Quake's 30th Anniversary

Yesterday, Bethesda released a major update for Quake—one of the most influential games of my formative years, and video gaming as a whole. Setting aside the nostalgia this event evokes (many of my cherished tween memories involve Quake), I’m surprised and delighted by this.

I’m surprised because there were recently massive layoffs at id software that left the company’s future in jeopardy. This shocked me: “Surely, id Software wouldn’t be gutted? Some of gaming’s legendary series came from id,” I thought. Reading the release statement at Bethesda reveals they contracted the development of this update to MachineGames, so even if the Quake product owners at id were impacted by the layoffs, this release was almost certainly finished before they were let go. Still, the fact that such massive layoffs hit one of gaming’s most important and influential design studios is concerning.

I’m delighted because it’s great to see support for a thirty-year-old game continue. Of course, this isn’t just any tricenarian; Quake is one of the first truly 3D PC FPS games whose impact reverberated throughout all of gaming when it released in 1996. That a game of this vintage continues to receive support and have new official content produced should be celebrated.

Extensibility Equals Longevity

While new official content is welcome, Quake has continued to thrive in the past three decades because of John Carmack’s decision to release the game’s engine as open source along with level and asset editors. When id Software moved on to Quake II and later projects, fans of the original—myself very much included—could continue to modify (or “mod”) Quake and extend its life.

Those cherished tween memories I mentioned a moment ago involve countless hours “mapping” or creating levels for Quake. My first software purchase was Ben Morris’s WorldCraft, a level editor for Quake that allowed me to bring my level ideas to life. Although I first started mapping id’s Doom and Doom II, it was Quake mapping that allowed me to extend my creativity vertically through 3D worlds and levels.

And I wasn’t the only one. The creators of Team Fortress, a popular Quake mod, went on to be hired by Valve Software to develop Team Fortress Classic for Half-Life and then eventually Team Fortress 2, a game with ~60k daily active players.

If id Software had kept Quake closed-source without releasing development tools, I doubt it would have survived as a cultural icon.

Longevity Equals Creativity

Beyond cultural relevance, id’s openness enabled an avalanche of excellent content for Quake. I’ve only moderately followed the Quake modding scene since the 2000s, but here are just some of the excellent mods you can play for free:

• Arcane Dimensions (my favorite so far: new weapons and monsters, and some individual maps are as long as entire vanilla Quake episodes!)
• Alkaline Quake
• Quake Brutalist Jam 3
• More at Slipgate Sightseer

Celebration

And so, today when work is over, I’ll be doing what I did thirty years ago: firing up Quake and talking about it on IRC. Here’s to thirty more years!