Quake (1996)

Quake is a first-person shooter game developed by id Software and published by GT Interactive. The first game in the Quake series, it was originally released for MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows and Linux in 1996, followed by Mac OS and Sega Saturn in 1997 and Nintendo 64 in 1998. In the game, players must find their way through various maze-like, medieval environments while battling monsters using an array of weaponry. The overall atmosphere is dark and gritty, with many stone textures and a rusty, capitalized font. Quake takes inspiration from gothic fiction and the works of H. P. Lovecraft.
The successor to id Software's Doom series, Quake built upon the technology and gameplay of its predecessor. Unlike the Doom engine before it, the Quake engine offered full real-time 3D rendering and had early support for 3D acceleration through OpenGL. After Doom helped popularize multiplayer deathmatches, Quake added various multiplayer options. Online multiplayer became increasingly common, with the QuakeWorld update and software such as QuakeSpy making the process of finding and playing against others on the Internet easier and more reliable. Quake featured music composed by Trent Reznor and his band Nine Inch Nails.
Despite receiving critical acclaim, Quake's development was controversial in the history of id Software. Due to creative differences and a lack of leadership, the majority of the team left the company after the game's release, including co-founder John Romero. A remastered version of Quake was developed by Nightdive Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks and was released for Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One consoles in August 2021, including the original game's extended content and two episodes developed by MachineGames. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions were released in October 2021.
== Gameplay ==
In Quake's single-player mode, players explore levels, facing monsters and finding secret areas before reaching an exit. Switches or keys open doors, and reaching the exit takes the player to the next level. Before accessing an episode, there is a set of three pathways with easy, medium, and hard skill levels. The fourth skill level, "Nightmare", was "so bad that it was hidden, so people won't wander in by accident"; the player must drop through water before the episode four entrance and go into a secret passage to access it.
Quake's single-player campaign is organized into four individual episodes with seven to eight levels in each (including one secret level per episode, one of which is a "low gravity" level that challenges the player's abilities in a different way). If the player's character dies, they must restart at the beginning of that level. The game may be saved at any time in the PC versions and between levels in the console versions. Upon completing an episode, the player is returned to the hub "START" level, where another episode can be chosen. Each episode starts the player from scratch, without any previously collected items. Episode one (which formed the shareware or downloadable demo version of Quake) has the most traditional ideology of a boss in the last level. The ultimate objective at the end of each episode is to recover a magic rune. After all of the runes are collected, the floor of the hub level opens up to reveal an entrance to the "END" level which contains a final puzzle.
=== Multiplayer ===
In multiplayer mode, players on several computers connect to a server (which may be a dedicated machine or on one of the player's computers), where they can either play the single-player campaign together in co-op (cooperative) mode, or play against each other in multiplayer. When players die in multiplayer mode, they can immediately respawn, but will lose any items that were collected. Similarly, items that have been picked up previously respawn after some time, and may be picked up again. The most popular multiplayer modes are all forms of deathmatch. Deathmatch modes typically consist of either free-for-all (no organization or teams involved), one-on-one duels, or organized teamplay with two or more players per team (or clan). Players frequently implement mods during teamplay. Monsters are not normally present in teamplay, as they serve no purpose other than to get in the way and reveal the positions of the players.
The gameplay in Quake was considered unique for its time because of the different ways the player can maneuver through the game. Bunny hopping or strafe jumping allow faster movement, while rocket jumping enables the player to reach otherwise-inaccessible areas at the cost of some self-damage. The player can start and stop moving suddenly, jump unnaturally high, and change direction while moving through the air. Many of these non-realistic behaviors contribute to Quake's appeal. Multiplayer Quake was one of the first games singled out as a form of electronic sport. A notable participant was Dennis Fong, who won John Carmack's Ferrari 328 at the Microsoft-sponsored Red Annihilation tournament in 1997.
== Plot ==
In the single-player game, the player takes the role of the unnamed protagonist, named Ranger in later games (voiced by Trent Reznor), sent into a portal in order to stop an enemy code-named "Quake". The government had been experimenting with teleportation technology and developed a working prototype called a "Slipgate"; the mysterious Quake compromised the Slipgate by connecting it with its own teleportation system, using it to send death squads to the "Human" dimension in order to test the martial capabilities of humanity.
The sole surviving protagonist in "Operation Counterstrike" is Ranger, who must advance, starting each of the four episodes from an overrun human military base, before fighting his way into other dimensions, reaching them via the Slipgate or their otherworld equivalent. After passing through the Slipgate, Ranger's main objective is to collect four magic runes from four dimensions of Quake; these are the key to stopping the enemy and ending the invasion of Earth.
The single-player campaign consists of 30 separate levels, or "maps", divided into four episodes (with a total of 26 regular maps and four secret ones), as well as a hub level to select a difficulty setting and episode, and the game's final boss level. Each episode represents individual dimensions that the player can access through magical portals (as opposed to the technological Slipgate) that are discovered over the course of the game. The various realms consist of a number of gothic, medieval, and lava-filled caves and dungeons, with a recurring theme of hellish and satanic imagery reminiscent of Doom (such as pentagrams and images of demons on the walls). The game's setting is inspired by dark fantasy influences, including H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Dimensional Shamblers appear as enemies, the "Spawn" enemies are called "Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua" in the manual, the boss of the first episode is named Chthon, the main villain is named Shub-Niggurath and is explicitly stated to be an Old One, and the four episodes all have Lovecraftian names.
== Development ==
A preview included with id's very first release, 1990's Commander Keen, advertised a game entitled The Fight for Justice as a follow-up to the Commander Keen trilogy. It would feature a character named Quake, "the strongest, most dangerous person on the continent", armed with thunderbolts and a "Ring of Regeneration". Conceived as a VGA full-color side-scrolling role-playing game, The Fight for Justice was never released.
Lead designer and director John Romero later conceived of Quake as an action game taking place in a fully 3D world, inspired by Sega AM2's 3D fighting game Virtua Fighter. Quake was also intended to feature Virtua Fighter influenced third-person melee combat, but id Software considered it to be risky. Because the project was taking too long, the third-person melee was eventually dropped. This led to creative differences between Romero and id Software, and eventually his departure from the company after Quake was released. Even though he led the project, Romero did not receive any money from Quake. In 2000, Romero released Daikatana, the game that he envisioned Quake being, and despite its shaky development, and being considered one of the worst games of all time, he said Daikatana was "more fun to make than Quake" due to the lack of creative interference.
Quake was given as a title to the game that id Software was working on shortly after the release of Doom II. The earliest information released described Quake as focusing on a Thor-like character who wields a giant hammer, and is able to knock away enemies by throwing the hammer (complete with real-time inverse kinematics). Initially, the levels were supposed to be designed in an Aztec style, but the choice was dropped some months into the project. Early screenshots then showed medieval environments and dragons. The plan was for the game to have more RPG-style elements. However, work was very slow on the engine, since John Carmack, the main programmer of Quake, was not only developing a fully 3D engine, but also a TCP/IP networking model (Carmack later said that he should have done two separate projects which developed those things). Working with a game engine that was still in development presented difficulties for the designers.
Eventually, the whole id Software team began to think that the original concept may not have been as wise a choice as they first believed. Thus, the final game was very stripped down from its original intentions, and instead featured gameplay similar to Doom and its sequel, although the levels and enemies were closer to medieval RPG style rather than science-fiction. In a December 1, 1994, post to an online bulletin board, John Romero wrote, "Okay, people. It seems that everyone is speculating on whether Quake is going to be a slow, RPG-style light-action game. Wrong! What does id do best and dominate at? Can you say "action"? I knew you could. Quake will be constant, hectic action throughout – probably more so than Doom".
Quake was programmed by John Carmack, Michael Abrash, and John Cash. The levels and scenarios were designed by American McGee, Sandy Petersen, John Romero, and Tim Willits, and the graphics were designed by Adrian Carmack, Kevin Cloud and Paul Steed. Cloud created the monster and player graphics using Alias.
The game engine developed for Quake, the Quake engine, popularized several major advances in the first-person shooter genre: polygonal models instead of prerendered sprites; full 3D level design instead of a 2.5D map; prerendered lightmaps; and allowing end users to partially program the game (in this case with QuakeC), which popularized fan-created modifications (mods).
Before the release of the full game or the shareware version of Quake, id Software released QTest on February 24, 1996. It was described as a technology demo and was limited to three multiplayer maps. There was no single-player support and some of the gameplay and graphics were unfinished or different from their final versions. QTest gave gamers their first peek into the filesystem and modifiability of the Quake engine, and many entity mods (that placed monsters in the otherwise empty multiplayer maps) and custom player skins began appearing online before the full game was even released.
Initially, the game was designed so that when the player ran out of ammunition, the player character would hit enemies with a gun-butt. Shortly before release this was replaced with an axe.
The release of Quake marks the end of the classic lineup at id Software. Due to conflicts with game design and ideas, animosity grew during development that majority of the staff resigned from id after the game's release including Romero, Abrash, Shawn Green, Jay Wilbur, Petersen and Mike Wilson. Petersen claimed in July 2021 that the lack of a team leader was the cause of it all. He volunteered to take lead as he had five years of experience as project manager in MicroProse, but he was turned down by Carmack.
=== Music and sound design[edit] ===
Main article: Quake
Quake's music and sound design was done by Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, using ambient soundscapes and synthesized drones to create atmospheric tracks. In an interview, Reznor remarked that the Quake soundtrack "is not music, it's textures and ambiences and whirling machine noises and stuff. We tried to make the most sinister, depressive, scary, frightening kind of thing... It's been fun." The game includes an homage to Reznor in the form of ammo boxes for the "Nailgun" and "Super Nailgun" decorated with the Nine Inch Nails logo.
Some digital re-releases of the game lack the CD soundtrack that came with the original shareware release. The 2021 remastered version includes the soundtrack.
=== Ports ===
The first port to be completed was the Linux port Quake 0.91 by id Software employee Dave D. Taylor using X11 on July 5, 1996, followed by a SPARC Solaris port later that year also by Taylor. An SVGAlib port for Linux was created by programmer Greg Alexander in 1997 using leaked source code but was later mainlined by id, unlike similar unofficial ports for OS/2, Amiga, Java VMs, and Mac OS. The first commercially released port was for Mac OS, done by MacSoft and Lion Entertainment, Inc. (the latter company ceased to exist just prior to the port's release, leading to MacSoft's involvement) in late August 1997. ClickBOOM announced version for Amiga-computers in 1998. Finally in 1999, a retail version of the Linux port was distributed by Macmillan Digital Publishing USA in a bundle with the three add-ons as Quake: The Offering.
Quake was also ported to home console systems. On December 2, 1997, the game was released for the Sega Saturn. Initially GT Interactive was to publish this version itself, but it later cancelled the release and the Saturn rights were picked up by Sega. Sega then took the project away from the original development team, who had been encountering difficulties getting the port to run at a decent frame rate, and assigned it to Lobotomy Software. The Saturn port uses Lobotomy Software 3D engine, SlaveDriver (also used in PowerSlave and Duke Nukem 3D for the Saturn). It is the only version of Quake rated "T" for Teen instead of "M" for Mature.
Quake was also ported to the Sony PlayStation by Lobotomy Software, but the company was not able to find a publisher for it. A port for the Atari Jaguar was reported as 30% complete in a May 1996 issue of Ultimate Future Games magazine, but it was never released. A port of Quake was planned for Panasonic M2 prior to cancellation of the system.
On March 24, 1998, the game was released for the Nintendo 64 by Midway Games. This version was developed by the same programming team that worked on Doom 64, at id Software's request. The Nintendo 64 version was originally slated to be released in 1997, but Midway delayed it until March 1998 to give the team time to implement the deathmatch modes.
Both console ports required compromises because of the limited CPU power and ROM storage space for levels. For example, the levels were rebuilt in the Saturn version in order to simplify the architecture, thereby reducing demands on the CPU. The Saturn version includes 28 of the 32 single-player levels from the original PC version of the game, though the secret levels, Ziggurat Vertigo (E1M8), The Underearth (E2M7), The Haunted Halls (E3M7), and The Nameless City (E4M8), were removed. Instead, it has four exclusive secret levels: Purgatorium, Hell's Aerie, The Coliseum, and Watery Grave. It also contains an exclusive unlockable, "Dank & Scuz", which is a story set in the Quake milieu and presented in the form of a slide show with voice acting. There are no multiplayer modes in the Saturn version; as a result of this, all of the deathmatch maps from the PC version were removed from the Saturn port. The Nintendo 64 version includes 25 single-player levels from the PC version, though it is missing The Grisly Grotto (E1M4), The Installation (E2M1), The Ebon Fortress (E2M4), The Wind Tunnels (E3M5), The Sewage System (E4M1), and Hell's Atrium (E4M5) levels. It also does not use the hub "START" map where the player chooses a difficulty level and an episode; the difficulty level is chosen from a menu when starting the game, and all of the levels are played in sequential order from The Slipgate Complex (E1M1) to Shub Niggurath's Pit (END). The Nintendo 64 version, while lacking the cooperative multiplayer mode, includes two player deathmatch. All six of the deathmatch maps from the PC version are in the Nintendo 64 port, and an exclusive deathmatch level, The Court of Death, is also included.
An unreleased Game Boy Advance port of Quake was in development from Randy Linden in 2002, and was pitched to id Software in that year. The port was rejected by the company, and Linden's work would remain unused until prototypes of his work were dumped in June 2022. Two homebrew ports of Quake for the Nintendo DS exist, QuakeDS and CQuake. Both run well; however, multiplayer does not work on QuakeDS. Since the source code for Quake was released, a number of unofficial ports have been made available for PDAs and mobile phones, such as PocketQuake, as well as versions for the Symbian S60 series of mobile phones and Android mobile phones. The Rockbox project also distributes a version of Quake that runs on some MP3 players.
In 2005, id Software signed a deal with publisher Pulse Interactive to release a version of Quake for mobile phones. The game was engineered by Californian company Bear Naked Productions. Initially due to be released on only two mobile phones, the Samsung Nexus (for which it was to be an embedded game) and the LG VX360. Quake mobile was reviewed by GameSpot on the Samsung Nexus and they cited its US release as October 2005; they also gave it a "Best Mobile Game" in their E3 2005 Editor's Choice Awards. It is unclear as to whether the game actually did ship with the Samsung Nexus. The game is only available for the DELL x50v and x51v, both of which are PDAs, not mobile phones. Quake Mobile does not feature the Nine Inch Nails soundtrack due to space constraints. Quake Mobile runs the most recent version of GL Quake (Quake v.1.09 GL 1.00) at 800x600 resolution and 25 fps. The most recent version of Quake Mobile is v.1.20 which has stylus support. There was an earlier version v.1.19 which lacked stylus support. The two Quake expansion packs, Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity, are also available for Quake Mobile.
A Flash-based version of the game by Michael Rennie runs Quake at full speed in any Flash-enabled web browser. Based on the shareware version of the game, it includes only the first episode and is available for free on the web.
=== Mods and add-ons ===
Quake can be heavily modified by altering the graphics, audio, or scripting in QuakeC, and has been the focus of many fan created "mods". The first mods were small gameplay fixes and patches initiated by the community, usually enhancements to weapons or gameplay with new enemies. Later mods were more ambitious and resulted in Quake fans creating versions of the game that were drastically different from id Software's original release.
The first major Quake mod was Team Fortress. This mod consists of Capture the Flag gameplay with a class system for the players. Players choose a class, which creates various restrictions on weapons and armor types available to that player, and also grants special abilities. For example, the bread-and-butter Soldier class has medium armor, medium speed, and a well-rounded selection of weapons and grenades, while the Scout class is lightly armored, very fast, has a scanner that detects nearby enemies, but has very weak offensive weapons. One of the other differences with CTF is the fact that the flag is not returned automatically when a player drops it: running over one's flag in Threewave CTF would return the flag to the base, and in TF the flag remains in the same spot for preconfigured time and it has to be defended on remote locations. This caused a shift in defensive tactics compared to Threewave CTF. Team Fortress maintained its standing as the most-played online Quake modification for many years. Team Fortress would go on to become Team Fortress Classic and get a sequel, Team Fortress 2.
Another popular mod was Threewave Capture the Flag (CTF), primarily authored by Dave 'Zoid' Kirsch. Threewave CTF is a partial conversion consisting of new levels, a new weapon (a grappling hook), power-ups, new textures, and new gameplay rules. Typically, two teams (red and blue) would compete in a game of Capture the flag, though a few maps with up to four teams (red, blue, green, and yellow) were created. Capture the Flag soon became a standard game mode included in most popular multiplayer games released after Quake. Rocket Arena provides the ability for players to face each other in small, open arenas with changes in the gameplay rules so that item collection and detailed level knowledge are no longer factors. A series of short rounds, with the surviving player in each round gaining a point, instead tests the player's aiming and dodging skills and reflexes. Clan Arena is a further modification that provides team play using Rocket Arena rules. One mod category, "bots", was introduced to provide surrogate players in multiplayer mode.
Arcane Dimensions is a singleplayer mod. It's a partial conversion with breakable objects and walls, enhanced particle system, numerous visual improvements and new enemies and weapons. The level design is much more complex in terms of geometry and gameplay than in the original game.
There are a large number of custom levels that have been made by users and fans of Quake. As of 2019, new maps are still being made, over twenty years since the game's release. Custom maps are new maps that are playable by loading them into the original game. Custom levels of various gameplay types have been made, but most are in the single-player and deathmatch genres. More than 1500 single-player and a similar number of deathmatch maps have been made for Quake.
== Reception ==
=== Sales ===
According to David Kushner in Masters of Doom, id Software released a retail shareware version of Quake before the game's full retail distribution by GT Interactive. These shareware copies could be converted into complete versions through passwords purchased via phone. However, Kushner wrote that "gamers wasted no time hacking the shareware to unlock the full version of the game for free." This problem, combined with the scale of the operation, led id Software to cancel the plan. As a result, the company was left with 150,000 unsold shareware copies in storage. The venture damaged Quake's initial sales and caused its retail push by GT Interactive to miss the holiday shopping season. Following the game's full release, Kushner remarked that its early "sales were good — with 250,000 units shipped — but not a phenomenon like Doom II."
In the United States, Quake placed sixth on PC Data's monthly computer game sales charts for November and December 1996. Its shareware edition was the sixth-best-selling computer game of 1996 overall, while its retail SKU claimed 20th place. The shareware version sold 393,575 copies and grossed $3,005,519 in the United States during 1996. It remained in PC Data's monthly top 10 from January to April 1997, but was absent by May. During its first 12 months, Quake sold 373,000 retail copies and earned $18 million in the United States, according to PC Data. Its final retail sales for 1997 were 273,936 copies, which made it the country's 16th-highest computer game seller for the year.
Sales of Quake reached 550,000 units in the United States alone by December 1999. In 1997, id estimated that there may be as many as 5 million copies of Quake circulating. The game sold over 1.4 million copies by December 1997.