21 ms·

Happy 20th Birthday, Quake

213 points by miiiiiike 10y ago

aidos 10y ago
Before I purchased the box / CD I was given a copy of the demo by a friend. He zipped it across 8 floppy disks and it took 2 painful attempts to get the zipping process to work without corruption. Those were the days!
rndmio 10y ago
I know there's a lot of nostalgia involved, but in my mind this was a pivotal moment in gaming. The step up from Doom (and alikes) to Quake was huge. Not to mention how well designed and balanced the game was. I wasted so many hours playing it originally and even now it still thrills, in a way I just haven't had for a long time.
- zorked 10y ago
  That was a beautiful moment in time when the technology was starting to reach high levels of realism but the aesthetic of realism still hadn't become the oppressive norm of mainstream gaming.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    And then we got WoW and now things are tilting back towards cartoons...
    - jerf 10y ago
      Yeah, but that's still progress in a way, progress away from the false goal of unconditional realism. Cartoons are generally cheaper, which means we can have more things, and also has more useful design space. Something like TF2-style "all characters must have distinctive silhouettes" is much harder if you're also trying to do total realism, because you end up so much more constrained with where the distinctiveness can be. (Color? No, nobody's running around on the battlefield in bright red. Nobody's wearing crazy hats or has two-foot-tall bouncing hair. A lot of guns look a lot like other guns. etc.)
      - Kristine1975 10y ago
        Here's a presentation by Valve about the visual design of Team Fortress 2: http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/NPAR07_IllustrativeRenderingInTeamFortress2.pdf http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/NPAR07_Illust... And here's the paper for it: http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2013/02/NPAR07_IllustrativeRenderingInTeamFortress2.pdf http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2013/02/NPAR07_Illu...
      - zanny 10y ago
        It is not even just about the cost to produce. Realist games sacrifice gameplay itself, because if you are on the bleeding edge of fidelity you cannot have a lot of useful gamey aspects (speed, object density, environment complexity, etc). You can put more non-interactive polygons on the screen but only in exchange for gameplay quality.
        digi_owl 10y ago
        Amen. I recently tried playing a MMORPG that seems to throw a insane polygon count at the player models (boob physics galore). End result is that my computer screams for mercy any time i set foot in a spawn zone.
        animal531 10y ago
        I think there's room for both, and it's not that limiting. An Uncharted 4 looks amazing and has all the elements you describe, but is obviously a lot harder to implement than an Overwatch (which is great looking in a cartoon fashion, with vibrant colours etc.)
      - Nullabillity 10y ago
        > Nobody's wearing crazy hats or has two-foot-tall bouncing hair. Clearly you've never played TF2.
        jerf 10y ago
        Read harder.
    - baldfat 10y ago
      Things run faster when not realistic and are cheaper to produce (Normally) I personally prefer the art style approach over trying to make it realistic/technical approach by making realistic representation as if it was real life. TF 2 > Crisis This is a BIG why the Indie Game movemnet
    - HannibalLecter 10y ago
      WoW sucks now. It was great back in TBC but now? It's nothing more than a tech-improved facebook game. Garbage. If you want something awesome check out Path of Exile. Free to play, too. It's like what Diablo 3 should have been but couldn't because Bliz don't know how to gameplay design anymore.
  - zanny 10y ago
    I don't know if this was intentional, but eevee just made a blog post about this yesterday: https://eev.ee/blog/2016/06/22/graphical-fidelity-is-ruining-video-games/ https://eev.ee/blog/2016/06/22/graphical-fidelity-is-ruining... Probably to coincide with the anniversary.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      Oddly one of the more interesting quake 2 mods i played around with was Brazen. It made the Quake 2 weapons have realistic ammo management and carrying capacity. The most intriguing part was perhaps that you could transfer ammo between magazines, and empty ones was thrown into the game world. The developer would go on to make a variant of this that was compatible with Action Quake, with a bit of Matrix influence thrown in (you could climb buildings by "wall jumping").
    - rndmio 10y ago
      That's a great article that really articulates some of the feelings I'd had towards modern games, especially FPSs.
    - Kristine1975 10y ago
      It was/is being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11959444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11959444
  - munificent 10y ago
    I've been really enjoying Minecraft lately because it bucks that trend for all of the right reasons. All of its graphical simplicity both helps make the game world more modifiable, and encourages users to use their imagination to interpret the world, just like simple LEGO blocks do.
  - noobermin 10y ago
    It's not just the graphics, it was gameplay too. Take a COD game and contrast that to a quake 3 1v1. No comparison. Of course, IMAO.
  - Asooka 10y ago
    I know what you mean, but as someone who works on rendering tech (for CG not for games, but games are more and more using the same tech), I would like to clarify something. You do want realism in your graphics. You want realism in the way light is calculated, you want realism in the way materials interact, in short you want fully physically modelled materials. Watch Disney animated movies (or really any high-budget animated movie), notice that no matter how stylised it gets, the lighting is always as realistic as possible, or if the visuals are really trippy, still grounded in the usual physics, it's just the materials and geometry that get twisted in fun ways. Humans have a really good feel for lighting, so you want that to be top-notch. Now that we've practically achieved real-time physically-based lighting calculations, I'm seeing lots of games opt for a less realistic style of materials. I think the oppressive drive towards realism was a necessary step to build the tech that will allow for real artistry. You can cheat and take shortcuts as much as you want, but there is no substitute for having a real solid base for lighting and I'm pretty excited to see what will come out in the coming years.
- mstade 10y ago
  It really was a distinct shift, wasn't it? And you could feel it then too, it's not like you have to look back 20 years later and go "yeah you know what, that probably was a pivotal moment" – it was palpable right then and there. Quake, as it turns out, was a really great name in more was than one. Me and some friends who played a lot together back in the day, some of us belonging to the same clans, are doing a re-union LAN later this summer as a kind of celebration. Can't wait! :o)
  - nailer 10y ago
    The atmosphere still exists when you look at shots today - I think it's mainly the lighting: http://static1.squarespace.com/static/566d855a841abafcc8ed19c4/576a68059de4bbf43633a24c/576a6808d482e96c76827deb/1466591242129/Q11.jpg http://static1.squarespace.com/static/566d855a841abafcc8ed19...
    - mikekchar 10y ago
      I suffer from poor vision, but surely I can't be the only one... there is no lighting in those pictures. It's black. I'm tempted to say it's so black you ask yourself how much more black could it be... Well, a little more black, but not much. I never played quake because I literally couldn't see it. I always wondered what it looked like to people who liked it.
      - Kristine1975 10y ago
        Apparently you can set the screen brightness in Quake's console by assigning a value to the variable "gamma": Less than 1 is brighter, more than 1 is darker: http://www.quakewiki.net/archives/console/commands/quake.html http://www.quakewiki.net/archives/console/commands/quake.htm...
      - nailer 10y ago
        I closed the curtains, so the only light was coming from the monitor. I think id should have told people do do that too.
  - 10y ago
daurnimator 10y ago
Dopefish lives....
ConnorG 10y ago
Was really expecting a longer post. Still pretty interesting though. PS Really happy Romero set his URL like that.
bluedino 10y ago
I remember when QTest hit the internet, it was beta of sorts to help test network play (and the whole engine, I guess). Even though it was only 3 levels, I was blown away by the lighting of the players weapon when you rotated, the SVGA modes... Did they release screenshots in 320x200 because that was the lowest common denominator resolution? Windows 95 was out at the time so I know people would have been able to view 640x480x256 screenshots.
- rangibaby 10y ago
  TFA says they were taken at 320x200, the same resolution as DOOM. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_13h https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_13h /E it's also one of the default resolutions of Quake. I mis-remembered Quake as requiring SVGA. https://github.com/id-Software/Quake/blob/master/WinQuake/data/TECHINFO.TXT https://github.com/id-Software/Quake/blob/master/WinQuake/da...
- joakleaf 10y ago
  Quake was build for 320x200 (VGA) as primary resolution target. I think, they initially wanted to release it for high powered 486s (66 Mhz or higher), where VGA was really the only option. The perspective correct texture mapping used a divide per 8 pixels, and this required a high-powered 486. In the end they more or less dropped 486 support, because they did perspective mapping using the FPU, which allowed for parallel processing of pixel output and the perspective divide on the Pentium (averaging just a few clock cycles per pixel), but caused slower processing on the 486DX which had a much slower FPU. I still preferred VGA over SVGA on my Pentium 133Mhz, because it was significantly more smooth.
  - sspiff 10y ago
    VGA was 640x480, not 320x200. 320x200 didn't have an acronym I can recall. SVGA was 800x600.
    - joakleaf 10y ago
      256 color VGA mode 13h was certainly 320x200. I agree it is wrong to call it "VGA", as the VGA (Video Graphics Adapter) was able to display graphics in a variety of resolutions. The standard resolution used for games was the 256 color 320x200. VGA allowed a couple of other non-documented and harder to achieve resolutions in 256 color, but this was the standard one, and also Quake's default mode. 640x480 was 16 color. Standard text-mode VGA was 80x25 characters of 9×16 pixels for a total of 720x400 pixels. SVGA was even more diffusely defined, as different vendors supported different resolutions.
kwijibob 10y ago
I remember being on the main irc channel when both qtest and the quake 1 official shareware was released. It was absolute insanity and great fun. Such an exciting time.
- wj 10y ago
  Yup. I believe it was EFNET #doom and I remember the release was delayed at least a few hours while they were uploading it to their server. I think I stayed up just long enough to start the download which probably took all night on my 56k modem. Also, I recall the main news site covering it had a brick background but cannot remember the name.
cm3 10y ago
This and Unreal were the last great software rendered 3d game engines before GPUs became mainstream. EDIT: I should have mentioned the BUILD engine too, written single-handedly by one developer for Duke Nukem 3D.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  And i find it curious how both those engines seems to have more flexiblity in modding than current ones. Maybe because these days you can't get away with a CLI compiler and some freeware to make "total conversions".
  - BugsBunnySan 10y ago
    Maybe it's a bit the complexity of todays game engines, but I suspect that also, If you give people that much freedom, the publishers and other DRM-zealots will freak out, since then people will easily build their own servers and such...
    - vvanders 10y ago
      Yup, it's a bit like trying to build a static HTML page with the full AWS stack. There's this incredibly high cost curve for assets. Back about 6 years ago the dev:art ratio was about 1:10 and I'm going to guess it's even higher these days. That's partially also why you see pixel art style thrive in the indie game space. It's the right combination of low production overhead that can still convey a large amount of information/style.
      - animal531 10y ago
        Yeah, 3d is also geometrically (excuse the pun) more difficult to pull off than 2d. Nevermind good looking 3d, animation etc.
  - pearle 10y ago
    The Creation engine by Bethesda is still highly mod friendly. For example, there is a fan-made total conversion mod being created for TES V: Skyrim that is a remake of TES III: Morrowind [1]. Also, the SureAI team is creating Enderal, a total conversion mod in a completely different setting [2]. [1] http://tesrenewal.com/blog/blog-post-march http://tesrenewal.com/blog/blog-post-march [2] http://sureai.net/games/enderal/?lang=en http://sureai.net/games/enderal/?lang=en
revelation 10y ago
Why are the screens so incredibly dark? Was the real game like this? I honestly can't remember.
- rcarmo 10y ago
  The graphics cards of the day didn't have gamma correction, for starters. Plus phosphor had an entirely different response curve. :)
  - Asooka 10y ago
    I'm sure that by the time Quake came out gamma of 2.2 was already standard.
- ekekekekekekl 10y ago
  The game was dark. These (doom, quake) were 256-color games which needed to burn substantial portions of the available palette just to facilitate shading and shadows atop colored textures. The dreary look of the game is somewhat forced by the limitations of VGA.
  - Kristine1975 10y ago
    I don't think that's true. Doom also used 256 colors with the same technique for shading and was much more colorful and brighter. In some ways Quake started the "real is brown" trend. That's not to say its visual design isn't really good, though!
    - ekekekekekekl 10y ago
      No, really, as these games progressed from the simpler wolf3d-style rendering where there was no attempt to shade things, which allowed a much more diverse set of colors, their colors became progressively less diverse. Just look at the Quake palette: https://quakewiki.org/wiki/Quake_palette https://quakewiki.org/wiki/Quake_palette Note how much of it is wasted on gradients, this is to get the more realistic 3d shading out of relatively few colors. Of course they made some choices in designing Quake to better position itself for a successful result working within these limitations, but it's the limitations forcing their hand.
wodenokoto 10y ago
Compared to everyone else here, my impression of quake back in the day was quite different. Back then I honestly couldn't appreciate the added 3D, but I found the art direction beyond boring, especially compared to the vibrant, changing and funny environments in Duke Nukem 3D. I found quake incredibly uninspiring and stuck with Duke for a long time. Today I can appreciate how much more advanced quake is. Does anybody know why it was called quake instead of doom 3?
- ajuc 10y ago
  I remember reading it was supposed to be an RPG game where you run around with melee weapons. It turned into almost doom eventually.
- noonat 10y ago
  The earliest concepts for the game were quite different than Doom. You were supposed to be playing a Thor-like character named Quake, who wielded a giant hammer.
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    Stomping the ground to cause Quakes ?
    - frenchie14 10y ago
      The name Quake came from Carmack's D&D character, who was an inspiration for the original game design
- agumonkey 10y ago
  I was weirded off by Quake in both bad and good ways. It was between Doom colorful gore and Hexen pale gothism. The 3D made texture a little bit too simple too. But it was a nice alternate reality to dive into. More like a feverish absurd dream.
- pasquinelli 10y ago
  i thought the atmosphere was great, in large part due to the soundtrack. honestly, the soundtrack was my favorite part of the game. i still listen to it every now and again.
HannibalLecter 10y ago
Thunderwalker CTF peeps, report in!
ComodoHacker 10y ago
Is there a modern engine with hi-res support capable of running Q1 and Q2 WADs?
- anc84 10y ago
  http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/download.htm http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/download.htm or http://fte.triptohell.info/ftedownloads/experimental http://fte.triptohell.info/ftedownloads/experimental seem to be recommended elsewhere.
- zanny 10y ago
  For Quake 1 its Darkplaces[1] or Quakespasm[2] (the former emphasizes more features, but has been dead for some years, the later is meant to be a more honest upgrade). There are HD texture packs like Quake HD[3] and Epsilon[4] on moddb that work with either. All HD modpacks for both games are just like any mappack. For Quake 2 I use Yamagi[5], but there is also KMQuake2[6] which is like Darkplaces from Quake 1. For HRT packs the only one I know of / have used is Berserker[7]. I think all those moddb packages are prebundled with Windows executables. You can just take the data directories and use them with your engine of choice. [1]https://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/ https://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/ [2]http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/ http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/ [3]http://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-hd-pack-guide http://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-hd-pack-guide [4]http://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-epsilon-build http://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-epsilon-build [5]http://www.yamagi.org/quake2/ http://www.yamagi.org/quake2/ [6]http://www.markshan.com/knightmare/ http://www.markshan.com/knightmare/ [7]http://www.moddb.com/mods/berserkerquake2 http://www.moddb.com/mods/berserkerquake2
  - ComodoHacker 10y ago
    Oh, thank you! I'll try them all.
- heeen2 10y ago
  if you want to play online http://ezquake.sourceforge.net/ http://ezquake.sourceforge.net/ server list https://www.quakeservers.net/quakeworld/servers/so=8/ https://www.quakeservers.net/quakeworld/servers/so=8/
JoeAltmaier 10y ago
My family played way, way too much Quake. One son played it thru entirely with 1 health, using only a laptop with scratchpad (no mouse) just to prove it could be done. Had to cheat - but only because there were some health packs in doorways that couldn't be avoided, so he went thru, then cheated to set his health back to 1.
- JTon 10y ago
  Awesome story. I hope he played it on the hardest difficulty too :P Er.. but you do mean using a touchpad right? Unless a scartchpad is something different?
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    Of course! Most games must be played on hardest difficulty. In fact when very young (6-8) the boys liked to play only in God Mode - the young are very conservative. I challenged them: win level 1 of Descent I at Insane level, and I would buy Descent II. Got a call at work 2 days later! And they never resorted to God Mode again.
- mrob 10y ago
  How did he get past the E2M5 underwater elevator ride with the forced drowning damage? I know you can skip it by immediately running away from the button and getting stuck, but that also causes damage.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
excalibur 10y ago
1996 was definitely a landmark year for 3D gaming. http://fortune.com/2016/06/23/nintendo-64-20-years-old/ http://fortune.com/2016/06/23/nintendo-64-20-years-old/
rayvd 10y ago
LAN parties!
strictnein 10y ago
> "I'm going to share a document created by Joost Shuur" Didn't Joost have a Quake site? I feel like he did. Time to reminisce: Ran my own Quake levels site back in the day. Meccaworld.com/quake with a lot of the files hosted at quakemecca.simplenet.com because simplenet offered "unlimited" bandwidth. (http://web.archive.org/web/19970217185506/http://meccaworld.com/quake/ http://web.archive.org/web/19970217185506/http://meccaworld.... ) If you're looking for some quality Single and Multiplayer Quake levels, most of the links work still (thanks to the magical way way back machine). edit: to answer my question, yes - http://home.pages.de/~jschuur/ http://home.pages.de/~jschuur/
- kolanos 10y ago
  Former webmaster of QLEN (Quake Level Editing News) on PlanetQuake here.waves
- pimlottc 10y ago
  Yep, Joost ("rhymes with toast") Shuur started Aftershock, the first major Quake news site, during the pre-release days. Other sites like Blue's, Redwood's and sCaryname's took over after the game was actually released. Sometime after that, Joost, ran a directory (remember those?) of Quake-related sites called Slipgate Central for a while. Here's an old interview with him at the time: https://www.quaddicted.com/webarchive/hosted.planetquake.gamespy.com/spq2/quake1/int_joos.htm https://www.quaddicted.com/webarchive/hosted.planetquake.gam... (Man, sure brings back a lot of memories, and not just of Quake; the 'net sure was a different place back then...)
qrybam 10y ago
Everything from Wolf3d to Quake3 has a special place in our household's hearts. My dad brought the original iD games to mine and my sister's attention when we were still kids. The first time we played co-op Doom as a family on LAN is one of those memories that's been seared onto my brain - taking down a Cyberdemon together was too much fun! Quake had a similar impact because that's when we migrated from keyboard to mouse for looking around - given it was truly 3D and all. But I have to say that the Cyberdemon > Shambler, despite how cuddly the Shambler looked. Happy Birthday Quake!
- Kristine1975 10y ago
  >that's when we migrated from keyboard to mouse for looking around I did one year earlier in Descent ;-)
  - qrybam 10y ago
    Hadn't made that leap at that point. I was still using A/Z for looking up/down in Descent - also a great game btw.
  - DiabloD3 10y ago
    Descent and Descent II is why I owned a flightstick. Ahh, multiplayer was so much fun.
    - talmand 10y ago
      Descent is why I broke a flightstick hat switch. Customer service knew what was up as soon as I described the problem.
WA 10y ago
The obligatory mention: If you haven't yet, go ahead and read Masters of Doom. It's the story of id Software, really well written and worth your time.
- angersock 10y ago
  Seconding this. Master of Doom was one of the reads that inspired me to be interested in startups.
balls187 10y ago
I still remember playing multiplayer deathmatch (more than 1v1) over modem, with ~200 ping, and still feeling how crazy responsive it was. That was as transformative of an experience much like seeing SuperMario 64 for the first time. Quake multiplayer was where I had to abandoned playing "closed style" on a keyboard and instead adopt the WASD mouse and Keyboard style. Also remember when GameSpy was QSpy, and PlanetQuake was just a fan site? And the fun of playing Threewave CTF with the grappling hook.
- malbs 10y ago
  I reckon you're talking about QuakeWorld. Because Quake on a 200+ ping was ice-skate-mode.
  - balls187 10y ago
    I can't recall exactly when I made the switch to Quakeworld, but I'm pretty sure when I first fired up Quake1 over modem, it was still quite responsive even with the original netcode.
malbs 10y ago
I bought Doom before I owned a PC. I bought the game, and sat it on my bedside while I saved up the money to buy a PC to play the game. I would go to the retail stores and install Doom on the demo PCs there just so I could play it. Finally I had enough money for a PC to play Doom, my brother and I played Doom for a couple of years on our home lan. I played dialup doom with friends. I played Doom with the mouse and keyboard because it was the only easy way to strafe kill someone "easily". and then Quake came out.... I went to a friends place and they were playing DM. I hadn't even heard of Quake. I was like "What is this game" "Oh its Quake, by those guys who made Doom". I had to get it. I had a 486. Wasn't ever going to fly. It ran like shit. You couldn't run out and buy a AMD cpu to play it on either because of the FPU. You had to have an Intel. So I bought a second hand Pentium 60, and off I went! I still remember the day I got the Pentium 60 and 8mb of ram and now I could also run Windows 95 too. Quake was a genre changing game, probably one of the most influential games ever. id loved to make modifiable games, and Doom had quite a solid mod community, but Quake was really the Internet's child. The Quake servers that came online initially were dark foreboding places for anyone not on a fixed line connection. You'd be dead before you knew what happened, so then Carmack created QuakeWorld, with the predictive movement, and suddenly online gaming FPS on a modem was a whole new experience. So many game sites spawned from the advent of Quake that are still around today. Entire media companies popped up around it. People have mentioned in other threads why didn't more people use SVGA mode. The answer is because no computer could run it at an acceptable speed. What came of that? GLQuake. Then people were buying shitty (not at the time!) Voodoo 3dfx cards to play GLQuake, with the broken GL implementation Glide, and thus the video card arms race was born. I got my first real job because of my affiliations with the Quake community. My first true love (who I met through Quake), "Internet friends" that I made playing QuakeWorld that I am still friends with today. I don't believe any other game has had anywhere near as much influence on my life, or gaming in general.
- mstade 10y ago
  I was fortunate and privileged enough to have a father who very much liked computers and made sure we always had them, even though he's never been all that savvy. So while I never had difficulty in procuring either the hardware or the software, I do very much recognize pretty much all the rest of your writing – down to the first real job and everything. I'm still very much friends with my old clan members today. Feeling very nostalgic right about now! I remember as well when QW came out and my friends would refuse to play it, considering it cheating. So they only ever played LANs, or university connections – since some were studying at the time – which were usually super fast. (At the time, if nothing else.) So many great memories.
smcnally 10y ago
Wasn't a big player 20 years ago though many colleagues and employees were -- many occasions finding the "LAN guys" holed-up in the darkened data center at Prodigy frag-festing. Been playing OpenArena for the past several months. It's a lot of fun, and there are a lot of available mods. http://openarena.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page http://openarena.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
russdill 10y ago
So weird seeing these screenshots again. I remember seeing these 20 years ago when they were first released.
haddr 10y ago
Quake multiplayer was a really big thing! I remember playing it on some 486 PCs, now unimaginable, but then it was really great! There was even a ~700KB (!) version, stripped down to the most necesary: TCP/IP multiplayer with only 1 level, but man, you could bring it to the classroom on a 1,44MB floppy!
xufi 10y ago
I was pretty young to play the original Quake but when I got around to play with it and DOom 95 (in the mid 2000s ), I realized what a amazing game it was and was hooked

213 points by miiiiiike 10y ago

aidos 10y ago

Before I purchased the box / CD I was given a copy of the demo by a friend. He zipped it across 8 floppy disks and it took 2 painful attempts to get the zipping process to work without corruption. Those were the days!

rndmio 10y ago

I know there's a lot of nostalgia involved, but in my mind this was a pivotal moment in gaming. The step up from Doom (and alikes) to Quake was huge. Not to mention how well designed and balanced the game was. I wasted so many hours playing it originally and even now it still thrills, in a way I just haven't had for a long time.

zorked 10y ago
That was a beautiful moment in time when the technology was starting to reach high levels of realism but the aesthetic of realism still hadn't become the oppressive norm of mainstream gaming.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  And then we got WoW and now things are tilting back towards cartoons...
  - jerf 10y ago
    Yeah, but that's still progress in a way, progress away from the false goal of unconditional realism. Cartoons are generally cheaper, which means we can have more things, and also has more useful design space. Something like TF2-style "all characters must have distinctive silhouettes" is much harder if you're also trying to do total realism, because you end up so much more constrained with where the distinctiveness can be. (Color? No, nobody's running around on the battlefield in bright red. Nobody's wearing crazy hats or has two-foot-tall bouncing hair. A lot of guns look a lot like other guns. etc.)
    - Kristine1975 10y ago
      Here's a presentation by Valve about the visual design of Team Fortress 2: http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/NPAR07_IllustrativeRenderingInTeamFortress2.pdf http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/NPAR07_Illust... And here's the paper for it: http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2013/02/NPAR07_IllustrativeRenderingInTeamFortress2.pdf http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2013/02/NPAR07_Illu...
    - zanny 10y ago
      It is not even just about the cost to produce. Realist games sacrifice gameplay itself, because if you are on the bleeding edge of fidelity you cannot have a lot of useful gamey aspects (speed, object density, environment complexity, etc). You can put more non-interactive polygons on the screen but only in exchange for gameplay quality.
      - digi_owl 10y ago
        Amen. I recently tried playing a MMORPG that seems to throw a insane polygon count at the player models (boob physics galore). End result is that my computer screams for mercy any time i set foot in a spawn zone.
      - animal531 10y ago
        I think there's room for both, and it's not that limiting. An Uncharted 4 looks amazing and has all the elements you describe, but is obviously a lot harder to implement than an Overwatch (which is great looking in a cartoon fashion, with vibrant colours etc.)
    - Nullabillity 10y ago
      > Nobody's wearing crazy hats or has two-foot-tall bouncing hair. Clearly you've never played TF2.
      - jerf 10y ago
        Read harder.
  - baldfat 10y ago
    Things run faster when not realistic and are cheaper to produce (Normally) I personally prefer the art style approach over trying to make it realistic/technical approach by making realistic representation as if it was real life. TF 2 > Crisis This is a BIG why the Indie Game movemnet
  - HannibalLecter 10y ago
    WoW sucks now. It was great back in TBC but now? It's nothing more than a tech-improved facebook game. Garbage. If you want something awesome check out Path of Exile. Free to play, too. It's like what Diablo 3 should have been but couldn't because Bliz don't know how to gameplay design anymore.
- zanny 10y ago
  I don't know if this was intentional, but eevee just made a blog post about this yesterday: https://eev.ee/blog/2016/06/22/graphical-fidelity-is-ruining-video-games/ https://eev.ee/blog/2016/06/22/graphical-fidelity-is-ruining... Probably to coincide with the anniversary.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Oddly one of the more interesting quake 2 mods i played around with was Brazen. It made the Quake 2 weapons have realistic ammo management and carrying capacity. The most intriguing part was perhaps that you could transfer ammo between magazines, and empty ones was thrown into the game world. The developer would go on to make a variant of this that was compatible with Action Quake, with a bit of Matrix influence thrown in (you could climb buildings by "wall jumping").
  - rndmio 10y ago
    That's a great article that really articulates some of the feelings I'd had towards modern games, especially FPSs.
  - Kristine1975 10y ago
    It was/is being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11959444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11959444
- munificent 10y ago
  I've been really enjoying Minecraft lately because it bucks that trend for all of the right reasons. All of its graphical simplicity both helps make the game world more modifiable, and encourages users to use their imagination to interpret the world, just like simple LEGO blocks do.
- noobermin 10y ago
  It's not just the graphics, it was gameplay too. Take a COD game and contrast that to a quake 3 1v1. No comparison. Of course, IMAO.
- Asooka 10y ago
  I know what you mean, but as someone who works on rendering tech (for CG not for games, but games are more and more using the same tech), I would like to clarify something. You do want realism in your graphics. You want realism in the way light is calculated, you want realism in the way materials interact, in short you want fully physically modelled materials. Watch Disney animated movies (or really any high-budget animated movie), notice that no matter how stylised it gets, the lighting is always as realistic as possible, or if the visuals are really trippy, still grounded in the usual physics, it's just the materials and geometry that get twisted in fun ways. Humans have a really good feel for lighting, so you want that to be top-notch. Now that we've practically achieved real-time physically-based lighting calculations, I'm seeing lots of games opt for a less realistic style of materials. I think the oppressive drive towards realism was a necessary step to build the tech that will allow for real artistry. You can cheat and take shortcuts as much as you want, but there is no substitute for having a real solid base for lighting and I'm pretty excited to see what will come out in the coming years.
mstade 10y ago
It really was a distinct shift, wasn't it? And you could feel it then too, it's not like you have to look back 20 years later and go "yeah you know what, that probably was a pivotal moment" – it was palpable right then and there. Quake, as it turns out, was a really great name in more was than one. Me and some friends who played a lot together back in the day, some of us belonging to the same clans, are doing a re-union LAN later this summer as a kind of celebration. Can't wait! :o)
- nailer 10y ago
  The atmosphere still exists when you look at shots today - I think it's mainly the lighting: http://static1.squarespace.com/static/566d855a841abafcc8ed19c4/576a68059de4bbf43633a24c/576a6808d482e96c76827deb/1466591242129/Q11.jpg http://static1.squarespace.com/static/566d855a841abafcc8ed19...
  - mikekchar 10y ago
    I suffer from poor vision, but surely I can't be the only one... there is no lighting in those pictures. It's black. I'm tempted to say it's so black you ask yourself how much more black could it be... Well, a little more black, but not much. I never played quake because I literally couldn't see it. I always wondered what it looked like to people who liked it.
    - Kristine1975 10y ago
      Apparently you can set the screen brightness in Quake's console by assigning a value to the variable "gamma": Less than 1 is brighter, more than 1 is darker: http://www.quakewiki.net/archives/console/commands/quake.html http://www.quakewiki.net/archives/console/commands/quake.htm...
    - nailer 10y ago
      I closed the curtains, so the only light was coming from the monitor. I think id should have told people do do that too.
- 10y ago

daurnimator 10y ago

Dopefish lives....

ConnorG 10y ago

Was really expecting a longer post. Still pretty interesting though. PS Really happy Romero set his URL like that.

bluedino 10y ago

I remember when QTest hit the internet, it was beta of sorts to help test network play (and the whole engine, I guess). Even though it was only 3 levels, I was blown away by the lighting of the players weapon when you rotated, the SVGA modes... Did they release screenshots in 320x200 because that was the lowest common denominator resolution? Windows 95 was out at the time so I know people would have been able to view 640x480x256 screenshots.

rangibaby 10y ago
TFA says they were taken at 320x200, the same resolution as DOOM. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_13h https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_13h /E it's also one of the default resolutions of Quake. I mis-remembered Quake as requiring SVGA. https://github.com/id-Software/Quake/blob/master/WinQuake/data/TECHINFO.TXT https://github.com/id-Software/Quake/blob/master/WinQuake/da...
joakleaf 10y ago
Quake was build for 320x200 (VGA) as primary resolution target. I think, they initially wanted to release it for high powered 486s (66 Mhz or higher), where VGA was really the only option. The perspective correct texture mapping used a divide per 8 pixels, and this required a high-powered 486. In the end they more or less dropped 486 support, because they did perspective mapping using the FPU, which allowed for parallel processing of pixel output and the perspective divide on the Pentium (averaging just a few clock cycles per pixel), but caused slower processing on the 486DX which had a much slower FPU. I still preferred VGA over SVGA on my Pentium 133Mhz, because it was significantly more smooth.
- sspiff 10y ago
  VGA was 640x480, not 320x200. 320x200 didn't have an acronym I can recall. SVGA was 800x600.
  - joakleaf 10y ago
    256 color VGA mode 13h was certainly 320x200. I agree it is wrong to call it "VGA", as the VGA (Video Graphics Adapter) was able to display graphics in a variety of resolutions. The standard resolution used for games was the 256 color 320x200. VGA allowed a couple of other non-documented and harder to achieve resolutions in 256 color, but this was the standard one, and also Quake's default mode. 640x480 was 16 color. Standard text-mode VGA was 80x25 characters of 9×16 pixels for a total of 720x400 pixels. SVGA was even more diffusely defined, as different vendors supported different resolutions.

kwijibob 10y ago

I remember being on the main irc channel when both qtest and the quake 1 official shareware was released. It was absolute insanity and great fun. Such an exciting time.

wj 10y ago
Yup. I believe it was EFNET #doom and I remember the release was delayed at least a few hours while they were uploading it to their server. I think I stayed up just long enough to start the download which probably took all night on my 56k modem. Also, I recall the main news site covering it had a brick background but cannot remember the name.

cm3 10y ago

This and Unreal were the last great software rendered 3d game engines before GPUs became mainstream. EDIT: I should have mentioned the BUILD engine too, written single-handedly by one developer for Duke Nukem 3D.

digi_owl 10y ago
And i find it curious how both those engines seems to have more flexiblity in modding than current ones. Maybe because these days you can't get away with a CLI compiler and some freeware to make "total conversions".
- BugsBunnySan 10y ago
  Maybe it's a bit the complexity of todays game engines, but I suspect that also, If you give people that much freedom, the publishers and other DRM-zealots will freak out, since then people will easily build their own servers and such...
  - vvanders 10y ago
    Yup, it's a bit like trying to build a static HTML page with the full AWS stack. There's this incredibly high cost curve for assets. Back about 6 years ago the dev:art ratio was about 1:10 and I'm going to guess it's even higher these days. That's partially also why you see pixel art style thrive in the indie game space. It's the right combination of low production overhead that can still convey a large amount of information/style.
    - animal531 10y ago
      Yeah, 3d is also geometrically (excuse the pun) more difficult to pull off than 2d. Nevermind good looking 3d, animation etc.
- pearle 10y ago
  The Creation engine by Bethesda is still highly mod friendly. For example, there is a fan-made total conversion mod being created for TES V: Skyrim that is a remake of TES III: Morrowind [1]. Also, the SureAI team is creating Enderal, a total conversion mod in a completely different setting [2]. [1] http://tesrenewal.com/blog/blog-post-march http://tesrenewal.com/blog/blog-post-march [2] http://sureai.net/games/enderal/?lang=en http://sureai.net/games/enderal/?lang=en

revelation 10y ago

Why are the screens so incredibly dark? Was the real game like this? I honestly can't remember.

rcarmo 10y ago
The graphics cards of the day didn't have gamma correction, for starters. Plus phosphor had an entirely different response curve. :)
- Asooka 10y ago
  I'm sure that by the time Quake came out gamma of 2.2 was already standard.
ekekekekekekl 10y ago
The game was dark. These (doom, quake) were 256-color games which needed to burn substantial portions of the available palette just to facilitate shading and shadows atop colored textures. The dreary look of the game is somewhat forced by the limitations of VGA.
- Kristine1975 10y ago
  I don't think that's true. Doom also used 256 colors with the same technique for shading and was much more colorful and brighter. In some ways Quake started the "real is brown" trend. That's not to say its visual design isn't really good, though!
  - ekekekekekekl 10y ago
    No, really, as these games progressed from the simpler wolf3d-style rendering where there was no attempt to shade things, which allowed a much more diverse set of colors, their colors became progressively less diverse. Just look at the Quake palette: https://quakewiki.org/wiki/Quake_palette https://quakewiki.org/wiki/Quake_palette Note how much of it is wasted on gradients, this is to get the more realistic 3d shading out of relatively few colors. Of course they made some choices in designing Quake to better position itself for a successful result working within these limitations, but it's the limitations forcing their hand.

wodenokoto 10y ago

Compared to everyone else here, my impression of quake back in the day was quite different. Back then I honestly couldn't appreciate the added 3D, but I found the art direction beyond boring, especially compared to the vibrant, changing and funny environments in Duke Nukem 3D. I found quake incredibly uninspiring and stuck with Duke for a long time. Today I can appreciate how much more advanced quake is. Does anybody know why it was called quake instead of doom 3?

ajuc 10y ago
I remember reading it was supposed to be an RPG game where you run around with melee weapons. It turned into almost doom eventually.
noonat 10y ago
The earliest concepts for the game were quite different than Doom. You were supposed to be playing a Thor-like character named Quake, who wielded a giant hammer.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Stomping the ground to cause Quakes ?
  - frenchie14 10y ago
    The name Quake came from Carmack's D&D character, who was an inspiration for the original game design
agumonkey 10y ago
I was weirded off by Quake in both bad and good ways. It was between Doom colorful gore and Hexen pale gothism. The 3D made texture a little bit too simple too. But it was a nice alternate reality to dive into. More like a feverish absurd dream.
pasquinelli 10y ago
i thought the atmosphere was great, in large part due to the soundtrack. honestly, the soundtrack was my favorite part of the game. i still listen to it every now and again.

HannibalLecter 10y ago

Thunderwalker CTF peeps, report in!

ComodoHacker 10y ago

Is there a modern engine with hi-res support capable of running Q1 and Q2 WADs?

anc84 10y ago
http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/download.htm http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/download.htm or http://fte.triptohell.info/ftedownloads/experimental http://fte.triptohell.info/ftedownloads/experimental seem to be recommended elsewhere.
zanny 10y ago
For Quake 1 its Darkplaces[1] or Quakespasm[2] (the former emphasizes more features, but has been dead for some years, the later is meant to be a more honest upgrade). There are HD texture packs like Quake HD[3] and Epsilon[4] on moddb that work with either. All HD modpacks for both games are just like any mappack. For Quake 2 I use Yamagi[5], but there is also KMQuake2[6] which is like Darkplaces from Quake 1. For HRT packs the only one I know of / have used is Berserker[7]. I think all those moddb packages are prebundled with Windows executables. You can just take the data directories and use them with your engine of choice. [1]https://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/ https://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/ [2]http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/ http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/ [3]http://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-hd-pack-guide http://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-hd-pack-guide [4]http://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-epsilon-build http://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-epsilon-build [5]http://www.yamagi.org/quake2/ http://www.yamagi.org/quake2/ [6]http://www.markshan.com/knightmare/ http://www.markshan.com/knightmare/ [7]http://www.moddb.com/mods/berserkerquake2 http://www.moddb.com/mods/berserkerquake2
- ComodoHacker 10y ago
  Oh, thank you! I'll try them all.
heeen2 10y ago
if you want to play online http://ezquake.sourceforge.net/ http://ezquake.sourceforge.net/ server list https://www.quakeservers.net/quakeworld/servers/so=8/ https://www.quakeservers.net/quakeworld/servers/so=8/

JoeAltmaier 10y ago

My family played way, way too much Quake. One son played it thru entirely with 1 health, using only a laptop with scratchpad (no mouse) just to prove it could be done. Had to cheat - but only because there were some health packs in doorways that couldn't be avoided, so he went thru, then cheated to set his health back to 1.

JTon 10y ago
Awesome story. I hope he played it on the hardest difficulty too :P Er.. but you do mean using a touchpad right? Unless a scartchpad is something different?
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  Of course! Most games must be played on hardest difficulty. In fact when very young (6-8) the boys liked to play only in God Mode - the young are very conservative. I challenged them: win level 1 of Descent I at Insane level, and I would buy Descent II. Got a call at work 2 days later! And they never resorted to God Mode again.
mrob 10y ago
How did he get past the E2M5 underwater elevator ride with the forced drowning damage? I know you can skip it by immediately running away from the button and getting stuck, but that also causes damage.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

excalibur 10y ago

1996 was definitely a landmark year for 3D gaming. http://fortune.com/2016/06/23/nintendo-64-20-years-old/ http://fortune.com/2016/06/23/nintendo-64-20-years-old/

rayvd 10y ago

LAN parties!

strictnein 10y ago

> "I'm going to share a document created by Joost Shuur" Didn't Joost have a Quake site? I feel like he did. Time to reminisce: Ran my own Quake levels site back in the day. Meccaworld.com/quake with a lot of the files hosted at quakemecca.simplenet.com because simplenet offered "unlimited" bandwidth. (http://web.archive.org/web/19970217185506/http://meccaworld.com/quake/ http://web.archive.org/web/19970217185506/http://meccaworld.... ) If you're looking for some quality Single and Multiplayer Quake levels, most of the links work still (thanks to the magical way way back machine). edit: to answer my question, yes - http://home.pages.de/~jschuur/ http://home.pages.de/~jschuur/

kolanos 10y ago
Former webmaster of QLEN (Quake Level Editing News) on PlanetQuake here.waves
pimlottc 10y ago
Yep, Joost ("rhymes with toast") Shuur started Aftershock, the first major Quake news site, during the pre-release days. Other sites like Blue's, Redwood's and sCaryname's took over after the game was actually released. Sometime after that, Joost, ran a directory (remember those?) of Quake-related sites called Slipgate Central for a while. Here's an old interview with him at the time: https://www.quaddicted.com/webarchive/hosted.planetquake.gamespy.com/spq2/quake1/int_joos.htm https://www.quaddicted.com/webarchive/hosted.planetquake.gam... (Man, sure brings back a lot of memories, and not just of Quake; the 'net sure was a different place back then...)

qrybam 10y ago

Everything from Wolf3d to Quake3 has a special place in our household's hearts. My dad brought the original iD games to mine and my sister's attention when we were still kids. The first time we played co-op Doom as a family on LAN is one of those memories that's been seared onto my brain - taking down a Cyberdemon together was too much fun! Quake had a similar impact because that's when we migrated from keyboard to mouse for looking around - given it was truly 3D and all. But I have to say that the Cyberdemon > Shambler, despite how cuddly the Shambler looked. Happy Birthday Quake!

Kristine1975 10y ago
>that's when we migrated from keyboard to mouse for looking around I did one year earlier in Descent ;-)
- qrybam 10y ago
  Hadn't made that leap at that point. I was still using A/Z for looking up/down in Descent - also a great game btw.
- DiabloD3 10y ago
  Descent and Descent II is why I owned a flightstick. Ahh, multiplayer was so much fun.
  - talmand 10y ago
    Descent is why I broke a flightstick hat switch. Customer service knew what was up as soon as I described the problem.

WA 10y ago

The obligatory mention: If you haven't yet, go ahead and read Masters of Doom. It's the story of id Software, really well written and worth your time.

angersock 10y ago
Seconding this. Master of Doom was one of the reads that inspired me to be interested in startups.

balls187 10y ago

I still remember playing multiplayer deathmatch (more than 1v1) over modem, with ~200 ping, and still feeling how crazy responsive it was. That was as transformative of an experience much like seeing SuperMario 64 for the first time. Quake multiplayer was where I had to abandoned playing "closed style" on a keyboard and instead adopt the WASD mouse and Keyboard style. Also remember when GameSpy was QSpy, and PlanetQuake was just a fan site? And the fun of playing Threewave CTF with the grappling hook.

malbs 10y ago
I reckon you're talking about QuakeWorld. Because Quake on a 200+ ping was ice-skate-mode.
- balls187 10y ago
  I can't recall exactly when I made the switch to Quakeworld, but I'm pretty sure when I first fired up Quake1 over modem, it was still quite responsive even with the original netcode.

malbs 10y ago

I bought Doom before I owned a PC. I bought the game, and sat it on my bedside while I saved up the money to buy a PC to play the game. I would go to the retail stores and install Doom on the demo PCs there just so I could play it. Finally I had enough money for a PC to play Doom, my brother and I played Doom for a couple of years on our home lan. I played dialup doom with friends. I played Doom with the mouse and keyboard because it was the only easy way to strafe kill someone "easily". and then Quake came out.... I went to a friends place and they were playing DM. I hadn't even heard of Quake. I was like "What is this game" "Oh its Quake, by those guys who made Doom". I had to get it. I had a 486. Wasn't ever going to fly. It ran like shit. You couldn't run out and buy a AMD cpu to play it on either because of the FPU. You had to have an Intel. So I bought a second hand Pentium 60, and off I went! I still remember the day I got the Pentium 60 and 8mb of ram and now I could also run Windows 95 too. Quake was a genre changing game, probably one of the most influential games ever. id loved to make modifiable games, and Doom had quite a solid mod community, but Quake was really the Internet's child. The Quake servers that came online initially were dark foreboding places for anyone not on a fixed line connection. You'd be dead before you knew what happened, so then Carmack created QuakeWorld, with the predictive movement, and suddenly online gaming FPS on a modem was a whole new experience. So many game sites spawned from the advent of Quake that are still around today. Entire media companies popped up around it. People have mentioned in other threads why didn't more people use SVGA mode. The answer is because no computer could run it at an acceptable speed. What came of that? GLQuake. Then people were buying shitty (not at the time!) Voodoo 3dfx cards to play GLQuake, with the broken GL implementation Glide, and thus the video card arms race was born. I got my first real job because of my affiliations with the Quake community. My first true love (who I met through Quake), "Internet friends" that I made playing QuakeWorld that I am still friends with today. I don't believe any other game has had anywhere near as much influence on my life, or gaming in general.

mstade 10y ago
I was fortunate and privileged enough to have a father who very much liked computers and made sure we always had them, even though he's never been all that savvy. So while I never had difficulty in procuring either the hardware or the software, I do very much recognize pretty much all the rest of your writing – down to the first real job and everything. I'm still very much friends with my old clan members today. Feeling very nostalgic right about now! I remember as well when QW came out and my friends would refuse to play it, considering it cheating. So they only ever played LANs, or university connections – since some were studying at the time – which were usually super fast. (At the time, if nothing else.) So many great memories.

smcnally 10y ago

Wasn't a big player 20 years ago though many colleagues and employees were -- many occasions finding the "LAN guys" holed-up in the darkened data center at Prodigy frag-festing. Been playing OpenArena for the past several months. It's a lot of fun, and there are a lot of available mods. http://openarena.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page http://openarena.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

russdill 10y ago

So weird seeing these screenshots again. I remember seeing these 20 years ago when they were first released.

haddr 10y ago

Quake multiplayer was a really big thing! I remember playing it on some 486 PCs, now unimaginable, but then it was really great! There was even a ~700KB (!) version, stripped down to the most necesary: TCP/IP multiplayer with only 1 level, but man, you could bring it to the classroom on a 1,44MB floppy!

xufi 10y ago

I was pretty young to play the original Quake but when I got around to play with it and DOom 95 (in the mid 2000s ), I realized what a amazing game it was and was hooked