Quake

aka: Quake 64, Quake Mobile, Quake: The Doomed Dimension
Moby ID: 374
Windows Specs
Note: We may earn an affiliate commission on purchases made via eBay or Amazon links (prices updated 3/29 8:44 PM )

Description official descriptions

An enemy with the codename ''Quake'', which is believed to come from another dimension, is using teleporter gates to invade Earth. The player takes the role of a nameless soldier who arrives at his base only to find out Quake has overrun it and killed everyone. Somewhere in the base, there must be a teleporter to Quake's realm. The mission is clear: take the fight to the enemy, overcome countless hordes of monsters, and exact revenge.

id Software's follow-up to Doom and Doom II, Quake is a first-person shooter. Its main technological innovation is the use of a true 3D engine - the levels themselves, as well as the enemies, are polygonal. This not only allows for more natural level-designs and character animations, but also for more realistic lighting and the inclusion of simulated physics that have an effect on gameplay: grenades can bounce off walls and around corners, for example.

In single-player mode, gameplay consists mainly of proceeding through the levels (spread over four distinct episodes) in search of an exit, killing everything that moves. Interaction with the game world is reduced to a minimum: since there is no use key, buttons are pressed by running into or shooting at them. As in id's earlier games, many secrets are waiting to be discovered, including a few hidden levels.

Unlike Doom's rather straightforward design that couples futuristic environments with demonic imagery, the theme of Quake's levels, enemies, and weapons is not so easily pinpointed. While each episode begins in a futuristic military base (with a technological 'slipgate' as the level exit), later levels take place in environments inspired by medieval fantasy and gothic horror (castles, dungeons, and caverns) and the player passes through magical portals to advance. In a departure from Doom's colorful environments, all Quake levels are dominated by earth colors.

The enemies conform to the mishmash of designs: there are human opponents armed with shotguns and energy weapons in the early levels, while the later levels include medieval knights, ghosts, zombies, ogres (armed with grenade launchers and chainsaws), and some more unearthly beasts. The player's weapons, while relatively modern, all have a low-tech feel. Besides a (bloodstained) axe, there are shotguns, nailguns, rocket and grenade launchers, and the Thunderbolt, which discharges electrical energy.

Quake was one of the first games playable natively over the Internet in addition to LANs. The single-player levels can be played cooperatively, but the game is most famous for its deathmatch mode. One-on-one duels, team play, and free-for-all competition are possible. The emphasis is on fast reaction and skillful maneuvering through the levels. All of the single-player maps can be used as arenas, but the game also comes with six maps specially designed for deathmatch.

Spellings

  • 雷神之锤 - Simplified Chinese spelling

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Videos

See any errors or missing info for this game?

You can submit a correction, contribute trivia, add to a game group, add a related site or alternate title.

Credits (DOS version)

27 People (15 developers, 12 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 87% (based on 61 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 465 ratings with 19 reviews)

3D engine for sale! 3D engine for sale! (oh yeah, there's a game here too)

The Good
The Quake Id Software intended to make was quite different to the Quake that actually got released. 1995-era gaming magazines were awash with hype about a fully 3D, fantasy-themed FPS with detailed lighting effects and morphable terrain and an RPG-style class system and everything but the kitchen sink.

Somewhere along the line id's development team must have realised that the hardware required for this sort of game did not exist yet. They ended up releasing a stripped-down tech demo that was only a shadow of what they had originally promised. It is completely 3D, but just about everything else was sacrificed to make it 3D.

Everywhere in Quake you see the signs of a game laboring under technological constraints. The levels are absolutely tiny, and mostly made up of cramped rooms and corridors (large outdoor areas like in Doom? Forget it.) The textures are bland and of low detail. The tradeoff for realistic lighting was that everything in the game is rendered in dull browns and grays. It's rare that you'll have three enemies on the screen at once. Five enemies is a gratuitous bloodbath.

Thematically the game is a continuation of Doom. The settings and plots are pretty much the same: you are a marine who is the last man standing on the site of an alien invasion. But rather than the Aliens setting of Doom, Quake is far more Gothic. Castles and dungeons are the rule here rather than space stations and moon bases. In fact, you could easily believe that this game was originally intended to be set in the Middle Ages.

The action is fast and lean. The monsters are weak but deal out massive damage, and since you don't have much ammo the game becomes a frenetic and tense reflex match. The game's realistic lighting works in its favor by giving monsters the ability to hide in shadows where you can't see them. The game's scariest moments come when you're walking down a well-lit corridor and suddenly the lights go out...and you can hear growls and snarls.

Quake's monsters are pretty cool and one of the best things that came with the game. There are zombies, werewolves, and flesh-eating fish, and lethal killing machines such as the Hell Knights and Vores. But pride of place is reserved for the Shambler, a hulking behemoth who can shoot lighting and absorb massive amounts of damage before dying; and can be regularly found on "Best Ever Monster" lists around the net.

The game's 3Dness makes it aesthetically incomparable to the 2.5D games of the day. Perspective is rendered correctly. There can be rooms on top of rooms. Your viewpoint can lean and rotate at any angle. You can look straight up at the sky. You even have the ability to swim underwater! These things gave the game the needed wow factor to become a hit, and just as well because that's all Quake has going for it.

The Bad
Like I mentioned before, the content side of the game was severely hamstrung so they could get it in 3D. Basically, everything about the game unrelated to technology sucks.

There is no story, and zero originality. Even though the FPS genre was only a few years Quake effectively stagnated it with boring levels, hardly any features, repetitive and derivative design, etc. This is the first game I can think of that was literally designed around its engine and graphical capabilities. Take away the 3D-ness, and Quake is worthless bargain bin material.

The levels themselves are so factory-produced and generic they might as well have been generated by a macro. The game over-uses the "monsters hiding in shadow" trick until it's not funny anymore (and the game has an annoying habit of spawning monsters behind you, the precursor of Doom 3). You'd think that with fully 3D terrain the door would be open for all sorts of cool levels, but for the most part Quake's levels are the same as Doom's levels: lots of hallways and staircases and the occasional elevator.

Weapon balance is way off, the hatchet is a worthless piece of crap and once you get the rocket launcher you're set for the whole game. And the game has a "weak, medium, strong" approach to weaponry, so that if you get a super shotgun your regular shotgun becomes useless and if you get a super nailgun your old nailgun becomes useless. The result? There are eight weapons in the game but you only ever use two or three of them. What's the point?

There's no originality, no attempt at a story, and nothing that advances the FPS genre at all. Any last chance of Quake being a good single-player game is drop-kicked in the nuts by a moronic final boss fight. I'm not one for hyperbole, but Quake has the lamest, most anti-climactic boss fight of any Id Software game (and that includes Commander Keen!). Shub Nigguruth is a giant blob that does not even move but just sits there doing nothing while you run around and kill a few monsters (like you've been doing all game) looking for a hidden switch that kills the boss and ends the game. And as a final insult, there isn't even an ending cutscene.

Although much can be said of the game's technology, Quake is not a pretty game. As mentioned before, the color palette is extremely limited and the whole game is brown and gray. The polygons are blocky and the monster animation is very choppy. Probably the best thing one can say about Quake's graphics is the distortion effects underwater, and the lighting. And although some would call Quake a masterpiece of Gothic horror, praising Quake for being dark and suspenseful is like praising a 1920s-era film for being sepia-toned and artsy. It only looks like that because of technological restrictions, and attempting to translate that into artistic genius on the part of the creators is nothing more than Emperor's New Clothes syndrome.

But wait! What about multiplayer? The game was a huge multiplayer hit over the internet, partly because it was so easy to set up and find opponents. But the game's rushed design can be seen here as well, as almost all the maps that come with the game are crap and full of bugs and imbalances (example: in one of the levels there is a 100% health powerup, a super nailgun and a quad damage right next to each other). Not to mention that Quake only started to become really popular after user mods had ironed out all the nuisances and issues, basically a continuation of Id's policy of "let the community fix our games for us". Hardly anyone plays Vanilla Quake.

The Bottom Line
There's a problem with engine games: they are only as good as the engine that powers them. As soon as the technology starts to become old, the game itself becomes obsolete. On the other hand, great gameplay never dies: look at how many people are playing Duke Nukem 3D after all these years. But Quake is dead armadillo. It was boring in its day and is even more so now.

DOS · by Maw (832) · 2007

All the other reviews are rubbish

The Good
Where Doom was in fact a technological step backwards (Ultima Underworld had a far superior engine a year previously) Quake was in every sense state of the art. One of the first truly 3D games engines, it was certainly by far and away the best looking thing at the time. A combination of great level design, fantastic music and Lovecraft-esque setting created the scariest atmosphere I'd met in a computer game. The out-of-the-box internet gameplay and free ability to create mods of the basic engine were better executed than had ever been before, perhaps due to id software has its roots in the shareware movement. The fact they have released the source code since is a nice nod to the independent game development community. But above all? The sheer playability.

The Bad
The downsides? Having to put up with people whining about the same old stuff when you say you like Quake. (It's too brown... no story... too much gore... don't like shooting games... Doom is better...) SHUT UP. The only real downside? It was such a success we now have to put up with endless inferior imitations.

The Bottom Line
It's easy in a genre that has advanced so fast to look back on the older titles with vague disgust rather than the admiration they deserve. Quake was a revolutionary game, and still is a fantastically fun one.

DOS · by rar (2) · 2004

A completely underrated yet revolutionary game.

The Good
My God, John Carmack - what more is there to say? While completely underrated (for some reason), this game was simply revolutionary at the time. Unlike Doom it came with a completely, 100% true 3D engine with gouraud-shaded textures and it ran DAMN FAST on any Pentium and adequately on an old 486.

This game completely revolutionized the genre: it was the first to come out-of-the-box with TCP/IP support for internet play (not through TEN or other such services) -- if you had the bandwidth to spare you could simply set up a Quake server and get it on! It was also the first to use the now-common server/client architecture (push the Tilde key and you'll see what I mean) and the first one which doesn't require a seperate module (COMMIT) for multiplayer play.

And most importantly, this game is damn challenging and fun in single player and multiplayer alike!

The Bad
It looks a bit on the brownish side, but we'll let that one pass. The sound effects are a bit annoying too.



The Bottom Line
A wonderful, underrated classic which didn't get the attention it deserved.

DOS · by Tomer Gabel (4539) · 2000

[ View all 19 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Paul Steed credit leilei (343) Aug 13, 2012
What music? null-geodesic (106) Jun 12, 2008

Trivia

1001 Video Games

The PC version of Quake appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Scrapped versions

The Game Boy Advance version of Quake was in development by AGB Games. There were also plans for port to Sony PlayStation by Lobotomy Software, which was able to work, under some circumstances, in 60 FPS. First one was cancelled for unknown reasons, while second cancellation was caused by fact, that developer failed to find a publisher.

3D cards support

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.

Anaconda level

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?

Development

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.

The original concept 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.

Deathmatch

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.

Dopefish

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: Secret of the Oracle level where the Dopefish first appears.

Engine

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

German index

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.

IFQuake

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

Innovations

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. It was also the first game which offered the opportunity for both Amiga and PC gamers to play online together.

Machinima

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.

Qtest1

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 ([email protected])" 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.

References

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") have the band's logo (NIN) on the side.

References to the game

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.

Saturn version

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

Source code release

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

Speedruns

Quake inspired the art of speedruns: trying to beat a game as fast as possible. The initial release was Quake Done Quick, completed in 19:49 and released on 1997. As of 2012, players still work on breaking the latest records.

Zeeboo version

On June 15, 2010, both Quake and Quake II were removed from Zeebo's wireless network, the Brazilian Zeebonet. Both games were offered for 10 Z-credits and each Brazilian Zeebo came with 35 Z-credits, so the games were sold virtually for free. They were replaced for Zeebo Extreme RolimĂŁ and Zeebo Extreme Jetboard as free downloads.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) - #36 in the “150 Best Games of All Time” list
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – The Best Way To Die In Computer Gaming (being telefragged)
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) –Worst Back Story of All Time
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #5 Least Rewarding Ending of All Time
    • May 1997 (Issue #154) – Action Game of the Year
    • May 1997 (Issue #154) – Action Game of the Year (Readers' Choice)
    • May 1997 (Issue #154) – Special Award for Technological Achievement (for its engine)
    • April 1999 (Issue #177) - Introduced into the Hall of Fame
    • March 2001 (Issue #200) - #8 Best Game of All Time
  • GameSpy
    • 2001 – #5 Top Game of All Time
  • GameStar (Germany)
    • Issue 12/1999 - #7 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
  • PC Gamer
    • April 2000 - #14 in the "All-Time Top 50 Games" poll
    • April 2005 - #26 in the "50 Best Games of All Time" list
  • Power Play
  • Ĺšwiat Gier Komputerowych
    • February 1997 (Issue #50) – readers' award Hitek'96 for the best foreign game of 1996

Information also contributed by Adam Baratz, Ashley Pomerov, chirinea, Darksaviour69, D Michael, Erkan O; keth, Maw, n-n, PCGamer77, Pseudo_Intellectual; Sciere, Scott Monster, Xoleras, Zack Green and Zovni

Analytics

MobyPro Early Access

Upgrade to MobyPro to view research rankings!

Related Games

Quake II
Released 1997 on Windows, Linux, 1999 on PlayStation...
Quake III: Arena
Released 1999 on Linux, Windows, 2000 on Dreamcast...
Quake: Episode 5 - Dimensions of the Past
Released 2016 on DOS, Windows
Ultimate Quake
Released 2001 on Windows
Quake II
Released 2023 on Windows, Windows Apps, PlayStation 4...
Quake Live
Released 2010 on Browser, Windows
Quake Minus One
Released 1985 on Commodore 64
Smokin' Guns
Released 2009 on Linux, Windows
Quake: Champions
Released 2017 on Windows, 2022 on Windows Apps

Related Sites +

  • FitzQuake
    The most faithful custom engine available.
  • Func_Msgboard
    An ever-active forum dedicated to custom mapping, primarily focusing on the original game but also covering the following games in the series from time to time.
  • Matt Chat 54
    Video interview with John Romero about the development of Quake
  • Planet Quake
    An exhaustive quake site visit it for news, mods, levels, tips and all you want related to Quake
  • Quaddicted
    The most comprehensive site for custom singleplayer maps.
  • Quake
    Official page on id Software's website
  • Quake cheat codes
    Detailed information on Quake 1 cheat codes for N64, PC and Sega Saturn
  • Tenebrae
    Tenebrae is a modification of the quake source that adds stencil shadows and per pixel lights to quake. Stencil shadows allow for realistic shadow effects on every object in the game world. Per pixel lighting allows you to have fine surface details correctly lit. These are essentially the same algorithms as used by the new Doom game.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 374
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

Contribute

Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

Game added by robotriot.

Zeebo added by chirinea. Nintendo 64 added by Kartanym. Amiga, Windows Mobile, Acorn 32-bit added by Kabushi. Windows added by The cranky hermit. Macintosh added by Ace of Sevens. SEGA Saturn added by quizzley7.

Additional contributors: JubalHarshaw, Andrew Hartnett, Ledmeister, Roedie, Unicorn Lynx, Atomic Punch!, erc, Kabushi, Patrick Bregger, Titan10, Karsa Orlong, MrFlibble, FatherJack, R3dn3ck3r.

Game added November 3, 1999. Last modified March 6, 2024.