Quake | Code Like It's 198x

“Over the past few years the games market has been inundated with Doom clones,” Edge wrote in August 1996, “some good, some average, some terrible but none matching the frenzied violence and perfectly constructed locations of the bona fide original. Until Quake.” id Software’s follow-up to Doom went out as a free shareware episode that June, and it changed two things at once.

The first was the picture. Doom had drawn a flat floor plan with heights added, and could never put one room above another. Quake built its castles, sewers and bases from real three-dimensional polygons, so levels could stack catwalks above floors above flooded tunnels, and you could look up and down. Its monsters were polygon models too, of 200 to 500 polygons each, John Carmack told Computer Gaming World, where Doom’s had been flat pictures. The second was the network. Any owner of Quake could start a server, and anyone who knew its internet address could join.

Fast facts

Developer and publisher: id Software, Mesquite, Texas. GT Interactive distributed the boxed version.
Released: shareware episode on 22 June 1996; the full game followed that summer, at $50.
Team: programming by John Carmack and Michael Abrash; levels by John Romero, American McGee, Sandy Petersen and Tim Willits; art by Adrian Carmack.
Sound: Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, who made the sound effects and the ambient soundtrack.
Multiplayer: IPX networks, modem, and the internet over TCP/IP; up to 8 players on a player’s own machine or 16 on a dedicated server.
Programming language: QuakeC, for changing the game’s rules.
Source code: released under the GNU General Public License on 21 December 1999.

A visit to Mesquite

Computer Gaming World’s Vic Long flew to id’s offices in Mesquite, near Dallas, shortly before the game was finished. Players had already had a taste: Qtest, a test release of a few DeathMatch levels, had gone out earlier in the year. Long found a team arguing about design. They had removed the automatic aiming that Doom used. “We settled on removing auto-aiming because doing so rewards skill,” Carmack said. Sandy Petersen’s advice was shorter: “You need to aim.” There would be no automap either, because the designers thought it spoiled the suspense.

Each designer had a style. McGee built the metal levels, Willits the medieval ones full of traps, Petersen the fantasy levels and Romero the military bases. The dynamic lighting, which lit up corridors as rockets flew down them, Carmack had coded “in an hour as a bet”. Boxes of nail-gun ammunition carried the Nine Inch Nails logo. There was barely a story, and id’s Jay Wilbur did not mind: “A bad game with a great story is a bad game. A great game with a bad story is still a great game.” In November 1996 the magazine put Quake first in its list of the worst back stories in PC games, with one line of explanation: “There is no story for Quake.”

Carmack was already looking past it. “Quake will be id’s last pure planar polygon-based engine,” he said.

Playing over the internet

Doom had linked four players on one network. Quake was built as a client and server from the start. In September 1996 Computer Gaming World explained how to run a listen server on your own machine for up to 8 players, or a dedicated server for 16, and pointed out what was new: “you don’t need an online service to run Quake over the Internet. You can enter the IP number of a server where Quake is running and connect directly.”

Dial-up modems made that laggy. In December 1996 id released QuakeWorld, a free version rewritten for internet play, and players found games through QSpy, a server list that showed each server’s ping time. Computer and Video Games called Quake “the first to have such an impact on world-wide internet gaming”, and its April 1997 PC chart put QuakeWorld at number one. For the method that made movement feel smooth over a slow line, see client-side prediction.

3D graphics cards changed how it looked. In early 1997 id released GLQuake, a version written for the OpenGL graphics interface with the 3Dfx Voodoo chipset as its reference card. Computer Gaming World ran it at 640×480 and was struck by the translucent water.

QuakeC and the mods

Quake kept its game rules outside the engine, in a language called QuakeC that players could edit and recompile. “With QUAKE C, there’s nothing you can’t do,” American McGee told Computer Gaming World in 1996. Players added grappling hooks, vehicles and new game types. Robin Walker and John Cook in Australia remade a Doom map called Fortress as Team Fortress, released in 1996, which split players into classes; 500,000 people downloaded it, and Walker and Cook later moved from Australia to join Valve. The modding and total conversions entries follow these projects further.

The physics produced tricks of their own. Firing a rocket at your own feet threw you upwards, the “rocket jump”, and strafing into a wall while running “can increase your speed by up to 40 per cent”, Anthony Bailey of the Quake done Quick team told PC Zone in 1998. Their recorded runs through the whole game are a landmark in the history of speedrunning.

Reception

Computer Gaming World made Quake its action game of 1996, “even though it isn’t the most innovative or original effort of the past year”. Its gameplay was Doom’s, the magazine said: kill the monsters and find the key. What set it apart was the true 3D world, a dark atmosphere and “the best multiplayer options”. The same magazine’s list of the 150 best games of all time, in November 1996, placed it 36th: “The ultimate implementation of the deathmatch, Quake also creates the spookiest atmosphere ever presented in an action game.”

The engine goes out

id licensed the engine to other studios. Raven Software used it, with some Quake II technology, for Hexen II; Ritual Entertainment, founded as Hipnotic Interactive, made the Scourge of Armagon mission pack and then began Sin on it, before moving that game to the Quake II engine; and Valve’s first game, Half-Life, “uses the enhanced Quake engine”, Computer Gaming World reported from E3 in 1997. Valve’s reworked version became its GoldSrc engine.

The series

Quake was the last game Romero made at id. He left in 1996 and started Ion Storm with Tom Hall. The sequels were different games under the same name: Quake II (1997); Quake III Arena (1999), which concentrated on online multiplayer; Quake 4 (2005); Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (2007); the free-to-play Quake Live (2010); and Quake Champions, fully released in 2022. An enhanced edition of the original, developed by Nightdive Studios, came out in August 2021. Players still meet every August at QuakeCon, which began in a Texas hotel two months after the shareware release.

Released source code

On 21 December 1999 id released the source code of Quake under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later: the complete code of WinQuake, GLQuake, QuakeWorld and GLQuakeWorld. The licence let anyone “do anything you want with the code, including sell your new version”, provided they published their own source. id publishes it today in its id-Software/Quake repository on GitHub. The release covered the programs, not the game’s levels, models and sounds.

Sources

Edge issue 35, August 1996: Prescreen (the shareware release, “Until Quake”, the three sections, polygon monsters, the grenade launcher, DeathMatch).
Vic Long, “Get Ready To Rumble”, Computer Gaming World issue 144, July 1996: the visit to Mesquite; Qtest; auto-aim and the automap; Carmack, Petersen, Abrash, McGee, Adrian Carmack and Jay Wilbur quoted; the designers’ level styles; dynamic lighting; Trent Reznor and the Nine Inch Nails ammunition boxes; the sidebar “Quake II and Beyond” (polygon counts, “last pure planar polygon-based engine”).
Computer Gaming World issue 146, September 1996, p. 66: network gaming feature (the shareware release, listen and dedicated servers, TCP/IP play by IP number).
Computer Gaming World issue 148, November 1996: “The Top 150 Games of All Time” (Quake 36th); “The Worst Back Stories in PC Games” (Quake first); Vic Long, “Quake C Basics” (American McGee’s quotation; vehicles; Hipnotic’s licence of the engine).
Computer Gaming World issue 149, December 1996: Quake as the action game of the year; $50, id Software.
Computer Gaming World issue 150, January 1997: GT Interactive advertisement (“Published by Id Software, Inc. Distributed by GT Interactive Software Corp.”); feature on Dallas developers (John Romero’s departure, Jay Wilbur’s retirement, Ion Storm with Tom Hall, Hipnotic’s formation after Quake’s release).
Computer and Video Games issue 184, March 1997: QuakeWorld feature (the server list with ping times, the quotation). Issue 185, April 1997: PC chart, QuakeWorld at number one.
Dave Salvator, Computer Gaming World issue 153, April 1997: GLQuake 0.9, OpenGL, the 3Dfx Voodoo reference platform.
Computer Gaming World issue 155, June 1997: Hexen II on the Quake engine. Issue 158, September 1997: E3 previews of Half-Life (“uses the enhanced Quake engine”) and Sin (Ritual, formerly Hipnotic, licensing the engine). Issue 161, December 1997: Sin moving to the Quake II engine.
Tom Chick, Team Fortress 2 preview, InterAction (Sierra), Spring 1999: Walker and Cook, the Fortress map, the 1996 release, 500,000 downloads, the move to Valve.
“Developer Profile: id Software”, Wireframe issue 16, June 2019, pp. 50–53: Quake III’s focus on “fast-paced online multiplayer”; Romero leaving in 1996.
PC Zone issue 69, November 1998: Quake done Quick, Anthony Bailey on strafing and the rocket jump.
id Software, Quake repository on GitHub (web, secondary): the contents of the source release and the GPL terms. https://github.com/id-Software/Quake
“Quake (video game)” and “Quake engine”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the shareware release on 22 June 1996, QuakeWorld in December 1996, the source release on 21 December 1999 under GPL-2.0-or-later, Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails as the soundtrack’s authors, GoldSrc, the 2021 edition by Nightdive Studios. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_(video_game) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_engine
“Quake (series)”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the sequels and their years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_(series)