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Five Years of Quake
Jacek Fedorynski writes "On this day five years ago the shareware version of Quake has hit the Net and changed the world forever. There's a pretty good article about the history of Quake on Methos Quake. It's got an interview with John Romero and Tim Willits."
And if you read the interview, the interviewees seem to be acknowledging that. To paraphrase every single question in the interview:
Interviewer: It was great how Quake invented foo.
Interviewee: We made some improvements over Doom/Wolfstein that regard.
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Now all games look the same! Give me the good ol' c64-games instead. Atleast back then gameplay was more important than fancy graphics and 3d accelerators.
Actually, the first multiplayer 3d shooter was probably a tank fighting game that was a GL demo for SGI systems. Kind of a neat game actually. It got better as GL got better. Preceeded even Wolfenstein 3D, but it required awesomely expensive hardware. :-)
Also, the multiplayer innovations in Quake were actually, to my knowledge, pioneered in nettrek for Unix boxes as well.
For a couple of other borrowed ideas...
I like the PC games mentioned, and have a lot of respect for those who wrote them. But, sometimes it irritates me that people forget the genesis of the big ideas that went into them.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
It seems to me that I remember playing Marathon from Bungie back at the end of 1994 or early 1995. There was a demo that was released with two or three levels and we had a good number of folks in biology and genetics that would get together for a good net duel on Friday afternoons in eager anticipation of the release of the full product. The grenade hop and the rocket launcher were awesome.
Does anyone know what the timeline was for Quake versus Marathon? I may be wrong here, but Marathon seems to come first in my mind for the first person 3D shooter. It may be that Bungie was developing for the Macintosh and fewer folks were exposed to it at the time, but the story of Bungie goes something like this: A few great programmers and artists get together and make a few killer products on the MacOS (Pathways into Darkness, Marathon etc...). Company decides to move development to Windows in addition to MacOS to make more money. Linux comes along and company starts developing for Linux. An awesome looking program begins development (HALO). Another company, M$ decides they want to own the game console market. M$ buys Bungie and HALO is forever lost to Linux, and possibly the MacOS.
At any rate, I would appreciate any info from those who remembers Marathon and know of the development timeline between Marathon and Quake.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
It was hard to find people who were willing to play Descent. It seems too many people were made physically ill by the realistic nothing-is-up-or-down environment.
My favorite part was when you blew up your opponents their "goodies" would float there for the taking.
The credit for the greatness of Quake is often shared between John Carmack (for his technical prowess) and John Romero (for his design skills). I, however, believe that the real genius behind Quake was American McGee. He made the two awesome maps (DM2 and DM4). Admittedly DM3 was Romero's creation.
IMO, Willits is a 'YES' man of the worst kind. He made DM1 (wtf?!) and the passable DM6 but is lauded like some sort of major contributor.
If you look at the following games that each of them made, Quake II for Carmack, Daikatana (stop laughing at the back!) for Romero and Alice for McGee, I think it is apparent who had the flair and imagination to push boundaries. Even though it was made within a corporate enviroment Alice was still refreshing and innovative (although not without flaws).
He's just started a new company and I await its creations with baited breath.
And computers are just a bloated rehash of television, which is just a bloated rehash of radio, which is just a bloated rehash of the written word, which is just a bloated rehash of people using their imaginations for everything.
Who the hell modded this 'insightful?'
I remember this: "What are they thinking? Why would they give something like this away for free?"
Where were you when Quake was released?
Got Rhinos?
I don't put a lot of stock in pinning down "firsts", even though people in general, and the media in particular, love to harp on it.
Everything is built on past work.
A lot of people like to think of creativity and innovation as something that springs from the void, but the truth is that everything is traceable to its origins.
I consider myself fortunate that I am consciously aware of the process. I can dissect all of my good ideas into their original parts, and even when there is an interesting synthesis, the transformation can usually be posed as an analogy to some previous work.
Given that fact, you will rarely find me touting anything as a "first", because I could always say it is "sort of like this thing over here, but with the principle demonstrated by this over there added to allow it to give the feature we wanted back then" and so on.
There are the occasional "eureka!" moments, but they tend to be in twitchy little technical things, not the larger ideas like "3D environment" or "multiplayer gaming".
I'm not all that concerned with our place in history. The process has been interesting enough in its own right, and lots of people have enjoyed the work as we produced it.
John Carmack
The first stable release of Quake for Linux should be out soon.
-gerbik
--come'on.
--Quake isn't a huge step from Doom. Yes, it is better than Doom in some technical ways but as a game it (and Doom for that matter) are not terribly different from Space Invaders or Asteroids. [It's you against a never ending supply of baddies coming at you.]
--FPS hadn't changed much from Wolfenstein. In terms of importance I'd rate Zork, Pirates!, Sim City and Civilization MAGNATUDUES higher than Quake.
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This
But the truly l33t were all over Smashing Pumpkins into Small Piles of Putrid Debris (aka SPISPOD), which essentially "[was] to DOOM what DOOM was to Pong."
J
- Aiming proxies
- Campers
- Lusers who complain about packet latency
- Hundreds, if not thousands of lame imitations
- Massive hardware requirements for *every* game, regardless of genre
- Game developers who are more concerned with game-engine mechanics than gameplay
- dozens of lame gaming comics
- CTF jokes
- Daikatana
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Yes, Quake might feel like another doom clone. While not initially impressed by Quakes graphics or game play (although good) , what made Quake was TCP/IP. Who doesn't remember their first time joining a server hundreds of miles away and fragging people you never knew. Kids today don't think twice about doing that with Counterstrike/Q3 etc, but it used to mean something. We used to have LAN emulation with things like Kali and the like, and the games WOULD NEVER WORK. Yet we'd keep trying. I think I maybe had 1 playable game of DuekNukem on Kali in 3 months, but just the fact I was playing was cool enough. Now if you have an 80 ping, players bitch of Lag. I only stopped playing Quake last year, but its amazing how far online gaming has come since, and due to, Quake I. Long live Quake I, tonight I'll drink to you.
Quite simply, Quake 2 is the best First Person Shooter created, ever.
Its too bad the people at id listened to the extremely vocal minority of 'hardcore' gamers that couldn't adjust to Quake 2's more cerebral style of gameplay and they made Quake 3 far too Quake 1 like.
Ah well.
You never saw Beaver Cleaver try a rocket launcher jump! Nowadays you cant go anywhere without being accosted by a gang of 13 year old miscreants with BFGs. Back in my day...
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
Then you've got to be talking about Marathon. Sure, it was only for the Macintosh for the longest time, but not only did it manage to include some amazing 3d engine work (for the time), it had a plot.
Shocking, I know. But that's why li'l ol' Marathon still beats out Quake [II[I]] in my book. Now that it's open sourced, it even has OpenGL support. All it's missing now is some good ol' TCP/IP networking...
Haven't really been keeping up with things...is this anything like Pong?