When I first immersed myself in the world of video games, I never dreamed there might be one that could exert so powerful an influence that it might virtually re-plumb the lineaments of an entire art form. Yet when I look back now at what I played and raved about in 1996, I realize that the first person shooting (FPS) game, Quake, was more than a great game on its own: it was a deeply transformative title, for the art and for society in general. I remember my slack-jawed wonder at what was happening onscreen and in my head. I almost wish I could see a play-by-play, because Quake clearly was a title that used technology, gameplay, and society in a magical way, and it turned them into something else.
During the mid-90s, id Software was already famous among gamers. The company had created Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM, which all but established the first-person shooter as we now know it to be. And while those strafing pioneers might be thought of as fairly primitive by younger fans who are more familiar with, say, the latest multiplayer Call Of Duty, Quake was, for its time, a landmark in awesome in a way that those earlier games weren’t. When you now step back and look at what all these games accomplished, there’s something absurd about the idea that the next release, the one that was going to headline 1996 in a way that might be matched by only, say, Friendship could be taken up to yet another notch in the wow scale.
The first time I loaded up Quake on my family’s little PC, I was instantly bewitched. Id Software’s 1996 masterpiece was rewarding in a way few other games were; it combined the fast-paced, straight-to-the-meat action that most teenage boys (myself included) love with an atmospheric soundtrack and a dark world that sucked me right in.
And if it was a world you could get sucked into, it was also a game with a cornucopia of secret areas to find and shortcuts to exploit. It was a very rewarding game if you happened to be, in your teenage years, a wannabe software designer or a storytelling ingénue like I was in the mid-1990s.
Jumping from Doom to Quake was like going from a drawing to a work of art. Quake levels possessed a depth and complication unseen before this game. The engine crafted cathedrals, not just rooms; the world was filled with architecture, often gothic and menacing, that seemed filled with malice and intent. Navigating it was a test of the player’s abilities, both in controller skill and in thinking through strategy.
My most vivid Quake memory centers on rocket jumping. If you’re not familiar with that term, it refers to using the explosion of a rocket from your rocket launcher to forcibly move your character to someplace he can’t reach. The first time I saw the rocket jump, I thought the Quake engine had a glitch. But once I got the yips out of my system, I practiced, and now I can even do it with my eyes closed. I’ve used this technique in all the places I was supposed to use it, in all the “You’re supposed to be here” moments in the game, and I’ve never been disappointed by the level of design involved in setting up those moments.
Multiplayer gaming previously was mostly in the domain of local area networks or, for consoles, in the split-screen mode. That was changed completely by Quake. id Software had overheated the office with all the Internet service providers they’d used during testing, and I think it was the lead developer, Mr. John Carmack, who said at the time that Quake was designed first and foremost for server and multiplayer mode. You can see the code there that lifts its leg and pees on all the other codes in the matter of server-side selection, what the gamers call “when you get there first, you stake your claim.”
The first time I played online Quake, I was both thrilled and humbled. I logged into a server, chose my character (who, back then, was just a series of blocky polygons with not much on the imagination-catching front), and was dumped into a room with a bunch of other players who seemed to know exactly what they were doing. I didn’t. After a minute or so, I finally figured out that the point was to frag, or “kill,” as many of the other players as possible. And I say “room” because that’s how it appeared to me at the time, though in retrospect, it was more of a 3D environment with a few brownish-bunker colors thrown in for good measure.
The virtual assembly started to burgeon, and so did fresh and innovative gaming experiences. Quake was a never-before-seen medium that was limited only by what a modder could dream up. It morphed into a boundless playscape that rippled outward to touch just about every first-person-shooter loving, competition-seeking gamer during the mid-to-late ’90s. In fact, if we really want to be thorough, the 1996 Slipgate experience was the initial push quake of an esports wave that continues to this day across multiple mediums and titles, to the tune of $1.1 billion projected for the esports industry in 2020.
My initiation into the world of Quake clans is something I won’t forget. A ragtag group of aficionados formed the first bond in The Fragmasters. We were a bunch of wannabes. I remember us practicing, spending all-our-free-time hours together, honing our hand-eye coordination, developing strats to compete against top pros, and buttering up to guys with modems so they’d host our servers. Sometimes, if we were lucky, we got to run some practice games with other fragfest junkies and propel our little fantasy world of soldiering into the stratosphere.
Another groundbreaking facet of Quake was its introduction of mods and custom content. It was one of the first games that not only allowed players to create their own maps and game modes but actively gave them the tools to do it, creating a new game from the revolutionary Quake engine. This fostered a fresh new gaming culture of innovativeness and creativity. Today, the most popular games, like Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike, have their beginnings as just that—mods of games where communities of creators took the first experiments in making not just new maps but new kinds of games. That’s a fresh gaming innovation that started with Quake.
Quake was more than a passing fad; its effects are still seen in today’s gaming world. The use of a three-dimensional engine did much more than offer a new visual perspective for an action game, it was a glossy, fresh-faced standard-bearer for the cause of software that took advantage of ever-increasing hardware muscle. In the Quake engine, id Software provided counting-you-fail gaming with a glossy new finish that was unforgiving in its performance demands but, in turn, offered a more visually exciting world for gamers to explore.
Apart from the technological advancements, Quake cultivated an unparalleled community. The friends, but also the enemies that formed in the personal computer’s first true decade of online gaming; the deathmatch epoch with the ancient 56k modem still have a really awful long-lasting hold on the first of us who went native with that dial-up. When you hear word nowadays that the “LAN party is dead,” you next expect to hear that the personal computer is also kaput and the next in line to be retro. This temporary insanity of the Quake epoch is what Id’s cofounder Tom Hall calls “the golden age of that basement thing,” with the truly meaningful byplay of local network nonsense.
QuakeCon, a yearly convention started by Quake enthusiasts in 1996, celebrates the long-standing impact of the 1996 game Quake. This event brings in Quake fans from around the world. While QuakeCon began as a small celebration of a few Quake fans, it now has the scope of a massive comic book convention, attracting thousands of participants, and providing pride, joy, and perhaps even a bit of nostalgia for fans of the gaming world that Quake helped to create.
Quake did more than just lay the foundation for the future of first-person shooters. Its developers’ emphasis on community and their capacity for using powerful 3D tools stretched its impact to almost every corner of the game industry. The way it offered a modicum of plot, large maps, and an array of weapons so that tool-users could experiment remains a model of what was once id Software’s revolution in game design. And its high-speed, no-mercy play across a futuristic Gothic universe of custom maps and total conversions can still thrill. The id Software team was ahead of the game.
The modding community of Quake is one of the game’s most enduring features. Even now, over 20 years after its initial release, Quake fans are still making new things for the game. A high-definition texture pack here, an all-new single-player campaign there, these are the types of creations that emerge when a community cares deeply about a game and knows it (and its tools) inside and out. That’s what’s happening here. So Quake not only remains a vibrant part of the lives of many people but also continues to find new players.
In hindsight, Quake was much more than a game. It was something that sparked a monumental shift in the whole of the gaming industry. The innovations, that’s what they were at the time, brought about by Quake have of course continued to evolve and become something altogether different. The online multiplayer experiences of today have their roots in Quake. Many of the games that are popular now owe a lot more than they might care to admit to the 1996 id Software classic.
Advancements in technology have opened up new possibilities for multiplayer online games. Once upon a time, when the internet was young and budding, players across the globe would dial into the same server and try to defeat one another in simple, often primitive, virtual grounds. Now, with the help of high-speed internet, powerful gaming consoles, and sophisticated matchmaking algorithms enveloping the player experience, gamers can truly go to virtual war inside complex gaming mechanics. But still, the best online games today offer what they always have: the thrill of competing against real, living, breathing opponents and the rich payoff of a well-developed, intricate game lay.
When I look back at my time with Quake, I can only feel thankful because of how much it has shaped my life. The world of online gaming was something that Quake made me a part of, and it has since meant powerful friendships of the kind that seems only real in a young person’s world and being, not to mention the significant number of skills that I have taken with me past the virtual threshold.
The influence of Quake on the game industry is simply unfathomable. What this title did back in 1996 simply hadn’t been done before. Gaming was taken to new levels; graphics were given an unheard-of push that set the title apart from many of the best-looking games of the age. Gameplay, as well, was unique and set the standard for future games based on the first-person mechanic. While the concept of the game may not seem original now, it was something no one had done up to that point. No one could have conceived of an entirely original idea based on a previous one; after all, wasn’t that infringing on what had already been done in the past?
The most significant aspect of the Quake series’ legacy is that it has established a basis for modern esports. The Quake games owe their esports-friendliness to their fast-paced, skill-determining gameplay. It offered all the right, unique ingredients to a recipe for an electronic sport. It helped establish the framework a young esports industry could use to go on shaping it into e-tournaments featuring growing rewards. And, it allowed the e-athletes proficient in its high skill-ceiling gameplay to go on virtually doing what they do best: perform under growing amounts of pressure while staying at the top of a 1%-of-1%-world.
When I survey the present-day territory of video games, I am in awe of the progress that has been made. Compared to the days of Quake, graphics are downright amazing, allowing for more realism in games. Some video game worlds, like the one in Red Dead Redemption, are so large that they surpass the size of real-world locations. Dutch and Belgian players found a more labyrinthine Vermont in the video game version of the Northeastern state, for instance, than exists in the real world. And yet, for all the advances that have been made, the experience of playing an online multiplayer game is largely the same today as it was back then. The game worlds that my friends and I inhabit may look a lot different (and certainly a lot better!) now than they did during the heyday of Quake, but the core experience is largely the same.
In conclusion, Quake is much more than just a game. For many people, it launched what has now been over a decade of massive multiplayer communities that continue to thrive even today. For countless Clan Arena, big Rocket Arena, and Team Fortress (both of those being awesome mods for the first and second Quake) players, the original Quake and Quake II still stand like twin colossi at the dawn of the massively multiplayer era (something we Quakers have long had contentious arguments about with EverQuest and World of Warcraft denizens). Whether you’re a seasoned vet or a newbie trying to understand the draw of the stadium-sized FPS arena, just remember that the Quake series never died because nothing really ever threatens our community in any way. Whether we’re talking about the Project “Q” Quake community (which isn’t even a community limited to a single game anymore), or many of the other Quake communities, these communities are all about enduring value and a sense of truly moving forward in the FPS world.
Quake illuminates the reality that video games are no longer just a pastime for millions of adolescents, but now top the list of a blockbuster electronic medium vying with both television and the Internet for the world’s creative and social capital. Its legacy shows that games can not only entertain us but make us part of something bigger. If the first Quake was a rallying cry for the potential power of the networked community in the late 1990s remember? The fledgling ‘GEEK’ emblems toiled tirelessly in the dungeons and built to new heights as stories unfolded against the multiple and endless backdrops of what can transport a whole community together inside a living and breathing world.
