![]() ![]() It wasn’t until Quake 2 that I semi-seriously began playing shooters in a player-versus-player environment, and the muscle memory and basic learnings from that game stay with me today. The mix of mechanical skill, decision making, and later, teamwork required to succeed (early Quake tourneys were only all 1v1 Deathmatch) drew tremendous interest from players. Quake laid the groundwork for its sequels, Unreal Tournament, and subsequently, Counter-Strike to explode on the competitive gaming scene. Heck, I bought a Creative Sound Blaster sound card because this guy endorsed it. Who can forget his glorious victory at 1997’s Red Annihilation event where he took home Quake designer John Carmack’s Ferrari as the prize? The other global eSports celebrity, Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendell was also a Quake III Arena player. I mean, Dennis “Thresh” Fong is probably the first eSports celebrity (if the name sounds familiar to League of Legends players, now you know where it came from). QuakeCon was home to North America's largest LAN events in the nineties Always at the forefront of the electronic sports movement which swept the world in the late 90s and early millennial years, Quake and its sequels were responsible for QuakeCon, the largest LAN events in North America at the time. While competitive gaming existed in various forms previously, be it high scores at arcades, Nintendo games and fighting games, it wasn’t until Quake that players and general public started taking shooters seriously. If Doom pioneered the first-person shooter genre, Quake took it to the next level from a competition standpoint. Quake hasn't aged well graphically, but mods can make it better However, one cannot take away Quake’s contribution to both 3D games as well as something far more significant, in my opinion: the emergence of mouse and keyboard as the primary input choice for PC games in general and shooters in particular. Add to this the movement, animation and weapon design, and you’ve got a game which hasn’t aged quite as gracefully as Doom a universal problem with games built on nascent technology (but you can make it look better with this 2011 HD mod and spare your eyes). It might have been groundbreaking tech for the time, but the blocky polygons, which looked a tad bit off-putting then, look borderline comical now. It doesn’t look as good now as it did back then a characteristic it shares with us, its aging players. Unfortunately, Quake’s visual style does not hold up. The weapon set, overall, was not as diverse as Doom’s, nor do the weapons pack the punch of some of its predecessor’s, but the gameplay is just so claustrophobic and fast-paced with moments of multilevel rocket-jumping polygonal madness that it simply didn’t matter. But then I remember the Nailgun-the idea that a weapon which didn’t shoot bullets, rockets or laser projectiles and yet, could be so devastating was pretty exciting. My earliest memories of the game always seemed to involve me falling to my death in a pool of lava while backpedaling. I don’t think I fully got to grips with Quake’s movement system. ![]() Prepare for sweaty games if you're jumping into Quake Live Initially, the game supported only software rendering, but I can still remember the day I fired up GLQuake to take complete advantage of a 3dfx Voodoo card I owned for extra crispy 3D graphics. Quake’s game engine showed the world something it had never seen before: everything in the game was rendered in real-time 3D, with the game sporting support for the now-forgotten phenomenon of “3D Acceleration” using OpenGL. Not only did this event make gamers from my generation feel just a little bit older (hint: you should have been at least 10 years old when you played the original in order to feel the effects of said aging), it was a reminder about the rapidly evolving technology used in video games. On June 22nd, 2016, id Software’s Quake turned twenty. ![]()
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