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Sonic isn’t the only one celebrating a birthday today, as the influential FPS Quake turns 15.
The eagerly anticipated follow up to Doom, Quake was released on the PC June 22, 1996. As well as being one of the first games to use fully polygonal graphics and hardware acceleration, it’s responsible for many trends still seen in the FPS genre today – standardised mouse look and the WASD control scheme can both be traced back to Quake.
Although id Software’s John Carmack is currently in the midst of the “final crunch” for Rage, he had time to spare a few thoughts for Quake.
“I have a bit more subdued memory of Quake than many of our other projects, because the development was so tough.” he looks back.
“It was the first project where I really had to grapple with my personal limitations; I had bitten off a little more than I could chew with all the big steps at once – full 3D world, 3D characters, light maps, PVS calculations, game scripting, client / server networking, etc. No matter how hard I worked, things just weren’t getting done when we wanted them to.”
“I look back at Quake as the golden age of game modding, before the standards rose so high that it required almost a full time commitment to do something relevant. I am very proud that many of today’s industry greats trace their start back to working with Quake.”
More of Carmack’s Quake memories can be read on the Bethesda Blog.
