Quake celebrates twenty-fifth birthday

It will be exactly twenty-five years since Quake appeared on June 22. The first-person shooter marked a big step forward for 3D games and made id Software an even more famous studio than it already was.

Quake was released on June 22, 1996 and according to the book Masters of Doom, it was a shareware version for Microsoft DOS. Players could unlock the full game via a password they received after payment. This system proved cumbersome. In addition, the game was soon cracked, potentially having a negative impact on sales. The retail version of Quake was 1.01 and it was released July 12, 1996. According to the author of Masters of Doom, about a quarter of a million copies were sold in 1996, making the game not as popular as Doom II.

Id Software released Wolfenstein and Doom in the early 1990s. These two games made the first person shooter popular. Unlike those games, Quake used more advanced 3D rendering. The rendering of the Doom Engine is often considered pseudo-3d, because it is not possible to look up or down, the objects are based on sprites and parts of the levels cannot be higher or lower in relation to each other. In contrast, the Quake Engine supported 3D techniques such as Gouraud shading, lighting, and shadows via lightmaps and 3d objects instead of sprites. The result was that the environment was less detailed than, for example, Duke Nukem 3D, which also appeared in 1996 and used 2d sprites.

What contributed to Quake’s popularity in particular was the multiplayer. Users were able to establish TCP/IP connections and thus play over the Internet, with the Deathmatches in particular proving popular. To test those Deathmatches, id Software already released the playable Qtest demo in February 1996.

Also worth mentioning is the music of the game, for which Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails was responsible. Developer John Romero thanks the musician for his contribution at the twenty-fifth anniversary. He remembers that Quake was a difficult game to make, but the hard work paid off in the end, partly because there is still a Quake community at the moment. Id Software celebrated its thirtieth anniversary earlier this year.