Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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