https://bethesda.net/en/article/5BDhzsrCYMjy5uWpaMKHQ0/celebrating-25-years-of-quake
Still have it on my comp. I love that and Quake 2. Which I also still play. They have a certain atmosphere that I think is missing these days.
Agreed. The last FPS I can remember with that level of atmosphere was Stalker.
That first time you encounter a Fiend. Amazing.
Same.
I remember in one of my first early death matches someone said to type +mlook in the console. It took some getting used to but that command forever changed how we played FPS’. In the I hate this guy thread there’s a bunch of ads from the mid to late 90s of wacky controllers to play shooters but none of them became mainstream because mouse look was so intuitive once you got the hang of it.
Quake multiplayer was the first multiplayer game I experienced ping disparity between my shitty dialup and the lucky ones who were the first recipients of cable modem. My dialup ISP hosted a Quake server this one asshole on cable would stake out the spawn points with the rocket launcher and nail anyone who spawned. You had no chance on dialup vs cable or a college or corporate high speed line. He’d twist the knife on us dial up losers with a spam macro of “pitchin a tent!” He was a low ping bastard for sure. I basically gave up on multiplayer shooters until over-priced and much slower than cable but still better than dialup DSL arrived to my street.
I believe I first learned about Quake when my friends were talking about Quake 2 in 1997. We only had a super crappy Amiga at the time, so my shooter thoughts were limited to Alien Breed 3D, a Doom knock-off by Team17 that my system wouldn’t stand a chance of running but I saw hyped up in Amiga Power. When I finally got a chance to play a shareware copy later that year, I couldn’t believe how advanced it was compared to what I was used to. I still think holds up as an incredibly effective mood piece. To this day, there was something that only Quake 1 and Unreal 1 captured for me. Maybe it’s due to their rocky, ambitious development cycles, where the art direction wasn’t set in stone, but they offer a strange mix between sci-fi industrial facilities and mystical, ancient castles that really works for me.
BTW, did you guys see some talented modders and game designers announced a fan campaign, Tremor, today that reimagines the four episodes of the base game. Out of the all the recent effort mods this one best captures the style of the original game. Releases later this year.
Especially if you have the original soundtrack.
On behalf of Amiga lovers everywhere, take that back.
More seriously, I still remember the first time I fired up Quake and the music started playing. Made me thrilled I’d opted to get the expensive doublespin CDROM with the soundblaster 16 (?) card! Quake was so far ahead of its time…
This game, more than any other, is responsible for my interest in computer graphics and career as a gamedev. I can’t believe it’s been 25 years.
I’m playing Alkaline. It’s no Arcane Dimenions, but it has some good levels
Quake–like pretty much all FPS of that era–was not officially available in Germany, but every PC gamer still somehow had it, of course. Still, among the group of people I did LAN parties with, it did not immediately replace Duke 3D as our go-to multiplayer shooter. And while I dutifully completed the singleplayer part of the game, I found the game technologically absolutely impressive, but aesthetically dull with its dark, muddy grey-brown look. Quake II might not be the classic its predecessor is, but it had a better sense of location, continuity, and setpieces when it came to the campaign. That said, once the mods started to trickle in and added a lot more variety and content to the multiplayer, Quake became the standard thing at our LAN parties. Crazily enough, we still played it with our keyboards. Mouse/keyboard didn’t happen for us until Unreal came along.
The only people I knew who played games back then (and throughout the 90s until I moved to the Seattle area in 99) were my two brothers. So they were my only two sources of gaming related things, besides the occasional times when we decided to buy a gaming magazine (and we did eventually subscribe to CGS+). That’s a long-winded way of saying I never knew about +mouselook until years later. So when the game came out, my brother who loved Duke Nukem3D immediately dismissed it because it was so dark and dreary compared to Duke3D and didn’t have actual real world locations. I personally was most disappointed in the controls. Using a button to look up, and a button to look down, in addition to aiming left and right with the mouse and having four movement keys on the keyboard, it was just too much for me.
Why can’t they do the same control scheme as Descent (shareware demo had come out 18 months before Quake, and had what we now call mouselook as the default control scheme)? Why couldn’t I look up and down with the mouse instead of having to use the keyboard?
So yeah, I left Quake alone, disappointed in the control scheme. Both my brother and I instead went back to Descent II, which had been out for 3 months already by that point. It had mouselook by default, and it had the new Thief bot who snuck in behind you and stole your stuff and ran away!
I remember that day! I was in my first year of grad school, chatting with my classmates outside the building after class, and I told everyone I was going home to play Quake – it was id software’s follow-up to Doom!! It was that vulnerable feeling when you decide to inform new friends that you’re a gamer.
I remember that this used to be a hot debate. Duke’s fake 3D, colors, interactivity, and humor versus Quake’s true 3D, gothic appearance, and straight presentation.
I distinctly remember being dissatisfied with both Duke3D and Quake at the time. They’ve both grown in my estimation over the years, but at the time Duke just seemed so juvenile with its ‘shake it, baby’ and plinky feeling weapons. And Quake just seemed formless to me, a context-free run through a bunch of dark levels fighting weird looking aliens for, I dunno, reasons I guess.
I liked Quake 2 a lot more, and Quake 4 even more than that (I sucked at Quake 3 and didn’t spend a lot of time with it). I wouldn’t mind seeing a return to Quake, especially since I’ve really enjoyed what id has done with the recent Doom games.
How dare you, sir! ;)
I was an Amiga guy too. Couldn’t afford a proper PC until '98, so I missed the first wave of shooters. After Half-Life I tried to get my hands on others, and wound up playing Quake II all the way through. In '99, as the UT/Quake 3 battle began, I broke for UT, possibly because of that stellar demo.
Quake taught me WASD and mouse look. And signing into QuakeWorld late at night, after work… memories…
I’m pretty sure Thresh’s config file was my first introduction to WASD. Was definitely a game changer, compared to using the arrow keys.