Happy Birthday: Quake turns 15 today

Emil

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Quake, a first-person shooter (FPS) video game that many consider a classic now, was released by id Software on June 22, 1996. Today, the game is thus 15 years old.

Quake has been largely praised throughout the gaming community, and it quickly dethroned previous FPS titles as the best in its category. Some would even go as far as to say that it revolutionized the way multiplayer games were developed. It went on to dominat the video game industry, which was rather young at the time.

Putting aside the four spinoffs and the at least 12 unofficial ports, we can see how successful the game became just by looking at the number of total games in the Quake video game series, which by the way does not really follow a logical story whatsoever. There have been 10 games:

  • Quake (1996)
  • Quake Mission Pack 1: Scourge of Armagon (1997)
  • Quake Mission Pack 2: Dissolution of Eternity (1997)
  • Quake II (1997)
  • Quake II Mission Pack: The Reckoning (1998)
  • Quake II Mission Pack: Ground Zero (1998)
  • Quake III Arena (1999)
  • Quake III: Team Arena (2000)
  • Quake 4 (2005)
  • Quake Live (2010)

happy birthday quake id software first person shooter

Out of all the games I played as a kid, Quake has probably been the most addicting. I played the original many times, but Quake III: Team Arena probably kept me away from the real world for the longest. When Quake 4 turned out to be disappointing, I switched to the Unreal Tournament series, and I haven't looked back since. Still, I'll always remember Quake as the game that made sure I pick FPS over all other genres (yes, even more than Warcraft and Starcraft have for my love of RTS).

If this post has made you feel nostalgic, fear not. The original Quake game has been available on Steam since May 31, 2007. What are you waiting for? Go relive those childhood memories.

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Quake 4 dissapointing?? I found it really darn good! More than good its one of my favourites, Quake 3 on the other hand was my dissapointment on the franchise.
 
Wow - can't call Q3 a disappointment - I've loved all of them. I learned on Quake, felt like a god on Quake 2, was humbled on pro servers in Quake 3, and felt like Quake 4 was sort of a return to the Quake 2 days. Happy B-Day Quake - you're the greatest FPS series ever - IMO.
 
Awesome franchise! I just bought Quake 4 on Amazon. I bought it originally when it 1st came out, but lost it and wanted it back in my collection. Quake Wars was alot of fun, but only held my interest for a short time. Played the others too and enjoyed them all.
 
Yah I must retain my comment on dissapointment, I was a big fan of Unreal Tournament back in the days when Quake III came out and I was hoping to find good questing mode, instead of a sort of UT clone.
 
Kibaruk said:
Quake 4 disappointing?? I found it really darn good! More than good its one of my favorites, Quake 3 on the other hand was my disappointment on the franchise.

I feel the exact same way, but I've always drawn the ire of my friends for admitting that. Good to find someone else who thinks this!
 
Quake was the first FPS I played and where I learned how to play on a mouse and keyboard. Quake 2 is still my favorite and Quake 3 showed me that the world was full of awesome players. I agree that Quake 4 was a little disappointing, but can't wait for Quake 4. Thank you id..and Happy Birthday Quake.
 
I owned the shareware version of quake, I believe I got it in the mail as a kid. You could play the first world it was pretty cool. I would stand by the other gates in the game wishing I had the full version.
 
I salute ID SOFTWARE for giving me the best FPS experience, Q3 was the bomb and it had tons of active communitys to enjoy.. dam those days will never comeback thanks to the new stupid greedy AAA brands and all the zombie sheep tools that support them buying theyr shitty products!

Quake FTW ( tear )
 
Ahhh.... fond memories blowing up classmates back in junior high... Those were good times, and that game was so addicting on LAN. I played so many ridiculous hours of it I owned everyone I came across. Really was the game that got me into FPS games, and I really think it had a large influence on other games.

Happy 15th Quake!
 
It's more like R.I.P. Quake, and the article should have been written 14 years ago and left at that. I'm really sick of hearing people giving high praise to these old junkers.

Quake was, as far as I care, the first actual game that had 3D (polygon or whatever) mobs, which was a big deal. But, I see no point celebrating that fact 15 years later. By today's standards, it's a boring, ugly, old thing better left in the past. Quake was great back then, but it's not great anymore. This is what I remember Quake as: Everything was brown, square and downtrodden. I don't get what makes people talk about Quake still.

I remember me and the old gang had a lot more fun playing Quake II, which came out a year after the first one (judging by the list in the article), and this game was pure magic. It was the first game we ever played that had Bi-Linear texture filtering. I believe this was around the time of the Voodoo/Voodoo 2 graphics cards. Remember that fun flare-like pistol? The colored lighting effects. Actual cool-looking player models and monsters.

Check out the Steam games list by top-down Metascore and you'll see Quake and Half-Life 2 and other old games taking up all the top spots. Those scores MAY have applied when the games were released, but they can't hold their own against today's games. Just think about it. In Quake you run around and shoot (like most FPS games back then). At least Duke Nukem 3D had a jetpack and attitude! And there's a lot more going on in games like MW2 etc. RPG elements even.
 
Quake1 introduced a lot of game technologies that are now standard fare. It is truly a revolutionary game and should be recognized as much. Naming all its innovations is difficult. Dedicated servers, capture the flag for FPS, 3d positioned sounds (torches, etc), fully 3d rendered world, 3d hardware accelerated graphics with vquake and glquake, etc etc etc.. There's much more that the game did first. Not only that, it is still a lot of fun to play. Check out www.quakeone.com and you can see people still play it. Jump on a populated server and see how fast, visceral and hilariously funny is the MP gameplay. No Quake after Quake1 even came close in the humor department. Guck guck guck, rrrrrrrip (telefrag), etc etc.

The game company Gamespy started as Quakespy and was devoted to listing multiplayer servers for Quake. Really, the game is a huge landmark for gaming and especially PC gaming.
 
I forgot to mention one more thing. Quake was the first FPS and probably the first commercial game to natively support TCP/IP (internet protocol) so that it could play over the Internet. It was absolutely a huge milestone for FPS games.
 
I spent many hours playing Q3 Rocket Arena ;) Ahh those were the days.
 
I too have spent countless hours playing Q1/2/3. Probably more then any other games todate. :)
 
To the guest who said it should be "R.I.P. Quake":

Of course its an old and ugly game when compared to todays standard, but thats like saying that old movies suck because they don't have today's CGI (go check IMDB's top rate movies). Quake was the biggest innovation in gaming back then, a big part of all that you have today in moderns shooters, in terms of graphics, gameplay and multiplayer was pioneered in Quake, which was then used in other genres.

I assume you are some sort of CoD fan or something, but Black Op's per example, is nothing comprared to what Quake was back then (mostly because its boring and has a overused formula), so the metascores are ok, especially the Half Life and Zelda ones. They were great games back then, and today you have so many games that most of them suck, and only a few are really good, because companies like EA and Activision, just to name a few, lost their way and only see profit in front of them.
 
Painkeep mod for Quake was awesome. Jetpack? Who needs a friggin' jetback when the can of beans would allow you to flatulate your way up to higher points to snipe off people. And the air gun? Keep shooting those missles at me. I'll just send them back at you! Not even Duke would let one fly (and I enjoyed Duke).

Quake, along with Doom and before that, Wolfenstein 3D are what really kicked off the FPS genre. Doom with the ability to play against 3 other people really paved the way.

Quake, unlike Doom, is what set off the modding community since it was encouraged to mod the heck out of it. So, not only was it the first to have 3D polygonal models, it came with QuakeC to allow you to easily mod the game and create entirely new worlds. Hence, Painkeep mod. Also, Quake no longer was confined to a local area network like Doom was. Instead, with Quake, you could play over the internet. Another first!

Ahh, those were the days.
 
I played Q1 - 3 and enjoyed the single player mode. What was the most fun though was playing CTF with various mods. We had a Quake server at our company and would play at lunch and after hours almost every day, it was a blast :)
 
I've never played a single quake game. I regret missing out on these classics, half life is another one that I regret not having played when it came out. I don't think I'd get the same experience if I went and played them now. I was very late to the PC scene. I didn't get my first computer until I was 17(8 years ago).

My only experience with computers before that were Oregon's trail and number munchers back in elementary school.
 
Played Quake 2 too much. Anyone else play the entire game with just a blaster?
 
Guest said:
It's more like R.I.P. Quake, and the article should have been written 14 years ago and left at that. I'm really sick of hearing people giving high praise to these old junkers.

Quake was, as far as I care, the first actual game that had 3D (polygon or whatever) mobs, which was a big deal. But, I see no point celebrating that fact 15 years later. By today's standards, it's a boring, ugly, old thing better left in the past. Quake was great back then, but it's not great anymore. This is what I remember Quake as: Everything was brown, square and downtrodden. I don't get what makes people talk about Quake still.

I remember me and the old gang had a lot more fun playing Quake II, which came out a year after the first one (judging by the list in the article), and this game was pure magic. It was the first game we ever played that had Bi-Linear texture filtering. I believe this was around the time of the Voodoo/Voodoo 2 graphics cards. Remember that fun flare-like pistol? The colored lighting effects. Actual cool-looking player models and monsters.

Check out the Steam games list by top-down Metascore and you'll see Quake and Half-Life 2 and other old games taking up all the top spots. Those scores MAY have applied when the games were released, but they can't hold their own against today's games. Just think about it. In Quake you run around and shoot (like most FPS games back then). At least Duke Nukem 3D had a jetpack and attitude! And there's a lot more going on in games like MW2 etc. RPG elements even.

Wow... why do you have to be such a hater? So you didn't like the Quake 1 atmosphere very much and thus didn't like the game. Ok thats fine, I respect that... but there are thousands and thousands who did like it. The game was dark, ugly, and morbid... THAT WAS THE POINT! It was made to scare the crap out of you and think you were in a terrible place that you wan't to get out of as quickly as possible. That was what made it fun, the rush... Multiplayer was a huge community as well, a very fast paced and entertaining experience, once you were good at it. I still have friends from high school that like to play it. We play it at least once at every LAN party we have, mainly for the nostalgia... It's loads of fun. This is really one of the main games that started it all. If it hadn't been for Quake, it is possible several of things we take for granted and enjoy in today's games wouldn't exist. Yes it's old and ugly compared to new games, but some say the same about a 1960's Mustang, but to others, that meant the beginning of a new era.

Don't be a hater, just say you didn't care for Quake 1.... Quake 2 was definitely fun in its own way, but it was certainly different from quake 1, and a lot of us were expecting Quake 2 to be the continuation of 1, which it wasn't. That disappointed many of us but it was still fun and still has a place.
 
Happy Birthday Quake.
Im another fan of this FPS series, Quake II was my favourite, I remember buying a 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 card for it, and those lighting effects were the bomb :) Q3 Arena consumed my life for an era lol, then all the mods, Team Arena, Rocket Arena.... Might have to pull it out and have a game over the weekend to relive old times.
 
Rumor has it that Quake 5 (if it ever gets made) might be a reboot of Quake 1, thereby forgetting the Strogs. I would like that! I never understood why Quake II was called Quake when it had nothing to do with the first one.

I know "Quake" was a codename for the enemy the marine was supposed to stop in the first one. I guess it was the same for Quake II and 4.

Still, going back to the Lovecraftian fantasy environment would be awesome.
 
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