Id software were at the height of their fame when they released Quake, but it came at a sincere cost. Id had been running on a string of hits since the early 90s. Commander Keen had proved that wiz kid John Carmack could do the impossible (in this case, make scrolling backgrounds for platformers work on a PC, something that was surprisingly difficult at the time without the dedicated hardware of consoles like the NES or SNES). And then with Wolfenstein 3D, John Romero was able to put his fantastical creativity, both in crazy settings and in spectacular level design, to good and critically beloved use. But it was Doom, one of capital-T The games ever released that both Johns came together to make something spectacular and iconic. Carmack's impressive engine with its complicated binary space partitioning was able to fake being 3D even when it technically wasn't. Did you ever notice or wonder why no map in the original two Doom games ever overlapped itself? That was because, as far as the engine was concerned, it was loading a 2D game, but drawing it to the screen as a 3D game. Thus, there was no Z-axis outside of rendering. The logic underneath only knew two axis. But that was no real limitation for Romero, who quickly stitched together a tone and feel for the game that would be equal parts Doom's character. Romero, always the wannabe rock star, wanted to create a game that would emulate a DnD campaign he and his fellow coworkers at id had played that ended with Hell invading and collapsing the game entirely. Thrash metal, waves of demons, and a darker aesthetic (again, thanks to the lighting in Carmack's new engine) gave way for Romero's Freudian ego to run amok to glorious results. Building on the principals they set up for Wolfenstein 3D, they created the true (although not literally true) birth of the shooter genre. They released stop-gap Doom II while Carmack worked on the next game engine, but the industry wasn't slowing down. Carmack's Doom engine was being leased out everywhere (or otherwise copied), and soon the market was swamped with oddware mods or imitators of Doom, from Hex to Marathon to self-proclaimed competitor Duke Nukem - there was no shortage of "Doom clones". A true follow up was highly anticipated, and Romero had no shortage of ideas. With Carmack's new 3D engine, showcasing true 3D rather than the 2.5D of Doom and with a killer new lighting engine, the engine that would be Quake's blew their competition out of the water. It was just about making those ideas a reality.
But, reality bites and Romero's vision would soon be truncated to a simple coat of paint (a helluva coat of paint it was, though). Romero envisioned a fast paced action RPG with Nordic and medieval setting and characters. His ambition was hampered by the slow development of Carmack's new engine, which was swamping him. Making matters worse, Carmack was simultaneously developing a new TCP/IP system for online matchmaking in the game (two things Carmack would later say should have been on "two different projects"). The slow goings on the engine equally lead to slow development, and the scope had to be narrowed down. It was a concession that would lead to Romero leaving id Software after Quake's completion, and id Software would never quite be the same. This is where Romero infamously made his own company to create Daikatana, the game he initially wanted Quake to be, and a veritable disaster in its own right.
This doesn't mean that Romero's vision wasn't still paramount to a lot of what Quake would have to offer. Doom felt like a comic book come to life in a lot of ways, like an R-rated Saturday morning cartoon based on whatever that kid in the jean jacket carving pentagrams into his desk at the back of class was interested in. Quake, on the other hand, was far darker in aesthetic. Quake's style is still incredibly unique to this day, and that can partially be attributed to its balls-to-the-wall kookiness. High powered weaponry like shotguns, lightning guns, rocket launchers, and oddly nail guns (and I mean literal guns) would be your paint brush as you chewed through medieval knights, zombies, ogres with grenade launchers and a chainsaw for a hand, and a slew of Lovecraftian horrors. Noticeably, the color pallet was shrunk to mostly greys and browns (an infamous design choice for the generation of consoles two gens later, but here was something "gritty" and "real", adjectives that still had some semblance of power behind them). Shadows were incredibly dark, darker than most any modern game you could think of, even those that work in the medium of dark-light dichotomy like horror shooter F.E.A.R. Partially, this was due to the game's setting. Gone were Doom's sci-fi military bases (mostly) and hellish nightmarescapes (mostly) and in were . . . medieval castles? Each of the four episodes found in Quake had a slightly different setting to them, all of which was conveniently tied together with the plot's "slipgates", inter-dimensional portals that . . . to be honest, the plot doesn't matter much at all. It reads as highschool dark fantasy fiction (a sentiment equally represented in its stellar soundtrack, done by none other than Nine Inch Nails), with its one notable aspect being in how wide its stylistic draws seem to be coming from. We have the dark ages' medieval knights and castles smashed together with space marines in dark, metallic bases. Lovecraftian horrors shoot green spells at you like wizards from the void, and your go to attack is going to be with a nail gun or rocket to the face. Quake's style feels a lot like some strange outsider art trying to tie together too many pieces, and it succeeds largely in just how blindly excited it feels about what it's trying to do.
For all that Quake was trying to do stylistically, the gameplay may feel quaint by comparison. Quake is a shooter, and marked the death of the "Doom clone" business going on in the gaming press at the time. While it got some cocked eyebrows at release for being, essentially, Doom 3 by certain standards (rather broad standards, if you ask me), it was overwhelmingly praised for its tight, frenetic combat, impressive graphical fidelity, and its grotesque style. Frenetic might not even cover it, to be honest. Quake is intense. The shotgun, your standby during your plunges through Doom's demon infested hallways, was paltry at best against Quake's enemies, a clear sign that you were in for something much more challenging. While Quake is on average more difficult than Doom, it never gets much more so at its peaks. Key to this difficulty was in its enemy design, and its odd take on weaponry. Given your shotgun is no longer a viable option but rather a last resort, keeping tabs on ammo is a little more important, especially in the latter two episodes. The nail gun does good damage, but I could never keep enough ammo to feel all that comfortable using the thing as a default weapon. Thus, I rode the grenade launcher and rocket launcher (both of which use the same ammo type) for most encounters, at least for the spongier enemies. While knights and soldiers will show up often in the early game for each episode, they will quickly slide away in favor of the ogre as your main "low-tier" enemy, which almost always created a formidable encounter. Getting too close to the ogre would lead to a chainsaw in the face, and in Quake up close melee damage is just about the worst damage you can receive. Thus, sticking far away is your ideal option with most opponents, but especially the ogre. The ogre, unfortunately, also wields a grenade launcher, bouncing explosives around the map and making constant movement a must. Adding a couple of ogres to any encounter always meant you were going to have to act quickly and listen for that ting of the grenade as it bounced wildly around the room (physics in a 3D space were, to put it mildly, incredibly new and not nearly so reliable or predictable). Black knights equally worked as low-tier enemies, able to slice you with their sword as well as put holes in you with some fiery projectiles when you were out of arms reach. Mid-tier came in the form of fiends, which could take an absurd amount of damage and would leap across the room to tear you apart with their claws, and vore, which would shoot homing explosives in your direction. All the enemies in Quake were designed with movement in mind, forcing you to be aware of your surroundings and of where items were located in a given level. Ducking and diving around corners to bait enemies into a state of vulnerability (or to avoid a projectile) is paramount to playing smart. At times, the game would intentionally place you in limited spaces, meant to force creativity in your approach, and a lot of this is due to the newfound Z-axis.
In Doom, jumping was basically running over gaps, hoping your momentum got you to where you need to go. Quake, with its true 3D architecture, could now have a dedicated jump button. Platforming is now something required to get to the end of a lot of levels, and one platforming challenge the game particularly likes toward the end of its (relatively short) run is to make you run along tie-rods of wood no thicker than you yourself are. Making a structure of these wooden beams in an arena full of enemies makes for a particularly challenging fight, and also makes running through a virtual impossibility. Quake's idea of platforming is serviceable, even though it rarely ever uses it for more than a modifier toward its main loop. Occasionally, it serves exploration, which is where I would say it excels at. In service of exploration, however, is one of the most iconic tricks in PC shooters: the rocket jump. Rocket jumping is a risk-reward move, allowing yourself to take damage in order to make a larger/longer/taller jump. Rocket jumping can outright allow yourself to skip whole sections of the game, and became a staple of the online meta.
Quake's online was a large step up from that of Doom's incredibly popular multiplayer. The 3D traversable space, faster gameplay, and more eclectic take on weaponry lead to a truly frenetic online shooter. Quake's online, however, is largely shorted by the fact that it wouldn't come into its own as the powerhouse that it was until Quake III: Arena. Quake can and should be credited with creating the unfortunately (mostly) dead Arena Shooter genre, whose attempted rebirth in recent years (including Quake's own dismal foray into a revival) has yet to find a foothold in the modern market of hero shooters and battle royale.
Quake was the cresting moment for PC shooters' rise to cultural domination, the moment where the golden years had just about reached its peak, before being dethroned by the console shooter with Halo (although many PC shooters hung on to a lot of renown, such as Battlefield 1942 and, of course, Half-Life 2). It was also the end of id Software's golden years where the Johns were together making themselves rockstars out of game development. After this, Carmack and co.'s output would feel slightly less id-like, although they would still have great hits in the follow up Quake titles (until Quake IV, that is, largely developed by another studio). Quake is an undisputed shooter classic, a game that was brimming with odd ideas and tight execution, one that was never quite matched again. It lacks the timelessness of Doom, as well as that game's colossal pop-cultural impact, but it made up for it in its technical brilliance. Quake's engine has been ported, modified, and leased out dozens of times, finding its code in classics such as Half-Life (and inspiring the Source Engine), as well as the modified Quake II Engine finding its ways into Daikatana, Medal of Honor, and the first handful of Call of Duty titles, making it one of the most important game engines of all time. Quake's importance is undisputed, but its surprising amount of fun even when looked at through modern gaming eyes is what makes it truly worthwhile. The taste of blood from gritted teeth as my arm locks up trying to duck and swerve away from enemy projectiles never tasted so sweet. Long live the king, baby.
9.5
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