Originally published June 14, 2016. Updated November 12, 2018.
It was two decades ago when a team known for some of the most insane and popular games of those times – Wolfenstein 3D, followed by the legendary Doom – has built a brand new game engine. The engine needed less resources than the games you play today at the red flush casino website that run in browser window today, yet it offered full, real-time 3D rendering of the environment and the enemies, support for 3D acceleration, and online multiplayer. It looked a lot like Minecraft, with its pixelated graphics, but wasn’t that colorful. It was called Quake – and it was the first truly 3D first person shooter ever released.
Quake didn’t really have a story. Players were thrown into a world of dark fantasy inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft – a parallel dimension filled with Dimensional Shamblers, blood-thirsty fiends and the Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua, and powerful enemies like Chthon and Shub-Niggurath. The goal of the game is for Ranger, the character controlled by the player, to explore four levels and find four magical runes to save the world.
Technology was not the only thing to make Quake unique. Its soundtrack, created by Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails. Reznor later revealed that the soundtrack of the game should not be understood as “music”, but as “textures and ambiances with whirling machine noises”, meant to be “the most sinister, depressive, scary, frightening kind of thing”.
The first technology demo of the Quake engine was released to players on February 24th 1996, consisting of three multiplayer maps, and no single player support. The graphics in QTest, as it was called, were unfinished. But it allowed users to create their own modifications in QuakeC, so player models and mods started appearing even before the final game was released. Soon after the final game was released, it was ported to all popular gaming platforms of the times: it was adapted to run on a Mac and the Sega Saturn in 1997, on Nintendo 64 and Amiga the next year, and on Linux in 1999.
Few gamers know that the first version of Team Fortress was built as a modification for the first version of Quake, later adapted to QuakeWorld. It introduced player classes and a new gameplay mode, Capture the Flag, which has become very popular over the years. The developers were working on a stand-alone sequel to the mod, when they were hired by Valve to create a port of Team Fortress using the Half-Life engine (which was a modified version of the Quake II engine). But TF is not the only thing we have Quake to thank for: its engine was used to create machinima (an animated film using video game graphics) for the first time.
Quake celebrates its 20th birthday on June 22nd this year.
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