Happy 20th Birthday, Quake

http://rome.ro/news/2016/6/22/happy-20th-birthday-quake

by miiiiiike • 10 years ago

213 144 10 years ago

rndmio2• 10 years ago

I know there's a lot of nostalgia involved, but in my mind this was a pivotal moment in gaming. The step up from Doom (and alikes) to Quake was huge. Not to mention how well designed and balanced the game was. I wasted so many hours playing it originally and even now it still thrills, in a way I just haven't had for a long time.

zorked• 10 years ago

That was a beautiful moment in time when the technology was starting to reach high levels of realism but the aesthetic of realism still hadn't become the oppressive norm of mainstream gaming.

digi_owl9• 10 years ago

And then we got WoW and now things are tilting back towards cartoons...

zanny3• 10 years ago

I don't know if this was intentional, but eevee just made a blog post about this yesterday:

https://eev.ee/blog/2016/06/22/graphical-fidelity-is-ruining...

Probably to coincide with the anniversary.

munificent• 10 years ago

I've been really enjoying Minecraft lately because it bucks that trend for all of the right reasons.

All of its graphical simplicity both helps make the game world more modifiable, and encourages users to use their imagination to interpret the world, just like simple LEGO blocks do.

noobermin• 10 years ago

It's not just the graphics, it was gameplay too. Take a COD game and contrast that to a quake 3 1v1. No comparison.

Of course, IMAO.

Asooka3• 10 years ago

I know what you mean, but as someone who works on rendering tech (for CG not for games, but games are more and more using the same tech), I would like to clarify something. You do want realism in your graphics. You want realism in the way light is calculated, you want realism in the way materials interact, in short you want fully physically modelled materials. Watch Disney animated movies (or really any high-budget animated movie), notice that no matter how stylised it gets, the lighting is always as realistic as possible, or if the visuals are really trippy, still grounded in the usual physics, it's just the materials and geometry that get twisted in fun ways. Humans have a really good feel for lighting, so you want that to be top-notch. Now that we've practically achieved real-time physically-based lighting calculations, I'm seeing lots of games opt for a less realistic style of materials. I think the oppressive drive towards realism was a necessary step to build the tech that will allow for real artistry. You can cheat and take shortcuts as much as you want, but there is no substitute for having a real solid base for lighting and I'm pretty excited to see what will come out in the coming years.

mstade2• 10 years ago

It really was a distinct shift, wasn't it? And you could feel it then too, it's not like you have to look back 20 years later and go "yeah you know what, that probably was a pivotal moment" – it was palpable right then and there. Quake, as it turns out, was a really great name in more was than one.

Me and some friends who played a lot together back in the day, some of us belonging to the same clans, are doing a re-union LAN later this summer as a kind of celebration. Can't wait! :o)

nailer2• 10 years ago

The atmosphere still exists when you look at shots today - I think it's mainly the lighting: http://static1.squarespace.com/static/566d855a841abafcc8ed19...

colordrops2• 10 years ago

It wasn't just a feeling. The reason Quake felt like a distinct shift was that it was the first proper 3D engine in an FPS, allowing for much more interesting level design and player freedom. Doom was still built on the hacky 2.5D engine from Wolfenstein.

daurnimator• 10 years ago

Dopefish lives....

ConnorG• 10 years ago

Was really expecting a longer post. Still pretty interesting though.

PS Really happy Romero set his URL like that.

bluedino5• 10 years ago

I remember when QTest hit the internet, it was beta of sorts to help test network play (and the whole engine, I guess). Even though it was only 3 levels, I was blown away by the lighting of the players weapon when you rotated, the SVGA modes...

Did they release screenshots in 320x200 because that was the lowest common denominator resolution? Windows 95 was out at the time so I know people would have been able to view 640x480x256 screenshots.

rangibaby2• 10 years ago

TFA says they were taken at 320x200, the same resolution as DOOM.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_13h

/E it's also one of the default resolutions of Quake. I mis-remembered Quake as requiring SVGA.

https://github.com/id-Software/Quake/blob/master/WinQuake/da...

joakleaf3• 10 years ago

Quake was build for 320x200 (VGA) as primary resolution target.

I think, they initially wanted to release it for high powered 486s (66 Mhz or higher), where VGA was really the only option.

The perspective correct texture mapping used a divide per 8 pixels, and this required a high-powered 486.

In the end they more or less dropped 486 support, because they did perspective mapping using the FPU, which allowed for parallel processing of pixel output and the perspective divide on the Pentium (averaging just a few clock cycles per pixel), but caused slower processing on the 486DX which had a much slower FPU.

I still preferred VGA over SVGA on my Pentium 133Mhz, because it was significantly more smooth.

sspiff• 10 years ago

VGA was 640x480, not 320x200. 320x200 didn't have an acronym I can recall. SVGA was 800x600.

cyxxon• 10 years ago

I distinctly remember playing it with a buddy of mine in LAN in its first days. He had a 486DX4 at 100MHz, I think, and I a Pentium 75. He could play a lot of other games better, raw speed I guess, but he really struggled with Quake. It worked, but with a lot worse performance than on my Pentium.

bluedino5• 10 years ago

I loved the VESA modes, all kinds of odd things like 360 pixels wide, and a personal favorite - 512x384, which was as much as my P100 could push and still be playable

mhd• 10 years ago

Quake was build for 320x200 (VGA) as primary resolution target.

Wasn't it Mode X, i.e. 320x240?

lealanko2• 10 years ago

They also released some 640x480 screenshots. They are included in Romero's post (fourth row), but that may not be obvious due to scaling. See the originals at http://doomgate.gamers.org/games/quake/screens.html

Fun thing about QTest1: even though you could only explore a static level and there were no creatures in it, the (then) Doom editing community had a ball delving into the details of the WAD format containing all its data. Finally they were rewarded: id had just dumped their graphics assets into the wad, and there were models inside, including the dragon, seen in the screenshots but, alas, not in the final game.

bluedino5• 10 years ago

The alpha is turned up in those thumbnails but the linked images are all dark :(

Quake had such a dark, dreary, earthtone color palette. Unreal was like a rainbow by comparison.

talmand3• 10 years ago

In QTest, the pain sound that played when you stepped into lava was much more painful sounding. I guess they wanted a more tough guy being burned alive by lava sound instead of the painful screech it was.

godshatter• 10 years ago

I remember playing QTest with some friends and coworkers every day after 5pm at work. An absolute ton of fun. I remember on the (third, I think?) map you couldn't get out of the water except to go up the ramp into the courtyard. Since the splash sound could be heard anywhere, everyone eventually learned to make a beeline for the courtyard and wait for you to come out.

kwijibob• 10 years ago

I remember being on the main irc channel when both qtest and the quake 1 official shareware was released.

It was absolute insanity and great fun.

Such an exciting time.

wj• 10 years ago

Yup. I believe it was EFNET #doom and I remember the release was delayed at least a few hours while they were uploading it to their server. I think I stayed up just long enough to start the download which probably took all night on my 56k modem.

Also, I recall the main news site covering it had a brick background but cannot remember the name.

cm35• 10 years ago

This and Unreal were the last great software rendered 3d game engines before GPUs became mainstream.

EDIT: I should have mentioned the BUILD engine too, written single-handedly by one developer for Duke Nukem 3D.

digi_owl9• 10 years ago

And i find it curious how both those engines seems to have more flexiblity in modding than current ones.

Maybe because these days you can't get away with a CLI compiler and some freeware to make "total conversions".

BugsBunnySan• 10 years ago

Maybe it's a bit the complexity of todays game engines, but I suspect that also, If you give people that much freedom, the publishers and other DRM-zealots will freak out, since then people will easily build their own servers and such...

pearle• 10 years ago

The Creation engine by Bethesda is still highly mod friendly. For example, there is a fan-made total conversion mod being created for TES V: Skyrim that is a remake of TES III: Morrowind [1]. Also, the SureAI team is creating Enderal, a total conversion mod in a completely different setting [2].

[1] http://tesrenewal.com/blog/blog-post-march

[2] http://sureai.net/games/enderal/?lang=en

Kristine19758• 10 years ago

I think it's more because nowadays the higher "realism" makes asset and level creation much harder. I remember seeing a presentation about "The Order: 1886" where they described how they created the visuals for a simple fire hydrant. With amount of work that went into it you could have created a Doom level.

bluedino5• 10 years ago

> written single handled you one developer for duke nukem 3D

Ken Silverman was a prodigy of sorts. I always wondered what he would have done if he had ended up staying in the industry.

http://advsys.net/ken/build.htm

cm35• 10 years ago

He's building stuff at Voxiebox now: http://www.voxiebox.com/team/

cm35• 10 years ago

http://advsys.net/ken/build.htm:

    06/09/1992: Ken's brother, Alan, hogs the computer by
    playing a new game titled "Wolfenstein 3D"
    06/16/1992: I decide I can win over his time by making my
    own version, originally titled "Walken" (Walk + Ken)

http://advsys.net/ken/mrein.htm:

    stonewall: In 1993 you made a proposal for the Build engine on
    behalf of Epic Games. At the time Epic was releasing pinball
    games and a year later research began on Unreal. What were your
    plans for Build and how did not getting that engine affect Epic?

    Mark: I'd say we came out way ahead the way things worked out.
    With Ken Silverman (creator of the Build engine) on board we
    might not have been as motivated to make our own technology.
    Build was good tech and of course Duke Nukem got made with it,
    but it wasn't a long-term technology play like the Unreal Engine.
    So both Epic and 3DRealms ended up better off for the way things
    worked out. 3DRealms produced the monster hit Duke Nukem 3D and,
    by complete coincedence, we went on to produce the engine that
    they will use for the sequel to it.

agumonkey3• 10 years ago

Intersting bit of history. I never got past the post DukeNukem 3D days and the famous 'more (money) is less (releases)'.

wiz21c• 10 years ago

You're forgetting Outcast

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_%28video_game%29

jason46• 10 years ago

Getting some sort of 3d accelerator for openGL and turning it on in the settings I remember being a glorious thing.

phusion• 10 years ago

I was a little late to the game and didn't get a 3d card until Quake 2 was out and had been patched a few times. I bought a Diamond Monster 3d (add on card), plugged it in, installed the drivers and loaded up Quake 2... no difference. After being frustrated, I finally found that I had to enable the OpenGL driver/mode and the console screen dropped, then revealed those rockets flying down the hallways in glorious, well lit 3d! I played for hours before finally going to bed, that was truly amazing.

I eventually got GLQuake and did the same for Quake 1, it was so exciting!

animal5315• 10 years ago

Definitely. Going from a max workable resolution of 320x240 up to 3d accelerated 640x480 (with far better looking textures due to mip-mapping) was amazing.

The first games I got working on my 3dfx was Quake and Tomb Raider, both game changing for the time.

animal5315• 10 years ago

For me the best game of the era was Shadow Warrior. The amount of detail compared to other titles was staggering.

revelation• 10 years ago

Why are the screens so incredibly dark? Was the real game like this? I honestly can't remember.

rcarmo• 10 years ago

The graphics cards of the day didn't have gamma correction, for starters. Plus phosphor had an entirely different response curve. :)

Asooka3• 10 years ago

I'm sure that by the time Quake came out gamma of 2.2 was already standard.

ekekekekekekl4• 10 years ago

The game was dark. These (doom, quake) were 256-color games which needed to burn substantial portions of the available palette just to facilitate shading and shadows atop colored textures. The dreary look of the game is somewhat forced by the limitations of VGA.

Kristine19758• 10 years ago

I don't think that's true. Doom also used 256 colors with the same technique for shading and was much more colorful and brighter.

In some ways Quake started the "real is brown" trend.

That's not to say its visual design isn't really good, though!

lealanko2• 10 years ago

Probably just a screen capture snafu. The final game (and even QTest1) had an adjustable gamma setting.

devonkim• 10 years ago

Completely unsubstantiated on my part, but I think that it may have been both for stylistic reasons as well as to make the lighting engine look better / hide certain imperfections. For example, the contrast between well-lit areas and dark ones would be better than if we tried the same lighting effect with bright ambient light everywhere.

Given what I've read about the guys at id though, it's equally plausible that they just liked dark, moody environments and figured their fans would be fine with it. Consider the debate that happened after the initial demos of Diablo 3 came out and some fans were outraged at how "cheerful" the colors were and Blizzard responded with critiques of fan recolorings of demo environments. In the end, they released the Reaper of Souls expansion which had a really dull palette compared to the rest of the world along with responses to other game direction criticisms. Being "tasteful" is not necessary for commercial success in the market today and I suspect it was even less necessary back in the mid-90s.

anc842• 10 years ago

GLQuake was so dark for most people that someone wrote a tool called 'idgamma' which actually modified the games' textures to be brighter: http://www.quaketerminus.com/exe.shtml

wodenokoto• 10 years ago

Compared to everyone else here, my impression of quake back in the day was quite different. Back then I honestly couldn't appreciate the added 3D, but I found the art direction beyond boring, especially compared to the vibrant, changing and funny environments in Duke Nukem 3D. I found quake incredibly uninspiring and stuck with Duke for a long time.

Today I can appreciate how much more advanced quake is.

Does anybody know why it was called quake instead of doom 3?

ajuc• 10 years ago

I remember reading it was supposed to be an RPG game where you run around with melee weapons. It turned into almost doom eventually.

noonat• 10 years ago

The earliest concepts for the game were quite different than Doom. You were supposed to be playing a Thor-like character named Quake, who wielded a giant hammer.

agumonkey3• 10 years ago

Stomping the ground to cause Quakes ?

agumonkey3• 10 years ago

I was weirded off by Quake in both bad and good ways. It was between Doom colorful gore and Hexen pale gothism. The 3D made texture a little bit too simple too. But it was a nice alternate reality to dive into. More like a feverish absurd dream.

pasquinelli2• 10 years ago

i thought the atmosphere was great, in large part due to the soundtrack. honestly, the soundtrack was my favorite part of the game. i still listen to it every now and again.

nopreserveroot• 10 years ago

A fellow Nine Inch Nails fan I see.

Nr7• 10 years ago

Totally agree. Duke 3D was far superior to Quake IMO. The only good things about Quake were the engine and the soundtrack. Everything else was just boring. Especially the weak sound effects (especially when compared to the Doom SFX) and the art direction as you said (everything being either brown or grey).

adventured• 10 years ago

You're missing a lot of stuff.

- The multi-player was tremendous for its time.

- The upgrades Carmack made for OpenGL that ushered in the modern GPU era was very big.

- QuakeWorld was a cutting edge experiment that showed other developers what could be done online.

- The modding was excellent. The Quake community of modders helped lay the foundation for the entire 3D gaming industry that was to sprout in the following decade. So many developers that went on to great things cut their teeth modding Quake.

ComodoHacker2• 10 years ago

Is there a modern engine with hi-res support capable of running Q1 and Q2 WADs?

anc842• 10 years ago

http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/download.htm or http://fte.triptohell.info/ftedownloads/experimental seem to be recommended elsewhere.

zanny3• 10 years ago

For Quake 1 its Darkplaces[1] or Quakespasm[2] (the former emphasizes more features, but has been dead for some years, the later is meant to be a more honest upgrade).

There are HD texture packs like Quake HD[3] and Epsilon[4] on moddb that work with either. All HD modpacks for both games are just like any mappack.

For Quake 2 I use Yamagi[5], but there is also KMQuake2[6] which is like Darkplaces from Quake 1. For HRT packs the only one I know of / have used is Berserker[7].

I think all those moddb packages are prebundled with Windows executables. You can just take the data directories and use them with your engine of choice.

[1]https://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/

[2]http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/

[3]http://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-hd-pack-guide

[4]http://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-epsilon-build

[5]http://www.yamagi.org/quake2/

[6]http://www.markshan.com/knightmare/

[7]http://www.moddb.com/mods/berserkerquake2

ComodoHacker2• 10 years ago

Oh, thank you! I'll try them all.

heeen2• 10 years ago

if you want to play online http://ezquake.sourceforge.net/ server list https://www.quakeservers.net/quakeworld/servers/so=8/

thedaemon• 10 years ago

https://www.quaddicted.com/ This is the place for all things Quake 1 related. All new maps are posted here. They even have a handy tool to install them and run them.

JoeAltmaier2• 10 years ago

My family played way, way too much Quake. One son played it thru entirely with 1 health, using only a laptop with scratchpad (no mouse) just to prove it could be done. Had to cheat - but only because there were some health packs in doorways that couldn't be avoided, so he went thru, then cheated to set his health back to 1.

JTon• 10 years ago

Awesome story. I hope he played it on the hardest difficulty too :P Er.. but you do mean using a touchpad right? Unless a scartchpad is something different?

JoeAltmaier2• 10 years ago

Of course! Most games must be played on hardest difficulty. In fact when very young (6-8) the boys liked to play only in God Mode - the young are very conservative. I challenged them: win level 1 of Descent I at Insane level, and I would buy Descent II. Got a call at work 2 days later! And they never resorted to God Mode again.

mrob• 10 years ago

How did he get past the E2M5 underwater elevator ride with the forced drowning damage? I know you can skip it by immediately running away from the button and getting stuck, but that also causes damage.

excalibur• 10 years ago

1996 was definitely a landmark year for 3D gaming.

http://fortune.com/2016/06/23/nintendo-64-20-years-old/

rayvd• 10 years ago

LAN parties!

strictnein• 10 years ago

"I'm going to share a document created by Joost Shuur"

Didn't Joost have a Quake site? I feel like he did.

Time to reminisce: Ran my own Quake levels site back in the day. Meccaworld.com/quake with a lot of the files hosted at quakemecca.simplenet.com because simplenet offered "unlimited" bandwidth. (http://web.archive.org/web/19970217185506/http://meccaworld.... )

If you're looking for some quality Single and Multiplayer Quake levels, most of the links work still (thanks to the magical way way back machine).

edit: to answer my question, yes - http://home.pages.de/~jschuur/

kolanos• 10 years ago

Former webmaster of QLEN (Quake Level Editing News) on PlanetQuake here.waves

pimlottc• 10 years ago

Yep, Joost ("rhymes with toast") Shuur started Aftershock, the first major Quake news site, during the pre-release days. Other sites like Blue's, Redwood's and sCaryname's took over after the game was actually released.

Sometime after that, Joost, ran a directory (remember those?) of Quake-related sites called Slipgate Central for a while.

Here's an old interview with him at the time:

https://www.quaddicted.com/webarchive/hosted.planetquake.gam...

(Man, sure brings back a lot of memories, and not just of Quake; the 'net sure was a different place back then...)

qrybam2• 10 years ago

Everything from Wolf3d to Quake3 has a special place in our household's hearts. My dad brought the original iD games to mine and my sister's attention when we were still kids. The first time we played co-op Doom as a family on LAN is one of those memories that's been seared onto my brain - taking down a Cyberdemon together was too much fun!

Quake had a similar impact because that's when we migrated from keyboard to mouse for looking around - given it was truly 3D and all. But I have to say that the Cyberdemon > Shambler, despite how cuddly the Shambler looked.

Happy Birthday Quake!

Kristine19758• 10 years ago

that's when we migrated from keyboard to mouse for looking around

I did one year earlier in Descent ;-)

qrybam2• 10 years ago

Hadn't made that leap at that point. I was still using A/Z for looking up/down in Descent - also a great game btw.

DiabloD3• 10 years ago

Descent and Descent II is why I owned a flightstick.

Ahh, multiplayer was so much fun.

aidos2• 10 years ago

Before I purchased the box / CD I was given a copy of the demo by a friend. He zipped it across 8 floppy disks and it took 2 painful attempts to get the zipping process to work without corruption. Those were the days!

WA• 10 years ago

The obligatory mention: If you haven't yet, go ahead and read Masters of Doom. It's the story of id Software, really well written and worth your time.

angersock3• 10 years ago

Seconding this. Master of Doom was one of the reads that inspired me to be interested in startups.

balls1872• 10 years ago

I still remember playing multiplayer deathmatch (more than 1v1) over modem, with ~200 ping, and still feeling how crazy responsive it was. That was as transformative of an experience much like seeing SuperMario 64 for the first time.

Quake multiplayer was where I had to abandoned playing "closed style" on a keyboard and instead adopt the WASD mouse and Keyboard style.

Also remember when GameSpy was QSpy, and PlanetQuake was just a fan site?

And the fun of playing Threewave CTF with the grappling hook.

malbs2• 10 years ago

I reckon you're talking about QuakeWorld. Because Quake on a 200+ ping was ice-skate-mode.

balls1872• 10 years ago

I can't recall exactly when I made the switch to Quakeworld, but I'm pretty sure when I first fired up Quake1 over modem, it was still quite responsive even with the original netcode.

malbs2• 10 years ago

I bought Doom before I owned a PC. I bought the game, and sat it on my bedside while I saved up the money to buy a PC to play the game. I would go to the retail stores and install Doom on the demo PCs there just so I could play it.

Finally I had enough money for a PC to play Doom, my brother and I played Doom for a couple of years on our home lan. I played dialup doom with friends. I played Doom with the mouse and keyboard because it was the only easy way to strafe kill someone "easily". and then Quake came out.... I went to a friends place and they were playing DM. I hadn't even heard of Quake. I was like "What is this game" "Oh its Quake, by those guys who made Doom". I had to get it. I had a 486. Wasn't ever going to fly. It ran like shit. You couldn't run out and buy a AMD cpu to play it on either because of the FPU. You had to have an Intel. So I bought a second hand Pentium 60, and off I went! I still remember the day I got the Pentium 60 and 8mb of ram and now I could also run Windows 95 too.

Quake was a genre changing game, probably one of the most influential games ever. id loved to make modifiable games, and Doom had quite a solid mod community, but Quake was really the Internet's child. The Quake servers that came online initially were dark foreboding places for anyone not on a fixed line connection. You'd be dead before you knew what happened, so then Carmack created QuakeWorld, with the predictive movement, and suddenly online gaming FPS on a modem was a whole new experience.

So many game sites spawned from the advent of Quake that are still around today. Entire media companies popped up around it.

People have mentioned in other threads why didn't more people use SVGA mode. The answer is because no computer could run it at an acceptable speed. What came of that? GLQuake. Then people were buying shitty (not at the time!) Voodoo 3dfx cards to play GLQuake, with the broken GL implementation Glide, and thus the video card arms race was born.

I got my first real job because of my affiliations with the Quake community. My first true love (who I met through Quake), "Internet friends" that I made playing QuakeWorld that I am still friends with today.

I don't believe any other game has had anywhere near as much influence on my life, or gaming in general.

mstade2• 10 years ago

I was fortunate and privileged enough to have a father who very much liked computers and made sure we always had them, even though he's never been all that savvy. So while I never had difficulty in procuring either the hardware or the software, I do very much recognize pretty much all the rest of your writing – down to the first real job and everything. I'm still very much friends with my old clan members today. Feeling very nostalgic right about now!

I remember as well when QW came out and my friends would refuse to play it, considering it cheating. So they only ever played LANs, or university connections – since some were studying at the time – which were usually super fast. (At the time, if nothing else.)

So many great memories.

Razengan• 10 years ago

I had to go to a friend's house to play Doom because I had a lowly 286 with 1 megabyte of RAM and those new-fangled "DOS extenders" demanded a 386 at least.

smcnally• 10 years ago

Wasn't a big player 20 years ago though many colleagues and employees were -- many occasions finding the "LAN guys" holed-up in the darkened data center at Prodigy frag-festing. Been playing OpenArena for the past several months. It's a lot of fun, and there are a lot of available mods. http://openarena.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

russdill• 10 years ago

So weird seeing these screenshots again. I remember seeing these 20 years ago when they were first released.

haddr• 10 years ago

Quake multiplayer was a really big thing!

I remember playing it on some 486 PCs, now unimaginable, but then it was really great!

There was even a ~700KB (!) version, stripped down to the most necesary: TCP/IP multiplayer with only 1 level, but man, you could bring it to the classroom on a 1,44MB floppy!

xufi• 10 years ago

I was pretty young to play the original Quake but when I got around to play with it and DOom 95 (in the mid 2000s ), I realized what a amazing game it was and was hooked

Happy 20th Birthday, Quake

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