Retrospective: Quake

By Jim Rossignol Published 9 October, 2011

A quirky quiescence.

There's a peculiar tension at the heart of Quake. Something's not quite right. For this reason it's a game that sits apart from id's other efforts while at the same time still being fundamental to the overall Brown Corridor heritage of the shooter genre.

It was a game that did so very much to evolve and define the FPS, and yet it does not fit so easily into the conventions that the Texan Doom-makers' other games wallow in. This tension is what makes it one of the developer's most interesting games.

Like all the shooting games whose existence has spilled from the number-fuelled mind of John Carmack, Quake's primary contribution to the history of games was technical. The 3D engine was a significant development atop what was prevalent at the time, and it introduced the minor revolution of "mouse-look" - that is free all-axes viewing using the mouse - to the majority of 1996's shooter players.

Up until that time gamers had been playing along flat axes, usually with "faked" height. But Quake made things truly three-dimensional, and this meant two things: levels which didn't have to shirk vertical complexity and, well, you could perform rocket jumps.

"It was the atmosphere and tone of the game that left its biggest impression on my imagination."

Rocket jumps were, of course, able to make Quake's tortuous, labyrinthine multiplayer maps faster to navigate, and were an unintended side-effect of the game's blast physics that became a defined skill within that multiplayer game and also with the bizarre phenomenon of speed runs.

It was the architecture of that multiplayer game that defined Quake's second contribution. Despite the richness of the world, the single-player was almost a prologue against the appeal and longevity of the multiplayer. In fact it was not Quake's 3D engine that really mattered to Quake, as powerful as it was. The technical project that had far-reaching consequences for multiplayer gaming was John Carmack's work on network code, which produced the kind of online deathmatch that still prevails today.

The Quakeworld update for the game, which introduced network code that would work feasibly over dial-up connections, was transformative: an action game that could, thanks to predicting where players were going to be, allow play at the high latencies that early modems had the contend with. Almost unimaginable now, in a world of ubiquitous broadband, but there was a time when a good chunk of gamers was unreachable in the evenings by their home phoneline, for reasons of Quaking.

1

Quake's aesthetic remains unique, caught in a strange limbo between sci-fi and fantasy.

Despite being shackled with tin-can communications tech, the sheer pace and intensity of Quake would daunt most modern players: the unrealistic physics and breakneck pace make Quake's multiplayer more like a twitchy kung-fu rocketry than the rather more pedestrian combat situations that shooters since Half-Life have delivered to us.

Enthusiasm for Quake's multiplayer game was ferocious, and id were quick to sponsor it - putting up Carmack's Ferrari as a prize in a 1997 tournament, won by the first notable FPS pro, Dennis "Thresh" Fong. The Quake scene surged across a nascent internet, and it was to define the pattern of FPS games for several years to follow.

The Quake template is one that is rarer now, due to its demands on player skill, but its influences are still felt in odd corners of modern game design, where the physics bounce players from the ground, and frictionless rocketry dominates the deathmatch.

Technology, however, is not wholly where Quake's value lies. Not to me, at least. It might have been the tech that rippled down the years, but it was the atmosphere and tone of the game that left its biggest impression on my imagination.

What I refuse to forget when looking back at Quake is how strange the flavour of the game, both mechanically and in its setting, really is. Quake was a game peculiar for almost refusing to tell a story, and setting itself in a world disconnected from standard fantasy, sci-fi, military, or post-apocalyptic templates that we see reused so routinely. Today, when every shooter imaginable is hammered across the contorted spine of some story or other, to be dropped in a bizarre world that served as little more than a container for violence and secrets is unusual indeed. Hell, it was unusual in 1996.

While the Dooms were sparse, they still told their tale of space marines versus the occult. Quake 2 and 4 focused on the rather more conventional "Strogg" story of space war between humans and their alien enemies. Quake itself stood apart, practically unexplained. The character was dropped into a byzantine world, and fought for his life, while checking every corner of the spiraling maps for secrets and hidden passageways.

The reason for this weirdness can be found in Quake's difficult and unlikely genesis. It was in fact a failed combat-based RPG. The id team's original plans for something more expansive after Doom quickly led back to a game that was even pacier and more focused on first-person close-quarters combat dynamics than Doom had been.

"It is a rumbling, speeding, frenzied dark masterpiece that deserves never to be forgotten."

But that had not been the original intention, because Quake had even once contained dragons and other trad fantasy standards. The id team's work took a darker turn as the RPG was eroded, but on close inspection you can see the echoes of the RPG-action game that, for a while, id thought it was making. As it turned out they ended up making a slick and minimalist FPS, but the ultra-gothic fantasy overtones remain. Quake is a shooter set not within a science fiction, or really within traditional fantasy, but in some kind of brutal, mechanistic pseudo-medieval realm in between.

This sense of rough-edged, grim fantasy design permeates the shooter, from its environments of clanking metal and rough stone, through to its monsters: savage sword-wielding skeletons, shambling giants that throw lightning-bolts, and Cthulhu-mythos boss characters that lurk in disturbing dungeon underworlds.

It is even reflected in the weapons: an axe, an archaic shotgun, a clonking gatling gun, a nail gun, a lightning gun like a giant magic wand. All this is set against a backdrop unlike normal fantasy Big Bad backstories, and quite unlike the other Quakes' galactic war, and even unlike the exposition-free Mars-demons of Doom.

Quake was set in a dimensional war of some kind, where raiders travelled through sinister "slipgates" to murder in other worlds. There was a whiff of beserk magic to the power ups, and the whole thing reeked of the dead remains of the game it might have been. Quake is a genre outlier in terms of setting and atmosphere, and as such one of my favourite games.

2

The introduction of mouse-look helped introduce verticality to the level design.

You can see why when people look at the other Quake and Doom games, they question whether a return to these evocative hybrid roots might not be a good idea.

Playing Rage this week has once again seen people raise the nature of id's "derivative" settings, as has happened numerous times in the past decade. Indeed, Rage does borrow heavily from post-apocalyptic cliche, lifted from Mad Max by countless driving and combat games, and most recently carved into our mainstream consciousness by Borderlands and Fallout 3. It seems to have almost no connection to Quake at all.

When contemplating the studio's colourful history of shooting games it's perhaps easy to glaze over the first Quake in the lineage. Not as infamous or as influential on mainstream perceptions as Doom, not perhaps as widely recognised as its first and second sequels, nor as notably disappointing as Doom 3, Quake is the game which is beginning to get fuzzy in our recollections.

It should not, because it is a rumbling, speeding, frenzied dark masterpiece that deserves never to be forgotten. And forget it I will not.

Comments (73) Latest comment 8 months ago

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  • Tyronne #1 8 months ago

    Quake was the first game I ever played with a 3dfx card in my pc...I was simply amazed as before I put the card in I wondered what all the fuss was about with them but once it was in the pc, it was like `my pc can do this?`...many fun hours were spent on the multiplayer part to quake as well.

  • sethsez #2 8 months ago

    People have been forgetting Quake when thinking of id? News to me. I was under the impression that it (along with Doom) is considered the game that pretty much defines the company.

  • paavopaavo #3 8 months ago

    Wasn't there an option for mouse look also in Duke Nukem 3D? And that was about six months before Quake.

  • danjfor #4 8 months ago

    Great article! I've never played Quake; this article made me wanna try it. This is lyrical-descriptions-type game writing done RIGHT.

  • Paul_cz #5 8 months ago

    I thought Terminator Future Shock was the game that introduces mouse look into first person genre?

  • Puppaz #6 8 months ago

    The soundtrack by Trent Reznor was pretty epic in this game too, added to the atmosphere hugely to me.
    For some reason, I always prefer to replay the doom games instead of quake, I think they've aged better in my mind.

  • nickthegun #7 8 months ago

    Something else amazing is that it was only a year before quake 2 came out and then a further year before Half-Life came out using the Q1 engine.

    Quake to Half-Life in two years. Its hard to imagine such a seismic shift now.

  • phycus #8 8 months ago

    Quake, 3dfx, opengl patch and Metallica CD. those were the days.

  • Savatage #9 8 months ago

    Great article. Quake did look amazing at the time in OpenGL mode (and was one of the few games my crappy Riva 128 could run properly) but to me it was the "true 3D" nature of the graphics that really blew me away. Watching a friend play it on his Pentium 90 for the first time and seeing the perspective tilt downwards as he looked towards the ground, and then upward as he glanced at the sky - well, it was incredible. Even playing in software mode at 320 x 200 (or thereabouts) with a framerate that struggled to reach the late teens, there was no doubt you were seeing the future of graphics.

  • sonicyoda #10 8 months ago

    Jesus Christ; look at those polygons! All three of them!

    It's a joke. Seriously, I was shocked to see how low the poly-count was on a game I remember fondly.
    Edited by sonicyoda at 09/10/11 @ 11:00

  • bad09 #11 8 months ago

    Will alway love the first Quake, to be honest it's the only Quake I love I've never really got into the games that come after with the space marine setting being kinda dull. Really never understood the move away from the bonkers world of Q1.

    First time I got into Quake was the shareware version at work on a PC with no sound and it was still an amazing experience, we also managed to set up a lan game for some multiplayer on our office server :)

  • obscured021 #12 8 months ago

    Loved quake; Quake, tomb raider,mech2 and descent2 looked sweet with the 3DFX patch, some of the best games ever made. I have the share ware version of quake running on my phone, its mad to think back in the day you needed a 1000 pound computer to play it at max 800x600
    Edited by obscured021 at 09/10/11 @ 09:56

  • witchdrash #13 8 months ago

    I remember playing the Quake tech demo and was totally blown away by the graphics, then when I got the full version with a 3DFX card just simply couldn't believe how amazing it looked. It was fun fast, and when played online utterly brutal, crazy and unforgiving. Quake is my favourite game from when I was a kid, as much as I liked Doom it just didn't grab me in the same way, there was something about being in a fully 3D environment which really grabbed me.

  • DDevil #14 8 months ago

    Weird, I was just playing Quake yesterday.

    Having trouble getting the Steam version of Quake running on modern nVidia cards? I've got you covered.

    Also, in that pack is several graphical updates that re-do the shadows, add HDR lighting, re-inserts the NIN soundtrack etc.
    Edited by DDevil at 09/10/11 @ 14:37

  • Rodney #15 8 months ago

    didn't System Shock do 3D FPS and mouse look before quake?

    I still remember playing the shareware Quake for the first time, It blew me away. It did give me motion sickness the first few times I played it. any one else get this?

  • Demiath #16 8 months ago

    There's a peculiar tension at the heart of Rage, too.

  • varkdm #17 8 months ago

    Doom 3 wasnt dissapointing.

  • RedSparrows #18 8 months ago

    id shooters such as Quake and Doom have managed to impress upon me feelings few other games have: that relentless, dark, story-free, violent 'boxes' of levels are as atmospheric as any story driven title. I find Doom and Quake still more scary to play than any 'horror' FPS.

  • bad09 #19 8 months ago

    @varkdm

    Well yes and no, D3 is a great game but is it D1 or D2? Do you think of it the same way with the same fondness? Most don't.

    Brilliant game in it's own right with a couple of design mistakes (TORCH! ARGH!!!!) but had too much to live up to with Doom being such a landmark title and a proper story instead of "you are here just kill everything" of seemed to take away something.

  • DodgyPast #20 8 months ago

    Is calling forcing mouse look on players a minor innovation meant to be ironic?

    I managed to get through the SP with keys, but when we started playing on our work LAN this was the game that made me unlearn my Doom reactions and relearn a skill that is still just as vital today.

    Quake still has one of my most powerful gaming memories. As I entered a room I noticed a white shambling monster in an adjoining room that was probably down the corridor. After being distracted killing the beasties in the room I'd entered I noticed it was gone, the hairs on the back of my neck literally prickled, and I turned around just in time to unload the shotgun into it's face as it went to take a swipe at me. Apparently I also uttered a rather girly scream at the same time.
    Edited by DodgyPast at 09/10/11 @ 10:57

  • drumbaby #21 8 months ago

    Never multiplayed this, but the single player of this and all the mission packs (and many mods) kept me happy for countless months on end. A legendary game.
    Edited by drumbaby at 09/10/11 @ 10:59

  • darkmorgado #22 8 months ago

    How the hell can you do a two-page retrospective on Quake and not mention the absolutely amazing soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails? It was the biggest contributor to the atmosphere. It was so good that id put the Nailgun weapon in as a tribute and slapped the NIN logo on every box!

  • Rodney #23 8 months ago

    younglings may not believe this but not only did the Quake CD-ROM have no DRM but it allowed you install the game on multiple PCs and play it without the disk.

  • chischis #24 8 months ago

    Quake was the last single-player id game with mostly non-linear levels. Then they just didn't bother any more. Q2, Q3 and RTCW were all fine games, but they all left old-school Doom-style gameplay behind. As in, multiple enemies at any one time, multiple paths to take in a single level etc.

    It's very telling that when id didn't try to tell a story, and concentrated on gameplay, they made better games.

  • erekose200 #25 8 months ago

    Quake was like most ID games - the only good thing about it was the graphics. Underneath it was as brainless and repetitive as Doom. Rage has proven that they are exactly the same now as they were then. The difference is just that they have long been surpassed by the likes of Valve who know how to make interesting shooters that look beautiful as well.

  • AaronTurner #26 8 months ago

    Great game, personally for me it's the game that defined id. Wolfenstein and Doom were good but Quake was another level and when Quakeworld and Wireplay came out my bank balance became seriously affected, it was incredible, I'd never experienced anything like it before. I remember looking at the screen with my friend and turning to him gobsmacked saying "It just looks real", which is kind of laughable today.

  • Tomo #27 8 months ago

    Good article. I much preferred Quake 2 though and spent God knows how long playing that on 56k modem.

    The PC is really lacking a game like this nowadays though. I can't think of a twitch multiplayer shooter made in the last ~5 years. Damn shame as they actually require skill.

  • neuroniky #28 8 months ago

    My mother used to complain that the phone was always busy when I was home alone. Quakeworld was ACE, and I used to spend oh so much time playing it over my modem connection I really lost contact with the world outside. Til the phone bill arrived, and my mother turned into an archdeamon herself, and I had to struggle for my life again, but with no nailgun in sight...

  • Scimarad #29 8 months ago

    "Despite the richness of the world, the single-player was almost a prologue against the appeal and longevity of the multiplayer."

    Oh, so it was Quake's fault was it? Bastards!!

  • el_pollo_diablo #30 8 months ago

    Spot on about the setting of the game. I loved that bizarre industrial castle dungeon vibe. Would be good to see it brought back.

  • paketep #31 8 months ago

    Such a great game. Such great times, when id made fantastic games and Carmack still hadn't put the dagger in PC Gamer's backs.

  • Eraserhead #32 8 months ago

    Just to add to the pedantic comments, Ultima Underworld was doing "proper" 3D, rather than just height maps, in 1992. It didn't have mouse look though.

  • thesonglessbird #33 8 months ago

    I never played proper multiplayer Quake since I didn't have the internet back then. I did, however, have a Quake botmatch mod that came with a copy of PC Format. Never stopped playing that. It's pretty much the reason I nearly didn't pass a few of my GCSE's!

  • DrStrangelove #34 8 months ago

    I still haven't found a better FPS game, at least in single player. I haven't found another weapon which is as much fun as the fast-projectile strong-kickback rocket launcher, for which there's plenty of ammo, thankfully. There's not much that compares with the satisfaction of shredding tough enemies to pieces with quad damage. I love the intense dark atmosphere, which is mostly due to the soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails, in my opinion by far the best video game soundtrack of all time.

    Also, I couldn't care less about stories. In one level, you're fighting guys with laser guns, in the next, you're fighting zombies and knights. Who cares? I want plain good fun, and Quake delivers just that. With lots of dark atmosphere.

  • Azazel #35 8 months ago

    Enjoyed this Jim - most important game for me personally.

  • Dave #36 8 months ago

    This was the first real shooter I played and playing it I did, for months on end. Bought all expansion packs and played those incessively too. Although, I still prefer Quake 2, that really is one of the best games I played ever. After that, id went downhill for me when Half-Life came along. Their games never could capture me again as they once did. About to play Rage, let's see how it will fare.

  • superdelphinus #37 8 months ago

    I remember this, along with c&c, as one of my first online multiplayer experiences. It was utterly bonkers, you'd spawn and there'd be rockets and people flying around everywhere

  • superdelphinus #38 8 months ago

    I remember when quake 2 came out that it seemed a massive break thrombin terms of graphics. Coloured lighting was a bug deal in those days. Did Riven use the quake engine?

  • Kanjin #39 8 months ago

    Quake with dragons would have been amazing, hell I'd still play that game.

    Even though I came late and never saw the original Quake, instead starting on Quake 3, the heady rush, the great weapons, the weird player models. Why aren't there more cartoonish ridiculously paced shooters around?

  • doctor_p #40 8 months ago

    QW + wireplay + 2.5p/minute. In the days before they started doing their subscription-thing, you'd sit there (okay, I sat there) and think "hey man, 2.5p/minute? That's okay! That's only, what, £1.50 an hour, its fine!". Turned out, no, it wasn't fine, and yes, it was an addiction. The amount of players that got ISDN lines just to go on wireplay...Not surprised BT were making £100/second profit in 1998. Quake was great...Oddly, I used to play it with the soundtrack to 3-colours:red...weird. Nice retrospective.

  • edhe #41 8 months ago

    Quake was the best fps before unreal tournament. Never really liked anything id did since.

  • mk-1601 #42 8 months ago

    You know when you see a particularly dumb comment on Eurogamer and you google the poster's username and the results make you do this? [link url=http://i.imgur.com/VfNpL.gif
    ]http://i.imgur.com/VfNpL.gif
    [/link]

    Yeah, that.

  • Raiten #43 8 months ago

    Realy miss the high speed skill based gameplay of good ol' quakeworld, it is a gameplay style you can not recreate unless you do it specificly for pc, which by current day standards is something we will never see again.. tis a real shame.
    There's something that says a lot about how good this game was, it is afterall the longest surviving multiplayer fps game, considering bit over a year ago i droped in and saw my age old clan playing tournaments still and there's still most likely some servers running.

  • Sunjammer #44 8 months ago

    This is the game that got me into scripting for games. Previously I'd only done levels. It was glorious.

    It's also got an absolutely stellar soundtrack, one that is actually in fairly high regard in dark ambient circles. I've played tracks from it at a couple of shows. It's brilliantly dark stuff.

  • SvennoJ #45 8 months ago

    Descent also made things truly 3-dimensional before Quake. It also used a 3-dimensional wire frame map to make sense of the levels where whole sections were in different orientations to each other. I wish they did a proper new game like that.

  • bobdebob #46 8 months ago

    Quake 2 was still better.

  • Zaiz #47 8 months ago

    @mk-1601

    You do realize that more than one person uses a given username, right?

  • Obiwanshinobi #48 8 months ago

    Not sure about Snatcher, but I know Hideo Kojima's Policenauts (1994) to utilise mouse in the first person shooting mode. As far as shooting in "real" 3D (with sprite-based graphics, though) is concerned, Neural Gear (1990) - a Space Harrier-like on rails shooter for the Sharp X68000 - sports mouse controls.
    Geograph Seal (1994) for Sharp X68000 was a first person shooter (and technically a primordial 3D platformer) with polygonal graphics, but I'm not sure if it supported mouse (the controls are digital anyways).
    Mouse was my control device of choice in Spectre Supreme (1993), but although it was a first person shooter with polygonal graphics, the gameplay wasn't really three-dimensional.
    Edited by Obiwanshinobi at 09/10/11 @ 20:21

  • doctorgonzo #49 8 months ago

    Not to mention the properly creepy Nine Inch Nails soundtrack; a bit of a forgotten classic in the game soundtrack stakes, I think.

  • ajaxpliskin #50 8 months ago

    Quake 1 was the best! Bring back Romero for Doom 4 and a true Quake 1 sequel!

  • Nova1977 #51 8 months ago

    I wish they included this game with Rage like they did Quake 2 with Quake 4 on console. This was the first game I bought with my own money but I couldn't get it to work on my P100 with 8mb of onboard RAM until I had to change something in the properties menu, but then I didn't have in-game audio again.

  • Obli #52 8 months ago

    Awesome game, one of my favourites of all time, my favourite Quake (and yes Mr. Carmack, I have recently played Quake - it's not rose-tinted glasses) up there with the original Dooms. This was the last id game that John Romero was involved in - he had a great influence on the early id games. I wish they could work together again - Rage would have turned out better if he was involved.

  • octavedoctor #53 8 months ago

    I'd love to play some Quake 1 again It's one game that just wouldn't work on console, the joypad would be too slow to aim with. Such an atmospheric game single player, and such a funny as f%^k game multiplayer.

    Ahhh the painkeep mod was hilarious, I remember lowering myself into the blackhole weapon the end of a grapplehook with everyone watching to see what happened, when they realsied I wasn't going to die they all promptly opened fire and I died in like 3 miliseconds :)

    Edited by octavedoctor at 10/10/11 @ 12:35

  • FooAtari #54 8 months ago

    Raiten
    There's something that says a lot about how good this game was, it is afterall the longest surviving multiplayer fps game, considering bit over a year ago i droped in and saw my age old clan playing tournaments still and there's still most likely some servers running.

    Some, still plenty when I last checked a few months ago and plenty Doom servers still running as well which are pretty busy. Great fun.

    ajaxpliskin
    Quake 1 was the best! Bring back Romero for Doom 4 and a true Quake 1 sequel!

    Thats the thing people forget. Carmack is probably as good as he has ever been, but he id the engines, he wasn't the designer, that was Romero. If it only had it hadn't all gone to his head.

    Everyone should go read Masters of Doom, great insight to id. I'd love to see them work together again. 90's PC gaming was my favorite games period. So much new ideas, and advancements happening non-stop.

    Nothing has held my interest in gaming as much since. Probably why I spend most of time playing 90's - early 2000s PC games. Still beats the hell out of the crap we get these days. And don't need anywhere near the latest tech to play them.

  • Kostabi #55 8 months ago

    Quake holds a special place for me as it was the first game I ever played online. I remember buying PC Zone just for map packs on the cover CD so I didn't have to waste my phone bill downloading them.

    If the traditional twitch based no nonsense shooter is a dying breed wouldn't it be great for a Quake vs Unreal Tournament crossover?

  • Arrahant #56 8 months ago

    Oh Quake, much love and good memories for that game here. I totally recognize occupying the family phone line all night in the story. :> Cost my parents a lot of money. This is the first game I played online at all, introducing me to clans and the occasional clan meeting.

    I do have forgotten the command to set the fov wider though! Used to be able to type that really fast! :p Shame on me.

  • Alex_976 #57 8 months ago

    Quakeworld and Wireplay was awesome. 2.5p a minute not so much. Monthly phone bills of £100. Thank god ntl started digging up the street and offered 1p a minute Internet. My 56k modem, v90 upgraded of course, ran so nicely then everyone got isdn lines :(So many good memory's of this game. We had it installed on the school network. The obvious highlight was was deathmatch and team deathmatch. But I'll never forget when 12 of us went thru the single player game co-op. Ultimate carnage.I even use the telefrag noise as my message tone on my phone.Thank you ID.
    Edited by Alex_976 at 10/10/11 @ 08:20

  • Sunyavadin #58 8 months ago

    Damn you all, id! YOU UNLEASHED THE BROWN DISEASE UPON THE FPS WORLD!

  • FeralGamer #59 8 months ago

    I remember installing the GLQuake patch. My mind was blown by the graphics.

  • BradlayLaw #60 8 months ago

    DM1-6 are still some of the greatest multiplayer maps ever created. 20 players in DM4 is amazing.

  • anthonypappa #61 8 months ago

    no mention of the NIN soundtrack and sound effects is criminal.

    especially as you state the atmosphere was your favourite part of it.

    the atmosphere was trent and his crazy analogue machines - that unsettling ambient airy noise.
    Edited by anthonypappa at 10/10/11 @ 11:16

  • FortysixterUK #62 8 months ago

    Quake is simply ID's finest moment, even when not graphically enhanced it oozes atmosphere.
    Music by Trent Reznor, the nail gun ammo having the NIN logo on the side. Those bastard lightening firing shamblers, and the evil scream you got from the mobs who could snipe you with energy balls from across the room. Wicked.
    Of course, jazz up the graphics and it's just eye candy on an already great game.

    Excellent title.

  • Ranger101 #63 8 months ago

    E1M7 - Best deathmatch map ever.

  • Peregrin #64 8 months ago

    For me, Quake is the greatest game of all time.
    It was the first truly 3D FPS game. TRULY 3D - none of this Duke Nukem '3D' crap.
    It was the first FPS to really nail mouse control. (This might not technically be true, but it certainly made many people realise that the mouselook system was superior to keyboard control)
    It was the first decent deathmatch game (OK, strictly speaking Doom was, but the multiplayer levels and powerups were much tighter and more refined in Quake, LAN and multiplayer was easier to set up, and it wasn't just a single player game modded to multiplayer).
    It was unencumbered by DRM or installation requirements - at school we'd copy the directory from the CD to a network share, all run from there and then delete the share.
    It was nicely open to modification - as soon as we were bored of the standard maps and gameplay, a wealth of custom goodies could be grabbed from gaming magazine CDs. It wasn't long before I started making my own maps - including modelling our school, which would probably get me detained under anti-terrorism laws nowadays.
    The soundtrack was epic and could be played in a CD player straight from the game CD.
    The AI was actually... intelligent. Rather than enemies wandering around in circles, they actually seemed to HUNT you.
    It didn't need a storyline. The gameplay was strong enough to stand on it's own.
    I realise that whatever game anybody played when they were in their formative years is by default their 'greatest game of all time', but all the same, Quake really was something special.

  • Retro_ #65 8 months ago

    MyPentium 1 166Mhz PC used to manage about 15 - 20fps, It had a Matrox Millenium Card if I recall correctly. I used to lug it to a mates Flat every week for Serial to Serial port networked DM games, utterly brilliant at the time. Loved Quake, it was eye popping at the time.

  • Seoh #66 8 months ago

    @obscured021

    OMG Descent 1 and 2 were awesome there is a game that a) needs a retrospective and b) needs to be brought back. Something about those mines was just brilliant.

  • rogermellie #67 8 months ago

    I remember taking my beige box over to friends to play Quake! Before the game's release you could get the free multiplay quake test and it was ace.

    It could be my memory, but didn't Looking Glass have true 3D engines before Id? I know they didn't have mouse look, but their games were more complex.

  • chiz #68 8 months ago

    DM1-6 are still some of the greatest multiplayer maps ever created. 20 players in DM4 is amazing.

    DM1 and 5 Were shit. The rest were fantastic though. My fav maps were the custom maps: Ultrav and ZTNDM4. Truly epic maps for 1v1 duels. I really hope another quake will come and it will be based on quake1. I hated the daft strogg story on q2 and q4. Oh, and the RL was slow.

    Nothing beats quake for pure skill. There's no shouting at the computer when you get killed - it's always your own fault. Unlike shit like COD/BF where all you need to do is sit in a window ledge and snipe the arse out of people. Not much skill involved. You can't do that in quake. Camp and your fucked.

  • BiscuitPowered #69 8 months ago

    Peregrin - "...at school we'd copy the directory from the CD to a network share, all run from there and then delete the share.

    It wasn't long before I started making my own maps - including modelling our school, which would probably get me detained under anti-terrorism laws nowadays."

    Are you me? :D

    Maps featuring highest on our 16 player after school LAN session (it ran great on a bog standard school issue RM Nimbus Pentium 120!!!)playlist were DM3 (still the greatest FFA deathmatch map ever IMO) followed by community maps Andromeda 9 and Titan 2 (both by Slayer) and another one called Moonglum's Base. Oh, and UKCLDM2

    I got pretty seriously into online QW, vividly remember the days of loading up quakespy, setting up my Qizmo proxy, dialling into Barrysworld late at night and fragging away until the early hours on the Barrysworld servers or my other regular server - 'Quake til Dawn'

    No modern FPS can match the sheer frenetic pace and twitch gameplay of QW.

    Happy days.
    Edited by BiscuitPowered at 10/10/11 @ 22:37

  • karstux #70 8 months ago

    I must have spent countless hours on the Quake tech demo, it was on a magazine cover CD which I brought over from England. I remember being extremely impressed by the grenade launcher... watching its projectiles bounce off the walls with a distinct metallic sound, drawing perfect parabolas of smoke trailing after them... good times, it was like looking into the future on that small CRT monitor.

    Spent a lot of time in the level editor as well.

  • Obiwanshinobi #71 8 months ago

    For me, Quake is the greatest game of all time.
    It was the first truly 3D FPS game. TRULY 3D - none of this Duke Nukem '3D' crap.

    You need a history lesson, then.

  • fluff_the_tiger #72 8 months ago

    I thought Terminator Future Shock was the game that introduces mouse look into first person genre?

    Yep that was the first one, however everyone (especially games journo's) have forgetten about it. A shame, since it was a pretty good game!

  • Videogamer. #73 8 months ago

    Quake rules - its awesomeness forever etched into my warmest high school recollections. :)