DOS

Quake

Trivia

Quake was named as #7 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking by German gaming magazine GameStar (issue 12/1999).

Quake was named #36 overall among the “150 Best Games of All Time” by Computer Gaming World Magazine (15th Anniversary Issue--November 1996).

Contributed by PCGamer77 (3025) on May 01, 2008.

Quake was known for many "firsts", one of which being that it offered the opportunity for both Amiga and PC gamers to play online together.

Contributed by D Michael (221) on Nov 04, 2007.

Quake has no true sequel. Thematically, Quake 2, 3 and 4 are all completely different games with no connection to the original, other than a few aesthetics such as the Quad Damage power-up.

Kornelia, a famous female quake player won the "TEN GibFest Contest" at the computer game developers conference at Santa Clara. As a result, she was afforded the opportunity to play John Romero in a 1v1 deathmatch. She beat him 22 to 1 and also took home a P200 MMX system.

Contributed by D Michael (221) on Jul 10, 2007.

One of the songs on Karl Sander's album Saurian Meditation, "Elder God Shrine", was named after the Quake level E4M3 which has the same name.

Quake is yet another of id Software's games that contains the infamous Dopefish. The level you can find the Dopefish on is E2M3, The Well of Wishes, in a secret location that you'd probably need a walkthrough to get to. Incidentally, "The Well of Wishes" is the same title as a Commander Keen 4 level where the Dopefish first appears.

The engine that iD Software started to make Quake with was called Six Degrees of Freedom

The first mention of Quake to the public was done in 1990 as part of Apogee's advertising for upcoming games. Designed as an RPG, the project was never completed and merely exists as a design document that shares the name of iD's Quake as we see it today. Found within the documentation of Commander Keen 3 mention of "Quake" states:

COMING SOON FROM ID SOFTWARE
As our follow-up to the Commander Keen trilogy, id Software is working on 'The Fight for Justice', a completely new approach to fantasy gaming. You start not as a weakling with no food--you start as Quake, the strongest, most dangerous person on the continent. You start off with a Hammer of Thunderbolts, a Ring of Regeneration, and a trans-dimensional artifact. Here the fun begins. You fight for Justice, a secret organization devoted to vanquishing evil from the land! This is role-playing excitement.

And you don't chunk around the screen. 'The Fight for Justice' contains fully animated scrolling backgrounds. All the people you meet have their own lives, personalities, and objectives. A 256-color VGA version will be available (smooth scrolling 256-color screens --fancy that)!

And the depth of play will be intense. No more "whack whack here's some gold". There will be interesting puzzles and decisions won't be "yes/no" but complex correlations of people and events. 'The Fight for Justice' will be the finest PC game yet.

On August 31, 1996, Quake was put on the infamous German index by the BPjS. For more information about what this means and to see a list of games sharing the same fate, take a look here: BPjS/BPjM indexed games.

For excellent graphics, please visit fuhquake.net and download the latest installer, which will increase the graphical details. You will also be able to play Quake on NT-system.

In addition to being one of the first full 3D games (with only polygons but no bitmaps) Quake was the first FPS to introduce realistic lighting and shadows.

Of course, this came at a price. Quake has taken a lot of flak because it's all dull brown and grey. This was necessary because it was the only way to get the lighting to work properly. Since each surface needs a wide variety of reserved colors for displaying darkened/brightened portions of the surface, the game was limited to just a few colors and all their respective shades.

Taking John Romero's work on the Apple ][ bootloader for Infocom's Zork Zero as a point of departure, in 2004 Jason Bergman released "IFQuake" -- the difficulty-selection stage and first level of the shareware version of Quake implemented as a text adventure game, downloadable at http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/ifquake.zip

Quake was ranked # 26 in the 50 Best Games of All Time list published by PC Gamer Magazine in its April 2005 issue.

Contributed by PCGamer77 (3025) on Mar 19, 2005.

The Saturn version of Quake is the only version with coloured lighting, something Lobotomy Software added to the saturn version

Machinima, an animated film using the 3D environment of a game, started with the Quake engine. Doom already had a recording feature, but it wasn't until Quake when people added narrative and called it "movies" that the genre was born. The first known machinima is Diary of a Camper, by a group of players called The Rangers, released on October 26, 1996.

Contributed by Sciere (119178) on Mar 06, 2005.

Quake was preceded by Qtest1, a tech demo which was released in February 1996. It consisted of three small, monster-free levels which illustrated the game's engine. Of particular note was Test3, which became the basis for the second level of Quake's first episode (of the other levels, Test2 seemed to be a very, very early incarnation of 'Ziggurat Vertigo', the infamous low-gravity secret level). The engine was almost fully complete, although wall-mounted torches were still sprite-based.

Although the test had no game - rather like the original Doom 'alpha releases' - multiplayer support was, fortunately, included. The infamous 'rocket jump' was discovered quite quickly, as Qtest included both rocket and grenade launchers.

"Chris (bigbang@seanet.com)" eventually discovered that monsters were included in the game's source code, and a patch released in June 1996 allowed players to experience early versions of Quake's beasties.

Almost incidentally, Quake introduced the now-standard concept of a FPS 'console', and popularised 'mouselook' as *the* absolute standard control interface.

Although the specifications required a Pentium, Quake ran acceptably well on a 486 DX4/100 and, at a push, the faster 486es. Along with 'Magic Carpet' it was however the game that most established the Pentium as a must-have processor.

Go to level e1m8 and you'll find yourself in a very weird map.

The original game had software rendering mode only. You could download glquake to use your 3d accelerated card. A special version was made for the intergraph rendition cards called vquake.

Contributed by Santa (847) on Apr 27, 2004.

As said below, the game was originally supposed to be medieval themed. This was inspired by a character named Quake in id's long D&D campaign (which actually ended with demons destroying the universe due to John Romero's greed), DM'd by John Carmack. Because of the switch to sci-fi, Romero was angry enough to leave id after Quake, even though Carmack fired him first. He later used another inspiration from the D&D campaign to make Daikatana.

In 1999, id Software made the complete source code for Quake freely available to the public. You can download it here.

Quake can, believe it or not, be finished in less than 20 mins. On nightmare difficulty. Don't believe me? Check out the Quake Movie "Quake Done Quick With a Vengeance" (http://www.planetquake.com/qdq/qdqwav.html)

QDQWAV is the latest Quake Movie from a group of players that have been recording their lightning-fast runs on Quake with the record demo command and publishing them as Quake Movies. The initial release was "Quake Done Quick", completed in 19:49 and released on 1997.

The standing record as per "Quake Done Quick With a Vengeance"? 12:23 minutes. Beat THAT!!

Sandy Petersen who was the level designer for this game and others (DOOM, DOOM II and Quake 2 etc.) also contributed (probably paintings) to an illustrated guide entitled, "Guide to Cthulhu Monsters - A field observer's handbook of Preternatural entities" (published by Chaosium Inc. 1988). This book contains original paintings for all Cthulhu entities of Lovecraft and is a real collectors item.

The 'Quake' series (as a whole) were ranked as the #17 games of the Top 50 Best Games of all time by the editors of PC Gamer magazine in their October 2001 issue.

Bizarre product tie-ins: for the release of the movie "Anaconda" Sony pictures released through their website an add-on level for Quake titled "Temple of the Mist" were you made your way trough an ancient temple searching for the altar that holds the key to escape. Obviously, before escaping you have to go mano a mano with the Anaconda itself...weird uh?

In the 200th aniversary issue of Computer Gaming World, the staff named it the eighth best game of all time.

Quake was voted #14 overall in PCGamer Magazine's Readers All-Time Top 50 Games Poll (April 2000 issue).

Contributed by PCGamer77 (3025) on Jan 21, 2001.

This game is a member of Computer Gaming World's Hall of Fame.

The original Quake was supposed to have a medieval environment, but a few months before its release, most of the medieval-role playing aspects of the game were removed (i.e. one of the weapons was going to be a sword and there was a dragon to fight with) and the result was a game with guns but such enemies like the fiend or the death knight (these were included in the original project).

(Many original design elements were scrapped -- the kernel idea behind Quake was this massive Thor-like warhammer that you could slam down on the ground to make shockwaves ripple through the game world. This "ultimate weapon" idea followed John Romero to his game Daikatana.)

All of the sounds and music for Quake were produced by Trent Reznor, the man behind the industrial/alternative group Nine Inch Nails. The ammo boxes for the nailgun ("nails") even have the band's logo (NIN) on the side.