Extract text from Game course files (COURSE)
To convert COURSE Courses to another format, you need The Golf Club or other Game software.
To convert other file formats to the "Custom Game Level File" file type, you need software like The Golf Club or a similar tool.
A .course file is a proprietary game level data archive. It is primarily used by HB Studios for The Golf Club and PGA Tour 2K video game series to store custom user-generated golf course designs. A smaller percentage of these files are associated with Super Mario ReMaker, a fan-made 2D level editor. These files store terrain heightmaps, 3D object placements, and environmental configuration settings required to render a playable level.
Users often attempt to convert or open .course files to extract 3D terrain meshes, modify course attributes outside the game, or migrate custom levels between different game releases. However, this format presents severe practical disadvantages. It is entirely proprietary, closed-source, and strictly tied to specific, proprietary game engines. Standard 3D modeling software like Blender or Autodesk Maya cannot open or import them. Additionally, version incompatibility is a major frustration for creators; a .course file built in an older game version frequently breaks or refuses to load in a newer release because the underlying terrain logic changes.
Because this is a closed, proprietary game asset, standard online converters fail to process it. Direct conversion to universal 3D formats like OBJ, STL, or FBX is typically impossible without highly specialized, community-built reverse-engineering scripts. The original game software is usually the only program that can properly read or export the intended graphical data.
Despite these restrictions, a .course file generated by The Golf Club is fundamentally a GZ (GZIP) compressed archive disguised under a different extension. We recommend targeting extraction to standard archive formats like ZIP or GZ, which allows you to access the raw data files inside. Just drag and drop your file to identify the format, view it, and convert it when possible. convert.guru can identify the file format, inspect the file, and show text or internal content. If our analysis detects a supported underlying or embedded format, viewing or conversion to TXT or JSON may still be possible without losing the original raw configuration data.
Convert.Guru analyzes your COURSE file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert COURSE file to EXE, ISO, BIN, CUE, PAK, WAD, PK3, PK4, BSP, MAP, SAV or DAT, you can use The Golf Club or similar software from the "Game Level Data Storage" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert MOD, BIN, CFG, SCX, DAT, MPQ, LOG, CUE, INI, EXE, SCM or ISO files to COURSE, try The Golf Club or another comparable tool in the "Game Level Data Storage" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our COURSE converter.