Quake may be the most influential game of all time. Not the best game, not the most innovative, but the most influential. Without it, the industry would be a very different place today. It gave rise to many of aspects of modern gaming that we take for granted. Its developers, modders, and even the very code of the game itself are ubiquitous in the industry today. Id Software's 1996 FPS gave rise to 3D gaming, client/server online play, the most prolific mod scene in history, multiplayer clans, server browsers, eSports, mouse-look as the PC control standard, Valve and dozens of other companies, and even 1UP's sister website, GameSpy. Without Quake, it's unlikely another game that featured the same suite of innovations would have come along. We would have had to wait for each of those things one at a time.
Quake came together almost by accident. There was no design document for the first half of its development, and the game that shipped was very different from what the creators first held in their minds in the beginning (if they had anything in mind). In 1994 id Software released Doom II. The company was riding high and seemed unstoppable. They announced that their next game would be Quake, a project they had started and abandoned years earlier, according to John Romero, id co-founder lead game designer, and Tools Programmer, "When we finished our first Commander Keen series on December 14th, 1990, we immediately started working on Quake in January. It was a top-down RPG, and was supposed to be based on our D&D campaign we were playing. The character of Quake was in this group called the Silver Shadow Band. It was a very small elite group of super badass characters. [He was this] Thor-like guy, and he had this amazing hammer, and this thing called the Hellgate Cube -- which was a sentient inter-dimensional cube that would rotate around him and go do its own thing depending on what was going on." He continues "We worked on it for two weeks and it was like, 'you know what, there's no way that this thing is looking as awesome as Quake really is, so let's just stop making Quake right now. So we decided to just sort of shelve it and wait until we had really great technology to make this a reality."
The tech came quickly. Each new id game was a technological revolution. Wolfenstein made the first-person shooter mainstream; Doom introduced the world to deathmatch and modding. It seemed only natural that id's next game would be an equal leap forward. The team made it look so easy. It was anything but. The tech required for Quake was far more complex than they ever imagined, and the id Software that started the game was very different from the one that finished it. In the year following the game's release developer blogs and interviews to the press were filled with gossip about id's troubles. At the same time, the team was revolutionizing 3D graphics and online play with an OpenGL version for then-cutting edge 3D accelerators (known today simply as video cards) and QuakeWorld, which added server browsing and improved online performance.
How did a small company of less than two dozen change the entire industry? The various stories from the game's developers fit together in a Rashomon-like way. Often during our interviews, we would hear the same story from three different people and get three drastically different takes on the past. Sure, the general facts line up, but if we didn't know better, we'd suspect our interview subjects were working on different games entirely. The men who were there making Quake can't even agree on the origins of the game's most revolutionary feature, internet play.
Before Quake, online gaming was something for those willing to pay a premium. Services like DWANGO (Dial-up Wide-Area Network Game Operation) and TEN (Total Entertainment Network) sprang up overnight to provide online play for games like Duke Nukem 3D and Doom that supported LAN play, but had no internet functionality. Quake changed everything with the creation of the server/client architecture still used by games today. Players would login to a host computer that was preferably dedicated solely to that task alone. It was a revolutionary idea at the time, according to level designer Tim Willits, "In 1996 there wasn't much of an internet. Doom was a peer-to peer-system, and a pain in the ass. Quake was the first true PC server/client architecture system. People told us we were crazy. They said, why would anyone run a Quake server on their machine to allow people they don't know to play a game?"
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