Editing Quake (video game) (section)

==Development==
===Design===
''Quake'''s development was troubled, and the game went through several incarnations over the course of its development.

====''The Fight for Justice'' (1990-91)====
In the early 1990s, the staff at [[id Software]] had a private ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]'' game, which would go on to inspire a number of elements in their titles over the following years. With [[John Carmack]] as [[Dungeon Master|DM]], the campaign featured a group of adventurers named the Silver Shadow Band. The group were named for the silver dragon on which they flew, and each represented one of the core stats of the game. Among them was a powerful character named Quake, representing strength, who fought with a magic hammer capable of destroying buildings. Quake was accompanied by a floating magic artefact named the Hellgate Cube which attacked his foes with lightning bolts.<ref name="doomguy 198-213">{{Cite book |last=Romero |first=John |title=Doom Guy: Life in First Person |publisher=Abrams Press |year=2023 |isbn=978-1-4197-5811-9 |location=New York |pages=198–213 |oclc=on1389830938}}</ref> [[John Romero]] described fighting alongside Quake as the most fun they had playing ''D&D''. The Silver Shadow Band did "contract work for Justice, an even more powerful group". The original campaign concluded in early 1992, after Romero's character made a deal with a demon, exchanging a book called the Demonomicron for a magic sword called the Daikatana, which resulted in a demonic invasion that wiped out the [[Material Plane]].<ref>{{harvnb|Romero|2023|pp=126–145}}</ref>

A preview included with id Software's first release, 1990's ''[[Commander Keen]]'', advertised a game entitled ''The Fight for Justice'' as a follow-up to the ''Commander Keen'' trilogy. It would feature a character named Quake, "the strongest, most dangerous person on the continent", armed with thunderbolts and a "Ring of Regeneration". Conceived as a [[Video Graphics Array|VGA]] full-color [[Side-scrolling game|side-scrolling]] [[role-playing video game]], ''The Fight for Justice'' was never released. The team briefly explored making the project in 1991 but abandoned the idea as the technology for it simply did not exist at the time. The project was only in development for about two weeks.<ref name="doomguy 198-213" />

====As a melee action game (1994-95)====
A return to the ''Quake'' concept was raised by John Romero in a meeting in late 1994, when discussing the next [[Game engine|engine]] and main project after the completion of ''[[Doom II]]''. Newer members of the team, including [[American McGee]] and [[Sandy Petersen]], had not been present for the original D&D campaign or game project, but were on board with the idea after it was explained to them, and the team was then in agreement about the broad direction of the title. In a December 1, 1994, post to an online bulletin board, John Romero wrote, "Okay, people. It seems that everyone is speculating on whether Quake is going to be a slow, RPG-style light-action game. Wrong! What does id do best and dominate at? Can you say "action"? I knew you could. Quake will be constant, hectic action throughout – probably more so than Doom".<ref>{{Cite journal |date=October 1995 |title=Quake Short Stories |journal=Maximum: The Video Game Magazine |publisher=[[Emap International Limited]] |issue=1 |page=135}}</ref>

The team entered into an R&D phase while Carmack was working on the engine. By 1995, the outline for the game included a medieval setting, hand-to-hand combat, thrown weapons, an area of effect attack with the hammer, and feeding souls to the Hellgate Cube.<ref name="doomguy 198-213" /> Some early information on ''Quake'' was released publicly, focusing on a [[Thor]]-like character who wields a giant hammer.<ref>{{Cite magazine |last=Longden |first=Willie Francis |date=June 1994 |title=This Horse Is A Norse |url=http://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/index.php?year=1994&pub=2&id=119 |department=The Rumor Bag |magazine=Computer Gaming World |pages=178}}</ref><ref>{{Cite magazine |last=Lombardi |first=Chris |date=July 1994 |title=To Hell and Back Again |url=http://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/index.php?year=1994&pub=2&id=120 |magazine=Computer Gaming World |pages=20–24}}</ref><ref name=Max6>{{Cite journal |last1=Jevons |first1=Daniel |last2=Leadbetter |first2=Richard |date=May 1996 |title=The Maximum id Inquisition Begins Here! |journal=Maximum: The Video Game Magazine |publisher=[[Emap International Limited]] |issue=6 |pages=96–97}}</ref> A close up of Quake holding his hammer was on the cover of ''[[PC Gamer]]'' for the October 1995 issue, and screenshots showed medieval environments and a dragon.<ref name=PCGamer/> Romero revealed in 2023 that the dragon model was never actually implemented, and had simply been placed in the sky for the screenshot. The plan was for the game to have more role-playing-style elements.<ref name="doomguy 214-235">{{harvnb|Romero|2023|pp=214–235}}</ref> An ''[[Aztec (video game)|Aztec]]'' style texture set was developed for the project, but the set was not used due to artistic opposition from American McGee, who preferred a more heavy metal themed look for his levels. This second texture set was used for the Vaults of Zin.<ref>{{harvnb|Romero|2023|pp=236–247}}</ref>

Before gameplay could be worked on in earnest, Carmack would need to build the game engine which was a significant undertaking, and took much longer than anticipated.<ref name="doomguy 198-213" /> Carmack was not only developing a fully 3D engine, but also a TCP/IP networking model. Carmack later said that he should have done two separate projects which developed those things- the networking model first, used for a game which was otherwise in the ''Doom II'' engine, and then the 3D overhaul for a second title.<ref name="doomguy 248-274">{{harvnb|Romero|2023|pp=248–274}}</ref> The [[Quake engine|''Quake'' engine]] popularized several major advances in the genre: polygonal models instead of [[prerendered]] [[sprite (computer graphics)|sprites]]; full 3D level design instead of a [[2.5D]] map; prerendered [[lightmap]]s; and allowing end users to partially program the game (in this case with [[QuakeC]]), which popularized fan-created [[Mod (computer gaming)|modifications (mods)]].

====As a first person shooter (1995-96)====
Working with a game engine that was still in development presented difficulties for the designers.<ref>{{Cite magazine |date=October 1997 |title=The Great Escape |magazine=[[Next Generation (magazine)|Next Generation]] |publisher=[[Imagine Media]] |issue=34 |page=44}}</ref> Around fifty levels were developed during the R&D process, but engine changes meant that the team was frequently having to redo work. Much of this needed to be scrapped by the time the engine was completed in late 1995. The team was burned out from the process, and raised the idea of using the existing demo levels for a first person shooter, as it would be faster and less risky.<ref name=Max6/> Romero opposed the change, but relented. The creative differences would ultimately lead to his departure from the company after completing ''Quake''.<ref name="doomguy 248-274" /><ref name=nextgen>{{Cite magazine |date=June 1997 |title=Does John Romero Still Enjoy Shooting People? |url=https://archive.org/stream/NextGeneration30Jun1997/Next_Generation_30_Jun_1997#page/n9/mode/2up |magazine=[[Next Generation (magazine)|Next Generation]] |issue=30 |pages=9–12}}</ref><ref>{{Cite magazine |date=May 2, 1997 |title=An Audience with John Romero |url=https://archive.org/details/EDGE.N045.1997.05/page/n17/mode/2up |magazine=[[Edge (magazine)|Edge]] |issue=45 (May 1997) |pages=18–23 |quote=My original idea was to do something like ''Virtua Fighter'' in a 3D world, with full-contact fighting, but you'd also be able to run through a world, and do the same stuff you do in ''Quake'', only when you got into these melees, the camera would pull out into a third-person perspective. It would've been great, but nobody else had faith in trying it. The project was taking too long, and everybody just wanted to fall back on the safe thing – the formula.}}</ref>

''Quake'' was programmed by John Carmack, [[Michael Abrash]], and John Cash. The levels and scenarios were designed by [[American McGee]], [[Sandy Petersen]], John Romero, and [[Tim Willits]], and the graphics were designed by [[Adrian Carmack]], [[Kevin Cloud]] and Paul Steed. Cloud created the monster and player graphics using [[PowerAnimator|Alias]].<ref>{{Cite journal |date=April 1996 |title=Earth-Quake! |journal=Maximum: The Video Game Magazine |publisher=[[Emap International Limited]] |issue=5 |pages=124–9}}</ref> Initially, the game was designed so that when the player ran out of ammunition, the player character would hit enemies with a [[gun-butt]].<ref name=Max6/> Shortly before release this was replaced with an [[axe]]. id Software released ''QTest'' on February 24, 1996, a technology demo limited to three multiplayer maps. There was no single-player support and some of the gameplay and graphics were unfinished or different from their final versions. ''QTest'' gave gamers their first peek into the filesystem and modifiability of the ''Quake'' engine, and many entity mods (that placed monsters in the otherwise empty multiplayer maps) and custom player skins began appearing online before the full game was even released.<ref>{{Cite news |last=Davison |first=Pete |date=August 2, 2013 |title=Blast from the Past III: Quaking in Fear |work=[[USgamer]] |url=https://www.usgamer.net/articles/blast-from-the-past-iii-quaking-in-fear |access-date=November 26, 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130804120931/https://www.usgamer.net/articles/blast-from-the-past-iii-quaking-in-fear |archive-date=2013-08-04}}</ref>

Morale on the project was low, and developers were under [[Crunch (video games)|crunch]] from December 1995 through to release in June 1996. Romero has described the process as one of the hardest grinds of his career. He was the only member of the team to attend the office on launch day to upload the files.<ref name="doomguy 248-274" />

=== Audio ===
{{Main|Quake (soundtrack)}}
[[File:American McGee at id Software, 6 October 1995 (by Ian Mapleson, administrator of the Doom Help Service).jpg|thumb|American McGee at id in October 1995, with a Nine Inch Nails shirt]]
''Quake''{{'}}s music and sound design was done by [[Trent Reznor]] and [[Nine Inch Nails]], using ambient soundscapes and synthesized [[drone (music)|drone]]s to create atmospheric tracks. In an interview, Reznor remarked that the ''Quake'' soundtrack "is not music[;] it's textures and ambiences and whirling machine noises and stuff. We tried to make the most sinister, depressive, scary, frightening kind of thing... It's been fun."<ref>{{Cite magazine |date=November 1995 |title=More Pictures |magazine=Maximum: The Video Game Magazine |publisher=[[Emap International Limited]] |issue=2 |pages=126–7}}</ref> The game includes an homage to Reznor in the form of ammo boxes for the "Nailgun" and "Super Nailgun" decorated with the Nine Inch Nails logo.

The idea to use Nine Inch Nails for the soundtrack was raised by American McGee, who had been listening to their album ''[[The Downward Spiral]]'' during his work on the game. Romero was initially skeptical as he had envisioned a more ambient tone, but was open to the idea of the band composing with that tone in mind. id approached the band's agents, and the group had agreed to do the soundtrack by the following day as they were ''Doom'' fans and excited by the project. McGee handled the delivery of the soundtrack from there on. A legal issue that rose late in development with the record company meant that the code to play the audio from the CD was among the final changes made before release.<ref name="doomguy 214-235" />

Some digital re-releases of the game lack the CD soundtrack that came with the original [[shareware]] release. The 2021 enhanced version includes the soundtrack.<ref name="quake-remaster-gamespot">{{Cite web |last=Koch |first=Cameron |date=August 19, 2021 |title=Original Quake Is Back, This Time On Consoles And With Its Original Soundtrack |url=https://www.gamespot.com/articles/original-quake-is-back-this-time-on-consoles-and-with-its-original-soundtrack/1100-6495354/ |access-date=August 19, 2021 |website=[[GameSpot]]}}</ref>

===Source ports===
====VQuake====
In late 1996, id Software released VQuake, a [[source port]] of the ''Quake'' engine to support hardware accelerated rendering on graphics cards using the [[Rendition Vérité]] chipset. Aside from the expected benefit of improved performance, VQuake offered numerous visual improvements over the original software-rendered ''Quake''. It boasted full 16-bit color, bilinear filtering (reducing pixelation), improved dynamic lighting, optional anti-aliasing, and improved source code clarity, as the improved performance finally allowed the use of gotos to be abandoned in favor of proper loop constructs. As the name implied, VQuake was a proprietary source port specifically for the Vérité; consumer 3D acceleration was in its infancy at the time, and there was no standard 3D API for the consumer market. After completing VQuake, John Carmack vowed to never write a proprietary port again, citing his frustration with Rendition's Speedy3D API.{{citation needed|date=May 2023}}

====QuakeWorld====
To improve the quality of online play, id Software released QuakeWorld in December 1996, a build of the ''Quake'' engine that featured significantly revamped network code including the addition of [[client-side prediction]]. The original ''Quake''{{'s}} network code would not show the player the results of their actions until the server sent back a reply acknowledging them. For example, if the player attempted to move forward, the client would send the request to move forward to the server, and the server would determine whether the client was actually able to move forward or if it ran into an obstacle, such as a wall or another player. The server would then respond to the client, and only then would the client display movement to the player. This was fine for play on a LAN, a high bandwidth, very low latency connection, but the latency over a dial-up Internet connection is much larger than on a LAN, and this caused a noticeable delay between when a player tried to act and when that action was visible on the screen. This made gameplay much more difficult, especially since the unpredictable nature of the Internet made the amount of delay vary from moment to moment. Players would experience jerky, laggy motion that sometimes felt like ice skating, where they would slide around with seemingly no ability to stop, due to a build-up of previously sent movement requests. John Carmack has admitted that this was a serious problem that should have been fixed before release, but it was not caught because he and other developers had high-speed Internet access at home.{{citation needed|date=May 2023}}

After months of private beta testing, QuakeWorld, written by John Carmack with help from John Cash and Christian Antkow, was released on December 13, 1996. The client portion followed on December 17.<ref>{{Cite web |date=October 16, 2006 |title=GameSpy.com - Articles |url=http://archive.gamespy.com/legacy/articles/quakeworld_a.shtm |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061016094830/http://archive.gamespy.com/legacy/articles/quakeworld_a.shtm |archive-date=October 16, 2006 |access-date=December 21, 2020}}</ref> Official id Software development stopped with the test release of QuakeWorld 2.33 on December 21, 1998. The last official stable release was 2.30.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Blue's News - August 22-28, 1998 |url=http://www.bluesnews.com/archives/aug98-4.html |website=Blue's News}}</ref> QuakeWorld has been described by [[IGN]] as the first popular [[first-person shooter]] meant to be played [[Online game|online]].<ref>{{Cite web |date=January 7, 2010 |title=The History of Online Shooters |url=http://www.ign.com/articles/2010/01/07/the-history-of-online-shooters |access-date=November 7, 2015 |website=[[IGN]]}}</ref>

With the help of [[client-side prediction]], which allowed players to see their own movement immediately without waiting for a response from the server, QuakeWorld's network code allowed players with high-latency connections to control their character's movement almost as precisely as when playing in single-player mode. The [[Netcode]] parameters could be adjusted by the user so that ''QuakeWorld'' performed well for users with high and low latency. The trade off to client-side prediction was that sometimes other players or objects would no longer be quite where they had appeared to be, or, in extreme cases, that the player would be pulled back to a previous position when the client received a late reply from the server which overrode movement the client had already previewed; this was known as "warping". As a result, some serious players, particularly in the U.S., still preferred to play online using the original ''Quake'' engine (commonly called NetQuake) rather than QuakeWorld. However, the majority of players, especially those on dial-up connections, preferred the newer network model, and QuakeWorld soon became the dominant form of online play. Following the success of QuakeWorld, client-side prediction has become a standard feature of nearly all real-time online games. As with all other ''Quake'' upgrades, QuakeWorld was released as a free, unsupported add-on to the game and was updated numerous times through 1998.{{citation needed|date=May 2023}}

In January 1997 an independant developer, Nick Maher, developed a version of the Quake World master server (called QuakeWorld Local) that could be run on a LAN without an Internet connection. The software tracked player statistics over time and allowed international players without a QuakeWorld server on their continent, or without Internet access at all, to enjoy the new client.<ref>{{Cite web |date=January 5, 1997 |title=QuakeWorld Local |url=https://www.bluesnews.com/s/225281/quakeworld-local|website=Blue's News}}</ref>

====GLQuake====
On January 22, 1997, id Software released{{clarification needed|date=November 2024}} the first beta of GLQuake. This was designed to use the [[OpenGL]] 3D [[Application programming interface|API]] to access hardware 3D graphics acceleration cards to [[rasterization|rasterize]] the graphics, rather than having the computer's [[CPU]] fill in every [[pixel]]. In addition to higher framerates for most players, GLQuake provided higher [[display resolution|resolution]] modes and [[texture filtering]]. GLQuake also experimented with reflections, transparent water, and even rudimentary shadows. GLQuake came with a [[MiniGL|driver]] enabling the subset of OpenGL used by the game to function on the [[3dfx]] [[Voodoo Graphics]] card, the only consumer-level card at the time capable of running GLQuake well. Previously, John Carmack had experimented with a version of ''Quake'' specifically written for the [[Rendition Vérité]] chip used in the [[Creative Labs]] PCI 3D Blaster card. This version had met with only limited success, and Carmack decided to write for generic APIs in the future rather than tailoring for specific hardware.{{Citation needed|date=March 2023}}

====WinQuake====
On March 11, 1997, id Software released WinQuake, a version of the non-OpenGL engine designed to run under [[Microsoft Windows]];{{clarification needed|date=November 2024}} the original ''Quake'' had been written for [[MS-DOS]], allowing for launch from [[Windows 95]], but could not run under [[Windows NT]]-based operating systems because it needed direct access to hardware. WinQuake instead accessed hardware via [[Win32]]-based APIs such as [[DirectSound]], [[DirectInput]], and [[DirectDraw]] that were supported on Windows 95, [[Windows NT 4.0]] and later releases. Like GLQuake, WinQuake also allowed higher resolution video modes. This removed the last barrier to widespread popularity of the game.

====vkQuake====
On July 20, 2016, Axel Gneiting, an id Tech employee responsible for implementing the [[Vulkan (API)|Vulkan]] rendering path to the [[id Tech 6]] engine used in [[Doom (2016 video game)|''Doom'' (2016)]], released a source port called vkQuake under the [[GNU General Public License#Version 2|GPLv2]].<ref>{{Cite web |last=Gneiting |first=Axel |date=July 20, 2016 |title=My Vulkan Quake 1 Port running 'In the Shadows' mod. Some stuff still missing. Code is here github.com/Novum/vkQuake |url=https://twitter.com/axelgneiting/status/755988244408381443 |access-date=August 6, 2016 |via=Twitter}}</ref>{{Primary source inline|date=May 2023}}<ref>{{Cite web |date=October 16, 2019 |title=vkQuake on github |url=https://github.com/Novum/vkQuake |website=[[GitHub]]}}</ref>