It’s very rare that we celebrate the anniversary of a video game and when we do it’s usually because it either has a soft spot in our hearts due to some kind of nostalgia or it was a landmark title in an already established genre. We might look back fondly on a game like the original Tomb Raider in 1996 because it was a fantastic game that still manages to stand up today, even though the action-adventure genre was well established. While Halo is nothing new and realistically isn’t very special, it defined the first person shooter genre for a new generation and was the first truly successful title of that genre on consoles. Until then almost every other shooter had been a PC port. You could make the same case for Golden Eye on the N64. People do remember it fondly for the good times they had, and it is considered a success story, but it wasn’t anything new, unlike Halo. In the case of all these titles their genres were already well defined and while these titles all pushed the boundaries of technology at the time, none of what they did was new. So it’s a very rare occasion indeed that we can celebrate a game that not only helped define a genre but one that also managed to push it forward to where it’s influence can be felt twenty five years later in the most popular franchises as well as still being played today. That game is Quake.

For me playing Classic Quake, as it’s come to be called, online, for the first time at the dawn of online gaming was like doing heroine for the very first time. One game and I was addicted. Quake was fast, chaotic, fun as fuck, and I wanted more of it. One game of Free For All death match¹ and I was hooked. Before Quake it was fighting games like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter. After playing my first games of death match, I just couldn’t go back to playing offline with just my friends. It simply wasn’t the same. To say it was a life changing experience would not be an understatement. It changed the way I played games and the way I looked at them. Stories are still great, but nothing beats outsmarting another player. Consoles made me a gamer. Quake made me a PC Gamer and an online gamer.

Today we expect games to have a multiplayer component of some sort. Hell, some modern games are strictly multiplayer only. That wasn’t the case when Quake released. If Doom is credited with lighting up corporate LANs, Quake, with it fast and brutal multiplayer, lit up the internet and changed gaming. Remember, this was also at a time when most people were still on 56k dial up with Pentium processors and graphics cards were just beginning to emerge and certainly were not the norm. In fact, it was Quake, with its new lighting technologies and high polygon count, that made graphics cards a necessity.

Quake’s technological achievements are impressive but before we start with those let’s talk a little about the game itself. We can wax poetic over the single player campaign and while it’s a good game it isn’t terribly special. What sets Quake apart from other games at the time and what makes it such a pillar of modern gaming are really two things. Its graphics engine and its multiplayer component. Without either of these things we wouldn’t have modern gaming as we know it.

Quake’s single player campaign starts with you in a chamber with the various difficulty levels laid out before you. Walking through the Slipgate takes you to another room where you can choose your episode. This was typical of id shooters at the time. Quake, like Doom before it, consisted of four episodes. The difference this time was that each episode had its own flavor. From the zombified military base of the first episode, to medieval castles, and Lovecraftian halls. Unlike Doom each episode is distinct in and of itself. That said, the game maintains an air of deep, dark hallways, tight corridors, and monsters, like the Shambler, that will scare the bejeezus out of you. Collecting a rune at the end of each episode brought you closer to fighting the end boss, Shub-Niggurath, and saving the day for humanity. Like Doom and Wolfenstein, Quake isn’t much for story and that’s not a bad thing.

Speaking about the campaign, we would be remiss if we didn’t speak about the fantastic job Trent Reznor (Yes, that Trent Reznor) did with the soundtrack. The ambience that it creates for these dark hallways adds a whole other dimension to them. It at times subtle while at others disturbing. Often times it’s both. To quote Trent himself with the most apt description I’ve ever heard of it:

“it is not music, it’s textures and ambiences and whirling machine noises and stuff. We tried to make the most sinister, depressive, scary, frightening kind of thing […] It’s been fun.”

Trent also did the sound effects for the game. Again, he did such a wonderful job that all of these sounds are instantly recognizable to anyone who spent any amount of time with the game. The sound of that grenade will stay with me until the day I die.

However it’s in these levels that we get our first taste of what Quake did so right. It was the first game of its kind to be fully 3D. Where Doom and Wolfenstein enabled you to simply look and move left and right on X and Y axis, Quake gave us a Z axis. We now had the ability to look up and down. No longer were the levels simply two dimensional pathways as was the case with Wolfenstein, or, as was the case with Doom, a sort of 2.5D². Now we were able to truly climb, and the levels contained a verticality to them that Doom was missing. What this means is that puzzles could now be vertical as well. Finding a switch to open a door could now mean dropping in from above or swimming through a flooded pipe. Over or under in addition to the tried and true level design of simply going around or hiding it nearby.

We can’t talk about Quake without talking about the graphics engine. Trace any modern first person shooter and you’ll most likely end up at Quake. As I said above, Quake was the first game to go fully 3D. That means everything was fully rendered and was no longer just prerendered sprites. For the first time you could walk around a monster and see, literally, all of it. And this didn’t just stop at the enemies. Even weapon projectiles and explosions were fully rendered, three dimensional, polygonal, objects.

In 1996 these things alone would’ve been quite an impressive feat. But what good would all these polygons be without an impressive new lighting system to go with them? Quake was the first game to use light maps. Light maps are what enabled the levels to have these dark and creepy hallways. Previously rooms and hallways were essentially either lit or they weren’t. Yes, they could have torches and light sources to give the room a look and feel but there weren’t a lot of shadows or variance in that light. Sure you could have a sort of varying degree of light in a cave let’s say, but the result was mostly that of an artist’s work. It was by no means even close to natural. Think of it like a dimmer switch: the artist can set the room lighting to whatever they wanted but once it was set, it was set. Light maps changed that. By using these light maps, they could bring in an early version of dynamic lighting. Walking down a hallway that was well lit but with a gap in torches, the hallway could be darker in the places where there were no troches. It also allowed for projectiles and explosions to be light sources. Launching a rocket down a hallway now lit up the dark parts of it by casting light on the walls around it. Its techniques like this that would allow later games like Call of Duty and even Counter Strike 1.6 to have things like muzzle flash.

The graphics engine alone would be enough to cement Quake with a legacy in gaming, but id wasn’t quite done yet. When Quake launched, it launched with a multiplayer component. While it did work, it didn’t quite fit in with the emerging internet at the time. Quake’s multiplayer client was spec’d closer to Doom’s. Meaning it was built more for LANs and low latency connections which were mostly only available in corporate offices and universities at the time. What the team didn’t count on was that it would end up being wildly popular.

From Carmack’s .plan file 08/08/1996:

The big difference is in the net code. While I can remember and justify all of my decisions about networking from DOOM through Quake, the bottom line is that I was working with the wrong basic assumptions for doing a good internet game. My original design was targeted at Ok, I made a bad call. I have a T1 to my house, so I just wasn’t familliar with PPP life. I’m adressing it now.

The updated multiplayer component wound up being called QuakeWorld but it was essentially nothing more than a re-write of Quake’s multiplayer netcode and the rest, honestly, is history. What started with a small but fierce player base of old school nerds, Quake has managed to turn that into something that, as I write this in June of 2021, is essentially mainstream. Made online play famous? Quake. The first e-sports tournaments? Quake. Influenced a generation of budding programmers due to it’s ability to be modded? Quake. Game modes that we take for granted today started as Quake mods. Team Fortress now stads as a whole separate game after Valve went on to hire the entire team behind the original Quake mod. Capture the flag is basically an online staple. Quake blew the doors to online play and didn’t look back.

Between the graphics engine and the multiplayer we would not have today’s games without Quake. So many modern multiplayer titles from modern COD to Apex Legends come back to Quake in one way or another. We take these things in games for granted today but in 1996 these things were new and they were pushing boundaries. Remember, these were the last days of Intel 486 chips and the early days Pentiums. We’re talking CPU speeds of roughly 50-100 Mhz and this thing wouldn’t even run on a 486 due to the chip’s limitations with floating point math³. Graphics cards as we know them now barely existed. There were precursors to what was to come but it was Quake that largely kicked off the graphics card race that we still have to this day between Nvidia and what was ATI, now owned by AMD. It was Carmack’s port to the OpenGL and 3DFX VooDoo Graphics Glide APIs that made this happen. Without that graphics card race other engines like Unreal may not have had the hardware to flourish on. Battlefield certainly wouldn’t have been able to popularize large scale online games without Quake making online play popular.

While I wouldn’t have the opportunity to play online until the summer of 1997, it completely changed my world. Before that I was playing fighting games with my friends on SNES. Quake was my first taste at what a smooth online game should feel like. It was fast, chaotic, easy to pick up yet impressively deep and incredibly punishing. I fully believe that those design decisions are still some of the best in gaming and those are the ones that truly successful titles carried forward into today’s games. Make it easy to play and hard to master. All of my first person shooter skills come back to those early days and marathon sessions of Quake.

The Arena Shooter that Quake pioneered all those years ago may have fallen out of favor but it’s spirit lives on through today’s games. Call of Duty got it’s start on id Tech 3⁴. That id Tech 3 engine that was so impressive at the time now is the very core of IW 8 which powers Call of Duty Warzone and Modern Warfare 2019⁵. It will also power the upcoming Sledgehammer Call of Duty title releasing this year. Apex Legends, like Titanfall before it, is running on a modern version of Source, which is just Valve’s version of id Tech 2, the Quake engine. The Battle Royale genre that is so prevalent today is just a more complex version of that arena shooter from ages ago. It’s still every man for themself, just on a much bigger map. While the use of newer id Tech engines has waned over the years for various reasons the fact that the core of these engines, even if the engines themselves are heavily modified, is an impressive feat. Quake, and the Quake engine, are one of the biggest contributions to gaming, and, perhaps just as importantly, helped push computing forward in it’s own resource hungry way.

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