Romero puts old Quake documents online in honor of 20th birthday

Quake is twenty years old. The first person shooter first appeared on June 22, 1996. John Romero, who was responsible for the level design, has put online the very first screenshots and an old document about the game from 1995 in honor of the anniversary.

On his website, Romero has published a page with early information about Quake. In addition to the screenshots, you can see the cover letter that he put online on August 3, 1995. “Here they are, finally! The first screenshots of Quake, shot in a resolution of 320×200 pixels,” Romero wrote at the time. He also noted that some high-resolution 640×480-pixel screenshots were included “so you can see the amazing lighting effects.” Romero has enlarged the republished screenshots for easier viewing.

Furthermore, the text describes that no working alias models have yet been implemented in the game, but that the studio is very close and that models will be properly lit and animated. In some screenshots, the developer shows older levels of Doom, which have been recreated in the Quake engine. “I’ve duplicated and Quake-ified the levels so you can see for yourself how cool that looks compared to the original,” Romero wrote in 1995.

Romero also published a document entitled Quaketalk 95, which was maintained by Joost Schuur. It was an unofficial newsletter that kept all the news about Quake’s development. The document was created on October 22, 1995, before the game’s release. In the document, Schuur collected all the information that could be found in magazines and on websites about Quake. According to Romero, not much was known about the game at the time and many people were curious about the new game from id Software. The document describes Quake in the introduction as a “fantasy role-playing/action game.”

Romero states that a month after the unofficial document was published, the id Software team met and made final decisions about Quake. The final game bears little resemblance to what is described in the faq and according to Romero that shows how much can change during the development of a game.

Quake was the successor to Doom and was made by development studio id Software. The game used a full-fledged 3d engine with OpenGL support. Before the full game was released, id Software released a tech demo with three multiplayer maps on February 24, 1996, called QTest. The test version did not have single player, and the gameplay and graphics were still different from the final game. However, it gave gamers the opportunity to create mods, such as custom skins for the characters, even before Quake came out.

Quake initially appeared for the PC, but later there were also versions for the Mac, Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64 and Amiga. The last full-fledged game in the series, Quake 4, dates from 2005. However, that game could not match the success of Quake III. During the E3 games show, publisher Bethesda announced last week that id Software is working on Quake Champions. The new game should be a competitive multiplayer shooter. During QuakeCon, which takes place in early August, more will be announced about the new game.