Quake turns 20
id's your birthday!
The video game birthdays keep on coming: now Quake is 20 years old.
id Software's hugely popular PC first-person shooter came out in the US on 22nd June 1996, courtesy of publisher GT Interactive.
In a Quake retrospective published in 2011, Jim Rossignol discussed the influence of id's game.
"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," he wrote.
"This tension is what makes it one of the developer's most interesting games."
To mark Quake's 20th birthday, co-creator John Romero penned a blog post in which he shared a document created by id's then FTP and web admin Joost Schuur called QUAKETALK 95.
This Quake FAQ was created on 22nd October 1995 to keep people up to date on everything that had been posted about the game.
"People wanted to know what the game was about and information was spread thin all over the place: magazine articles, IRC logs, even in hint books," Romero said.
"You can see the original design thinking behind Quake while we were making it. Just one month after this QUAKETALK 95 FAQ was released was our fateful, big company meeting that determined the final direction of the game into the Quake that was released. It bears little resemblance to the designs discussed here but it lets you see how volatile game design processes can be."
Romero also re-published the first screenshots of Quake, originally released onto the internet on 3rd August 1995. The 320x200 pics are enlarged. Here's one:
And here's what Quake ended up looking like:
Quake lives on, of course. At E3 this month, Bethesda announced a new Quake game for PC called Quake Champions.