It is June 22, 1996. Quake shakes the world to its foundations. The new game from id Software hits with the force of an atomic bomb. In an era dominated by 2.5D worlds, optical illusions and sprites, Quake heralds a true revolution. John Carmack's Quake engine is capable of realizing full 3D worlds. Today we take that for granted, but the realization that enemies are no longer sprites and that everything consists of real models, made up of polygons, was hard to imagine at the time. The items you can pick up, the nails that shoot out of your gun, and the grenades that bounce around the environment are all 3D objects. It's a technological leap forward that will change the games industry forever.
Such a huge step forward didn’t happen without challenges, starting with the engine itself. John Carmack bit off more than he could chew, which caused the development to take much longer than expected. For a year, the technical aspects kept changing, which meant that a lot of work had to be discarded. Once the engine was finally finished, the team didn’t have much to work with. The original vision for Quake was very ambitious and would take a long time to develop. Instead, the team pivoted and made a game more akin to DOOM. With four different designers, minimal creative direction and a push to get it done, there was little room to create something cohesive. This mishmash of ideas ended up working surprisingly well and Quake’s uniqueness was largely created by accident.
Initially, Quake would have been an RPG, based on a custom Dungeons & Dragons campaign the team played in their free time. The world they made up was strongly influenced by the cosmic horror of the American author H.P. Lovecraft. Many of the original ideas never made it into the game, although later the mod Quake: Mjölnir made an impressive attempt to realize them. Hindsight is 20/20 and even though Quake tore the team apart, it’s precisely because of this troubled development that we’re still celebrating the game 30 years later. Where else can you find sci-fi combined with dark medieval environments, cosmic horror, and modern firepower? With a soundscape and musical score so unsettling that you have to hear it to believe the massive impact it truly had on the overall experience?
There’s no summary I can write that will properly convey how impactful Quake was, but I recommend reading Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters for a better understanding. Having said that, there are things I would be remiss not to highlight. Besides accelerating hardware innovation, Quake also made mouse-look become a standard. Team Fortress and Capture the Flag were born in the game’s mod scene and many games can trace their lineage to Quake. For instance, Half-Life’s GoldSrc engine is a heavily modified version of Quake’s engine. Its successors, simply called Source and Source 2, still contain code that was used in Quake. That means popular games like Counter-Strike 2 and DOTA 2 have a little bit of Quake in their DNA. In fact, there’s even a dedicated Wikipedia page to the entire Quake family tree.
That influence was apparent in the game’s multiplayer as well. By adding client/server support for online play and later releasing Quakeworld, which introduced the first server browser, id Software further established competitive multiplayer on the PC. Avid players did everything they could to be competitive, and soon you saw them bunny-hopping and rocket-jumping through the first deathmatch levels. QuakeCon started in 1996 as a small LAN party and grew into the "Woodstock of gaming" and a weekend full of "peace, love, and rockets". A year later, Dennis 'Thresh' Fong won John Carmack's Ferrari in the Red Annihilation Quake Tournament and went on to become the first pro gamer. All this is thanks to Quake's multiplayer. You could even argue that the game was the catalyst for competitive play, multiplayer clans and eSports on PC.
Quake’s multiplayer has faded to the background in the past three decades, but the mod community is still thriving with new releases every week. If you look at Quaddicted, you'll find hundreds of levels and mods created by fans, as well as professional developers. On the PC, the support is truly phenomenal, with an almost inexhaustible source of content, source ports and launchers. With the re-release of Quake in 2021, console players got to experience some of that as well, thanks to curated add-ons. It isn’t a complete list, but it offers a glimpse of what’s out there for newcomers who are (re)discovering Quake. Modern editors such as Trenchbroom allow the community to create maps that defy the expectations of what a thirty-year-old engine can run. Not to mention that acclaimed mods, like Arcane Dimensions, get coverage from the games media.
Nowadays, games tend to have a short lifespan. Support is limited, servers close and entire games are being delisted. Modding support is rare and even if it’s there, greedy publishers try to capitalize on it. As with many other forms of media, games have become content that’s consumed and quickly forgotten. Quake, however, has defiantly stood the test of time. Whether that’s due to the amazing engine, the game’s uniqueness, the unsettling soundscape and musical score or the competitive multiplayer, is irrelevant at this point. We’re thirty years in and by this point we all have different ideas of what Quake is or what it should be. We might be scattered over different communities, but what ultimately connects us is our passion for Quake. When a game is embraced by that much love, it will live on forever.