Happy 20th Birthday, Quake | Hacker News Reader

Happy 20th Birthday, Quake

rome.ro

213 pointsmiiiiiike144 comments

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was/is being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11959444

Oddly one of the more interesting quake 2 mods i played around with was Brazen. It made the Quake 2 weapons have realistic ammo management and carrying capacity.

The most intriguing part was perhaps that you could transfer ammo between magazines, and empty ones was thrown into the game world.

The developer would go on to make a variant of this that was compatible with Action Quake, with a bit of Matrix influence thrown in (you could climb buildings by "wall jumping").

That's a great article that really articulates some of the feelings I'd had towards modern games, especially FPSs.

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.

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.

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

Yeah, but that's still progress in a way, progress away from the false goal of unconditional realism. Cartoons are generally cheaper, which means we can have more things, and also has more useful design space. Something like TF2-style "all characters must have distinctive silhouettes" is much harder if you're also trying to do total realism, because you end up so much more constrained with where the distinctiveness can be. (Color? No, nobody's running around on the battlefield in bright red. Nobody's wearing crazy hats or has two-foot-tall bouncing hair. A lot of guns look a lot like other guns. etc.)

Here's a presentation by Valve about the visual design of Team Fortress 2: http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/NPAR07_Illust...

And here's the paper for it: http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2013/02/NPAR07_Illu...

It is not even just about the cost to produce. Realist games sacrifice gameplay itself, because if you are on the bleeding edge of fidelity you cannot have a lot of useful gamey aspects (speed, object density, environment complexity, etc). You can put more non-interactive polygons on the screen but only in exchange for gameplay quality.

Amen. I recently tried playing a MMORPG that seems to throw a insane polygon count at the player models (boob physics galore). End result is that my computer screams for mercy any time i set foot in a spawn zone.

I think there's room for both, and it's not that limiting. An Uncharted 4 looks amazing and has all the elements you describe, but is obviously a lot harder to implement than an Overwatch (which is great looking in a cartoon fashion, with vibrant colours etc.)

> Nobody's wearing crazy hats or has two-foot-tall bouncing hair.

Clearly you've never played TF2.

Read harder.

Whoops. Too bad it's too late to delete now.

Things run faster when not realistic and are cheaper to produce (Normally)

I personally prefer the art style approach over trying to make it realistic/technical approach by making realistic representation as if it was real life. TF 2 > Crisis

This is a BIG why the Indie Game movemnet

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.

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)

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

I suffer from poor vision, but surely I can't be the only one... there is no lighting in those pictures. It's black. I'm tempted to say it's so black you ask yourself how much more black could it be... Well, a little more black, but not much. I never played quake because I literally couldn't see it. I always wondered what it looked like to people who liked it.

Apparently you can set the screen brightness in Quake's console by assigning a value to the variable "gamma": Less than 1 is brighter, more than 1 is darker: http://www.quakewiki.net/archives/console/commands/quake.htm...

I closed the curtains, so the only light was coming from the monitor. I think id should have told people do do that too.

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.

>Doom was still built on the hacky 2.5D engine from Wolfenstein.

That's not true at all. Wolfenstein 3D was a raycasting engine based on cubes. Doom used BSP trees and allowed for much more varied level geometry without right angles everywhere (although there still were no sloped floors).

Let me rephrase that. Doom extended the technique used in Wolfenstein, which is 2D maps and sprites, and movement in the 3rd dimension was limited. Quake used a proper polygon rendering engine. In any case, it doesn't change my point that there is a discrete change in the rendering tech between Doom and Quake that accounts for the difference in feel.

Again, you're kinda missing the big change from wolf3d to doom.

Doom added semi-dynamic lighting, arbitrary line angles (wolf3d was only grid-based), and moving segments.

Maybe not as large a leap as from Doom to Quake, but at the time it was significant.

You guys are arguing from opposite directions.

Doom-to-Quake was a bigger technological leap, going from a hacky 2.5D raycasting engine to a fully polygonal 3D environment and renderer.

But Wolf3D-to-Doom was a bigger gameplay leap. Doom could do enormously more with level design and the visual experience than Wolf3D could. Quake being fully 3D didn't really do all that much for the player experience over and above Doom.

Out of the box, Quake was a lesser experience indeed.

But the engine was highly mod friendly. I think i have at least a couple of CDRs somewhere (if they are still readable) Stuffed with zips downloaded from Fileplanet.

Everything from grand projects like Team Fortress, to small one man mods that was not much more than a collage of weapons.

This in large part because the game logic was implemented using quake-c, and the compiler was freely distributed.

how do you define semi-dynamic, the lighting had to be pre-rendered as part of the level building.

Lighting could change and cycle, thus changing the illumination of sprites for a sector.

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.

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

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!

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

I did one year earlier in Descent ;-)

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.

Descent and Descent II is why I owned a flightstick.

Ahh, multiplayer was so much fun.

Descent is why I broke a flightstick hat switch. Customer service knew what was up as soon as I described the problem.

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.

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.

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.

I remember playing Red Alert on my 486 at the time. It was enjoyable game but something seemed a bit off.

About 3 months later I upgraded to a Pentium 200 and realizing that I'd been playing at 1/3rd speed because the 486 just couldn't handle it. Red Alert become much more fun after that.

haha, had exactly the same experience with the first GTA.

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

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

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

    vid_describemodes

    Lists all available video modes, built-in and VESA.

    vid_mode #

    Switches the video mode to mode #.  Quake has 11 built-in modes:

    0:  320x200
    1:  320x200
    2:  360x200
    3:  320x240
    4:  360x240
    5:  320x350
    6:  360x350
    7:  320x400
    8:  360x400
    9:  320x480
    10: 360x480

    0 is the default mode.  Modes above 10 are not built in, but are VESA
    modes which may be supported by Quake and your hardware.  Use
    vid_describemodes to see the available VESA modes.

I was always super disappointed they didn't use Mode-X by default.

As a result, even though you could set Mode-X explicitly, it wasn't optimized so it went slower than plain 13h and wasn't even page-flipped. So there wasn't a compelling reason to use it, except for the square pixels.

Ah, good old Mode X hackery; all that effort for 40 extra scanlines (and paging).

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

256 color VGA mode 13h was certainly 320x200.

I agree it is wrong to call it "VGA", as the VGA (Video Graphics Adapter) was able to display graphics in a variety of resolutions.

The standard resolution used for games was the 256 color 320x200. VGA allowed a couple of other non-documented and harder to achieve resolutions in 256 color, but this was the standard one, and also Quake's default mode.

640x480 was 16 color.

Standard text-mode VGA was 80x25 characters of 9×16 pixels for a total of 720x400 pixels.

SVGA was even more diffusely defined, as different vendors supported different resolutions.

Time for some HN-worthy pedantry. I distinctly remember reading in DOS for Dummies that VGA stood for Video Graphics Array. Sorry, I just had to get that out of my system.

Yes, sorry... You are absolutely right!

I've always mixed up "Array" and "Adapter" for VGA, as EGA stood for Enhanced Graphics Adapter, and CGA was Color Graphics Adapter.

320x200x256 colors was referred to as MCGA, but nobody actually had an an MCGA card.

Anyone who had a PS/2 Model 25 or 30 did, but those weren't exactly popular, and MCGA was a weird duck (supporting the 256 color 320x200 mode, and a 640x480 monochrome mode, but not the 320x200x16 EGA mode -- which VGA supported -- which made it not a compatible upgrade from EGA and unable to run lots of EGA software. If it had been EGA compatible, it might have seen more use, even though VGA was better and introduced at the same time.)

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

You're forgetting Outcast

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

>> 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

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

He looks so young. Please don't let me fund out he built Build while I was ogling the stripper sprites in Duke Nukem and barely managing my CGSE maths homework...

From [1]:

> 08/24/1993: Ken signs employment agreement with Apogee Software Productions. A special provision on the contract says that Apogee cannot interfere with Ken's education.

Inferring from the first entry in the timeline, he must have been 17 or 18 then.

[1] http://advsys.net/ken/build.htm

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.

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

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".

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.

I would argue that the resources spent on (visual) effects is dumb money trying to improve a game where the creators fail to build a better, more engaging, highly replayable game.

To this day, I haven't encountered a better FPS than Quake3. Quake3 isn't the fastest (Painkiller was IIRC), but it hit the sweet spot and today's contenders (including the new Quake) fail to deliver. The new Unreal Tournament looks promising and likely to be a replacement for Unreal Tournament 1.

I've tried and failed to play an FPS with a controller on a console and PC. The games are adapted to the imprecise input devices but it's still nothing like the Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament 1 keyboard+mouse experience. I couldn't get a positive experience out of it, and I hope kids getting started will have a chance to play those games as intended in order to have the full picture.

> I would argue that the resources spent on (visual) effects is dumb money trying to improve a game where the creators fail to build a better, more engaging, highly replayable game.

Graphics make you buy the game, mechanics make you keep playing, and story gives you happy memories afterward. That explains why AAA games have good graphics, average mechanics, and bad stories :-)

The games with the highest replay value to me have been GTA 3, GTA Vice City and GTA San Andreas. Haven't played GTA 4 or 5, so don't know if the high replayability factor was kept.

That was kinda what i was talking about.

Quake 1 had quake-c and a simple compiler (and later decompiler) and some third party freeware to make models and maps.

Come Quake 2 you needed visual-C++ and 3D studio to make mods.

I don't recall any freeware to make and animate models for Quake1. Maps, sure; models not so much. Everybody I knew in the mod scene was using 3D Studio. I don't recall what id Software used, but it was something other than 3D Studio.

I suppose something came along later on in the lifespan leading up to Quake2?

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

Quake got crazy mods like Airquake, made initially by one guy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X173LZkEgYc

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...

Yup, it's a bit like trying to build a static HTML page with the full AWS stack.

There's this incredibly high cost curve for assets. Back about 6 years ago the dev:art ratio was about 1:10 and I'm going to guess it's even higher these days.

That's partially also why you see pixel art style thrive in the indie game space. It's the right combination of low production overhead that can still convey a large amount of information/style.

Yeah, 3d is also geometrically (excuse the pun) more difficult to pull off than 2d. Nevermind good looking 3d, animation etc.

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

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!

Wow, I have almost the exact same memory. Think mine was a 3dfx-branded Voodoo 2 (released after the Voodoo 3 came out, but I couldn't afford it). The switch from nearest-neighbor to bilinear texture interpolation was amazing, but it was the yellow cast light from moving rockets that I remember most clearly. Q3A and UT were soon to follow, Rainbow Six, it was a good time for PC gaming.

Anyone know what they were doing for lighting by rockets? Seems like per vertex wouldn't work and pixel shaders were a lot way off. Did early opengl have specific functionality for that?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

Stomping the ground to cause Quakes ?

The name Quake came from Carmack's D&D character, who was an inspiration for the original game design

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.

A fellow Nine Inch Nails fan I see.

for sure, and the quake soundtrack was actually my first exposure to nine inch nails.

I was already a massive NIN fan so I LOVED the soundtrack. Even though I haven't heard it for years I can a) still hear it and b) picture the points in the game where it switched.

Trent Reznor makes great soundtracks. Natural Born Killers is incredible.

The Quake CD was some sort of hybrid data/music CD. It was possible to play the soundtrack in a regular CD player.

This was true of a lot of PC games from that time IIRC.

Yep. Basically the trick was to make one track as data, and the rest as redbook audio.

I seem to recall running into the odd album that was done up in a similar way to bundle images and such for fans.

Found the Wikipedia article on it btw, Mixed Mode CD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_Mode_CD

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.

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

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).

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.

The modding was indeed a class of its own. One guy even implemented a rudimentary flight simulator called Airquake.

Basic thing was that the engine had few hardcoded limits.

You could implement a crazy number of weapons and/or weapon modes for example. Quake 3 on the other hand was hard capped to the number of weapons the game launched with, iirc.

And all you needed to write a mod, as long as you didn't need new models or maps, was a freely downloadable compiler for quake-c. And compiled mods were easily decompiled. So others could have a look and learn.

I wonder if it would make sense to add clang/llvm to a game nowadays to make modding as easy as that again.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

> "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/

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...)

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

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

PS Really happy Romero set his URL like that.

1996 was definitely a landmark year for 3D gaming.

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

Dopefish lives....

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

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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!

No, really, as these games progressed from the simpler wolf3d-style rendering where there was no attempt to shade things, which allowed a much more diverse set of colors, their colors became progressively less diverse.

Just look at the Quake palette: https://quakewiki.org/wiki/Quake_palette

Note how much of it is wasted on gradients, this is to get the more realistic 3d shading out of relatively few colors. Of course they made some choices in designing Quake to better position itself for a successful result working within these limitations, but it's the limitations forcing their hand.

The Doom palette looks very similar though: http://zdoom.org/wiki/palette So I don't think Quake's style was necessitated by technology.

They're not that similar in terms of how much space is spent on dark shades. In the doom palette the gradients don't go down to full blackness, and there's a technical reason for that; it's inappropriate for doom's engine.

The engines are very different in this regard, doom had no lighting. In quake you had lighting, and potential for dark shadows. The lighted colors needed to have range to blackness throughout, since they may occur in textures which get cast into full shadow. By limiting the full intensity of the colors chosen, smaller steps are achieved from black to full intensity across the 16 slots each color gradient was given. Those smaller steps improve the rendering quality, but the lower peak intensities contribute to the generally muted color-space of the game.

Doom and Quake do not use the same techniques as you mentioned above, that's incorrect. Quake was a major improvement over doom, doom more closely resembles the faux-3d "raycasting" of wolf3d. Quake is more like a traditional texture-mapped 3d engine, hence its 3dfx-accelerated readiness.

In the past I experimented with RGB direct-color modes in Mode-X (320x240x256) using a 332 format, to have the full color cube available and not have to preselect a fixed palette. This allowed a diverse color-space in a real-time 3d simulation, but the quality of the output was terrible due to the very few shades given to each color from full darkness to full brightness. This is why a game like Quake which would obviously benefit from a direct-color mode still ends up opting for a palette of dramatically constrained colors; it's just to improve the quality of the output.

In the world of 256 colors, the more advanced the 3d engines became the worse the colors got.

The very thing that made Quake so impressive at the time was the 3d with lighting and shadows on our 256-color displays. Nobody was doing that, probably because everyone assumed direct-color was a requirement, and with the VGA the only direct-color you could do was 8-bit "332". So while everyone was waiting for PC graphics hardware to mature a bit, id came along and gave a us a game full of browns, greens, and grays, and we loved it.

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

LAN parties!

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