Over 15 Years and Still Fragging

On June 22nd, 1996, a brash indie game development company calling itself id Software released a shareware version of a new game that it called “Quake” … and the world of video games was forever changed. Among the hundred of websites that bloomed over the years as a result of the game’s release was Quake.ie - a site dedicated to players of Quake in Ireland.

Quake was unique in that its significance lay not primarily in its content. Indeed, the medium was truly the message here. Don’t get us wrong. The game itself was the stuff of action gaming legend. Yes, first-person shooters had been done before (at least two of them - Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM - also created by id, which popularised the genre). But nothing quite harnessed the nascent hardcore gamer’s glee for wanton bloodlust and post-apocalyptic / sci-fi adventuring in such an immersive way as Quake. The game’s cutting edge 3D graphics (innovated by company co-founder and lead programmer John Carmack) pushed technical innovation to its limits (spawning an escalating video card war that rages to this day). The original soundtrack by industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, then reaching the apex of its early popularity, didn’t hurt any (and contributed to a sense that this was a broader cultural movement, not just the bastion of nerds).

But no - Quake changed gaming with everything BUT its content. id didn’t just release a single video game in 1996. It launched the modern era of gaming, which continues to flourish to this day. Here's a history lesson in our favourite FPS shooter to show how.

On initial release, Quake was largely praised throughout the gaming community, and it quickly dethroned previous FPS titles as the best in its category. Some would even go as far as to say that it revolutionised the way multiplayer games were developed. Throughout the second half on 1996 it went on to completely dominate the video game industry, which was rather young at the time, and the gamer magazines went mad for it (game websites like this one didn't really exist at the time, the Internet as we know it today was still in it's infancy in 1996). In fact, the inclusion of the shareware binaries on the cover CD with most magazines guaranteed that every PC gamer had a copy and were able to play (at last the first few levels) without even purchasing the game. This quicky made Quake the most recognised game on the planet and got everyone talking about it!

Putting aside the four spinoffs and the at least 12 unofficial ports (Nintendo N64, Sony Playstation etc), we can see how successful the game became just by looking at the number of total games in the Quake series, which by the way does not really follow a logical story whatsoever (various reasons, too many to cover here). There have been 11 games to date:

• Quake (1996)
• Quake Mission Pack 1: Scourge of Armagon (1997)
• Quake Mission Pack 2: Dissolution of Eternity (1997)
• Quake II (1997)
• Quake II Mission Pack: The Reckoning (1998)
• Quake II Mission Pack: Ground Zero (1998)
• Quake III Arena (1999)
• Quake III: Team Arena (2000)
• Quake 4 (2005)
• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (2007)
• Quake Live (2010)

Note that although licensed by id Software, Quake 4 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars were both developed by external companies. They are both set in the same universe at Quake II. Quake Live is a variant of Quake III Arena designed to run in a web browser.

The original Quake had come together almost by accident. There was no design document for the first half of its development, and the game that shipped was very different from what the creators first held in their minds in the beginning (if they had anything in mind). In 1994 id Software released Doom II. The company was riding high and seemed unstoppable. They announced that their next game would be Quake, a project they had started and abandoned years earlier, according to John Romero, id co-founder and lead game designer, "When we finished our first Commander Keen series on December 14th, 1990, we immediately started working on Quake in January. It was a top-down RPG, and was supposed to be based on our D&D campaign we were playing. The character of Quake was in this group called the Silver Shadow Band. It was a very small elite group of super badass characters. [He was this] Thor-like guy, and he had this amazing hammer, and this thing called the Hellgate Cube -- which was a sentient inter-dimensional cube that would rotate around him and go do its own thing depending on what was going on." He continues "We worked on it for two weeks and it was like, 'you know what, there's no way that this thing is looking as awesome as Quake really is, so let's just stop making Quake right now. So we decided to just sort of shelve it and wait until we had really great technology to make this a reality."

The tech came quickly. Each new id game was a technological revolution. Wolfenstein made the first-person shooter mainstream; Doom introduced the world to deathmatch and modding. It seemed only natural that id's next game would be an equal leap forward. The team made it look so easy. It was anything but. The tech required for Quake was far more complex than they ever imagined, and the id Software that started the game was very different from the one that finished it. In the months following the game's release developer blogs and interviews to the press were filled with gossip about id's troubles. At the same time, the team was perparing to revolutionise 3D graphics and online play with an OpenGL version for then-cutting edge 3D accelerators (known today simply as video cards) and Quakeworld, which would greatly improve online play.

Modems at the time had theoretical max speeds of just 28.8k and 36.6k a second, though most users settled for much slower rates even if they had the fancy hardware. Quakeworld compensated for this with updated network code and added the much needed feature of server browsing to find a game to join. A major side-effect of Quakeworld was 'clans', groups of gamers who formed teams to compete against others over the Internet in multiplayer games. Nobody foresaw the creation of clans, but the sheer number of them that popped up didn't do any harm for the success of Quakeworld. Clans still exist today - name any online mutiplayer game and their are clans (or 'guilds') out there who play it passionately.

But it's what Quake did to change PC hardware in the mid 90's that is most important. Throughout development, id had been in talks with graphics card manufacturers who were trying to make 3D cards a necessary part of every PC. All they needed was a killer app, and they really wanted Quake. This is where GLQuake would come in to it's own (and eventually replace the base engine code completely, making a 3D card a minimum requirement for playing any game on a PC - see Unreal Tounament and Quake III Arena 4 years later).

All the top-level hardware manufacturers including 3dfx, Rendition, and NVidia were courting id. "Rendition had Walt Donovan come onsite and port Quake onto their card. Walt's an amazing programmer and graphics guy (now at NVidia), which was a good thing, because that was a really hard port." Hardware manufacturers were at a disadvantage. The tech of the game could literally change overnight. The information that id passed along to them could quickly become outdated, according to MichaelAbrash, technical writer for id Software in 1996. "Quake ended up running okay at 640x480 [on the Rendition card -- a high res at the time], which was pretty cool. NVidia had the NV1, which did quad warping, and John (Carmack) was very blunt that that was the wrong thing to do. In particular, I remember an NVidia T-shirt pinned to the wall outside my office with a knife; it doesn't get much more symbolic than that. It wasn't until 3Dfx came along that hardware started being clearly the way to go. It was always obvious that the future was 3D hardware. It was just a question of when."

The release of GLQuake (as in 'OpenGL' Quake) in January of 1997 made 3Dfx the winner of the first video card hardware war, and Carmack's choices would affect how drivers for such hardware were written for years to come. Video card sales went through the roof, and the PC hardware market suddenly got very competitive.

However, along the way Quake changed more than just game hardware. It's code was so well written that it's still used in games today. Bits of the original Quake code still run under the hood in the Call of Duty games, including the Modern Warfare series. Valve's engineers were familiar with the Quake engine when they were creating the Source engine that powers everything from Half-Life 2 to Dota 2. "We licensed Quake to Valve when they were starting their company and they built Source using Quake, and Quake code is still in Source even today. Inside of some DLLs, there's still some Quake code running in there," says Romero.

In fact, Quake was so well-written that aspects of it haven't required changing in over fifteen years, and people are still playing the original Quakeworld online. Greatest game ever? We certainly think so! Quake.ie is therefore dedicated to this, the greatest game ever, and always will be. We have have been reporting on all things Quake for over 10 years now, and promise to keep doing so, as well as always keeping at least one Irish Quakeworld server online for those of you who yearn at any time for a blast from the past.

Read Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner for more on the inside story of John Carmack, John Romero and how id Software created an empire, ruled a multi-billion-dollar industry, and provoked a national controversy.