s not exactly fun being told something you just spent 100 hours on isn’t very good. Sometimes the elite players and the elite designers go at it.

But overall, it’s a group of people who just want to create.

“Not too many people in the community are into it for how many plays you got,” Quenneville said. “It’s just the process, or being picked to host a tournament on TGC Tours is a cool experience, but for the most part people like sharing it with people in their community.”

There’s a question they all get asked most often, though. One this reporter of course asked as well. How long does it take to design a course?

None of them quite have their answer down, because it depends. Quenneville is the first to say he’s not the most detail obsessed, so in his prime he could make a pretty good course in 20 to 40 hours. Page’s simplest courses take that long, or he could take 200 hours. Fehr, yeah he’s going to be around 100 to 200 hours without a doubt. He’s hit 300 hours before over several months. He might spend a whole night mastering one bunker.

And all these guys have day jobs. At the peak of his obsession, Quenneville would be at the dinner table thinking about what hole he was going to work on, or wonder if he could take off work to finish a course. Now, he’s much more likely to put his kids to bed and spend an hour or two planing grass while listening to a podcast.

But Fehr took exception when asked about how much time he takes living in this community. Sure, he makes time to see his family. And yes, he does go see his friends in Saskatoon when he can. But there was something about the suggestion that his design world was him running away from the real world that didn’t sit right with him. Was his design life not as valid? Was living out some version of his dream not as substantial? He wasn’t avoiding his friends.

“These are my friends.”

(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; Photos: Courtesy 2K)