Inducted: 2025
A dark, medieval world filled with peculiar technology and Lovecraftian creatures. Quake was a first-person shooter built with the mouse in mind, making use completely of its 3D space. Unlike its predecessor Doom, Quake’s engine offered true, real-time 3D rendering. 3D optimized gameplay with pre-processed and pre-rendered backgrounds sped up processing times that were typically sluggish during this time.
id Software took the success they had with Doom multiplayer deathmatches and expanded it; Quake’s multiplayer portion of the game proved to be massively popular with early online users. By 1996, many college campuses were hooked up to the internet, and dial-up was becoming more widespread in homes. Online multiplayer games were becoming more feasible for the average home user, and this paired with Quake’s quick rendering and fun multiplayer component, skyrocketed the game’s popularity. Quake not only changed how people played games, but how games were made. The peer-to-peer system, while effective, was limiting. Quake popularized the server/client architecture system, which allowed players to host their own servers. Eventually, QuakeSpy (or QSpy) came along and gave users the ability to search for online Quake servers. From a modern perspective this is something that is available on almost any game with online functionality today–and it was born here, in Quake, almost thirty years ago.
Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor composed the game’s music, producing a highly ambient soundtrack. Creepy, dark, brooding, and atmospheric, the score perfectly punctuated the game’s campaign. Quake’s music is still hailed today as being one of the best video game soundtracks of all time.
Quake was the first shooter to get widespread mod support, and this kept the community alive and active far past the average single player campaign time. Team Fortress 2, one of the most played online games even today, began its life as a Quake mod. The growth of this modding community was not accidental, for Quake’s lead developers John Carmack and John Romero intentionally made it easy for players to access the game’s assets and modify them for their own purposes. One thing that players began doing, that the designers didn’t necessarily expect, was to use the game to make movies such as the short film “Diary of a Camper.” Soon this filmmaking proliferated as more and more users created “Quake movies” which eventually became known as machinima. A whole new way of playing with video games, in addition to playing them, was born.
Perhaps Quake’s biggest legacy is that the game was central to the creation of esports as an industry. The first online national game competition, entitled “Red Annihilation,” used Quake and started the domino effect of televised online gaming competitions, which would in turn become an industry worth over a billion dollars. Quake’s legacy lives on in its atmospheric single player campaign, its influence in how online games are played, its active modding community, and its creation and shaping of esports. Not only this, but Quake’s code is a literal legacy, The Quake Engine Family Tree as it is called, has dozens of branches interconnecting different IPs with Quake through its legacy code–franchises. Represented among these are: Heretic, Hexen, Doom, Call of Duty, and many more. Quake has been influential in nearly every category a game can be influential in, but of few games can it be said that its bones—its code—continues to be present in modern games, more than twenty-five years after its release.
Did You Know?
Professional gamer Dennis “Thresh” Fong won Quake co-developer John Carmack’s red Ferrari at the 1997 Red Annihilation Quake esports competition.