This Week In Retro: Quake (Patreon)

June 22, 1996: id Software enters the third dimension

by Diamond Feit

As a medium, video games are young. As a human being, I am not, though I'm not elderly either. I'm just sort of ripe, ready to engage in deep self-reflection and soul-searching while also acknowledging that I've got a lot to learn before my time is up. Yet I'm old enough to have witnessed the meteoric rise of video games from "fad" to "sensation" to "multi-billion-dollar global industry" to "is this the future of entertainment?" That's a lot of change, and I'm privileged to have seen the medium advance by leaps and bounds during my lifetime.

With all that history in mind, I don't think I have ever seen a game change the world as much as Doom did. I doubt I'll ever see it change that much again, either. Street Fighter II may have invented a genre and Resident Evil represented huge strides for the culture of games, but Doom struck the medium like an asteroid and changed its orbit forever.

The above examples were nowhere near the "first" games in their respective genres, but they all served to encapsulate and codify the many, many bandwagon-jumpers that sprung up afterwards. Doom wasn't even the first game of its kind made by its own developers, yet the leap from Wolfenstein 3D to Doom is many magnitudes larger than the gap between Street Fighter and Street Fighter II. I can remember being hooked the very first time I saw Wolfenstein 3D on a low-res, monochrome laptop; the immersion, the danger, and the allure of shooting Nazis grabbed me like no other game had. Still, when I played Doom for the first time, I felt like Neo being freed from the Matrix: My senses were overwhelmed as if I'd never used them before.

Doom's success was immediate and apparent to all parties involved, developers and consumers alike. Within two years of its original 1993 release, Doom II and an uncountable number of "Doom-clones" appeared on both PCs and consoles. A follow-up FPS was a foregone conclusion, but id Software did not deliver Doom 3. Rather, the team developed an all-new game on an all-new engine and intended to create an all-new experience to go with it: Instead of more sci-fi shooting, the concept was medieval with magical monsters and RPG-style melee combat.

As time wore on and the challenges of designing a game and engine simultaneously took their toll, the project shifted towards the less-radical concept of a 3D first-person shooter. Both Wolfenstein and Doom dropped players inside a space that appeared to exist in three dimensions, but in truth these games actually use two-dimensional maps and sprites. id's new game, titled Quake, would present a true 3D world where everything from the walls to the guns to the monsters were all proper polygonal creations.

Quake launched in the summer of 1996, almost two years after Doom II, and much had changed from the original pitch. Despite early press reports hyping a "fantasy world" starring a "Thor-like being" wielding an enchanted hammer, Quake launched with a standard array of firearms, plus an axe as a last-resort melee option. The gothic environments resembled castles more than moon bases, but the presence of nailguns and chainsaws dispelled any "fantasy" angle. Had id been so inclined, Quake could have been sold to the public as a new Doom with only a simple shift of lore, but the studio stuck to their guns and presented the game as-is.

Quake may not have been everything id wanted it to be, but it was an original creation with many forward-thinking features. Levels took full advantage of the new 3D engine, with branching paths that could overlap one another and lots of vertical chambers that required players to maintain awareness in every direction. id discarded the "use" command, so doors and switches now activated automatically when the player touched them; out-of-reach switches could also be triggered with gunfire. The hero of Doom moved incredibly fast for a human being, but Quake gave the player even more mobility with the ability to swim underwater and even jump.

The biggest change from Doom to Quake is one that cannot be seen, yet it is the one that imbues the game with a vastly different energy than its predecessors. id Software hired Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor to create Quake's entire soundscape. Not just the music, but all the sound effects as well. Reznor created a video game soundtrack unlike any other at the time: A moody, sinister set of ambient tracks that make the player feel wholly unwelcome in Quake's accursed world. Reznor's music is the polar opposite of Doom's MIDI-based rock-n-roll that made shooting demons a party. Even though Doom takes place in Hell, Quake feels even scarier.

Quake was well-received upon its initial release, and even lauded as one of the greatest PC games ever made, though it never reached the critical or commercial heights that Doom managed to achieve. I have one theory as to a weakness that hindered Quake's mass-market appeal, and it concerns the eye-popping visuals id worked so hard on. The original Doom went into the world on floppy disks, and only required a couple megabytes of data to create the illusion of Hell on Mars. There's a reason people can port Doom to ordinary devices like printers and ATMs: It's a simple program with a small footprint that runs on almost anything.

Quake, on the other hand, contains a fully-modeled 3D world that necessarily requires a larger amount of data and processing power. 1996 happened to be the first year I bought my own PC and I couldn't afford a model with an Intel Pentium CPU, nor could I spring for more than a 50MB hard drive. I could run Windows 95, I could surf the web, and I could easily run Doom, but games like Quake were out of the question.

Thus, my Quake experience did not begin until this very month when the game turned 25 years old. It is, of course, trivial to operate Quake on modern PCs, but it holds up tremendously well. The default weapon is a shotgun rather than a meager pistol, so from moment one I felt like my attacks had weight. The impossibly straight lines of the architecture make Quake seem all the more unreal (dare I say...liminal?), and the monsters made of jagged polygons look extra freakish in 2021.

I think it is completely fair to say that Quake is no Doom: It is more technically advanced and contains more features that we accept as standard in modern shooters, but despite the naming conventions it was Doom that shook the earth when it landed, whereas Quake was more of an aftershock. Nevertheless, if you're like me and missed out on Quake or dismissed it as a "Doom-clone," I recommend taking it for a spin—it is readily available on modern software platforms and only costs a few dollars. Just make sure you take whatever measures necessary to play it with the original soundtrack intact; if there's no muffled whispers or mechanical screeches in the background, it's not Quake.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.