Inside3D Asks #4: Quake 1 and the community.

[Error]

[Error]

[ceriux]

[Junrall]

[mh]

The Atmosphere of the Game

It's unique. There was never anything like it before and never anything like it after. It may have had a somewhat screwed-up gestation, but that's all part of what makes it so special and different (and why it won't happen again).

The Simplicity

You just dive in and start shooting. There's no fooling around with alternate fire modes, no fooling around with inventory management, no fooling around with 25,000 different game modes. More complex games have their place and can be fun too, but there is also a place for something pure and simple.

The Community

Mappers spurring engine coders on to do greater things, everyone sharing ideas, the sense of genuine support for and interest in people's work. That's what's really keeping Q1 alive.

Weak Points

The NQ vs WQ and SP vs MP splits. This doesn't globally apply, but there is a certain amount of 1337-ism in parts of the community which is detrimental - things that could be of benefit to everyone end up being compartmentalised. On the other hand it does allow someone to pick their niche and really go for it.

[dreadlorde]

Simplicity, Generality, Clarity.

[Sajt]

Well, each and every modern game is poison to me. If I didn't come back to pre-1997 games (not that I ever left them), I would have declared ALL games to be crap, and find something better to do with my life (as to whether that would have been a good thing... I leave to the historians). I still like Quake for its purity as a GAME, but also because of its atmosphere. Unfortunately, I've played every map 1000 times (and e1m1 800,000 times) by now, so it's lost some of its freshness. But Quake's atmosphere still strikes me by its potential, how it approached something which no other game has come closer to... and yet Quake is still so far away. That thought has driven scar3crow and I to (somewhat) incessantly pursue the design of a modern game based on where the FPS genre (and a game's atmosphere) SHOULD have gone after Quake.

Most of my programming time nowadays (since 2006 actually) is spent on original from-scratch projects, but I still like to come back to Quake modding. Unfortunately every time I start a mod I realize that it will suck if it doesn't have its own map, and none of my 12,000 maps have ever made it past two or three rooms. This is why the recent Hellsmash QSR beta was so amazing to me. A mod with a map?! Has that ever happened since the old commercial TC days?!

[goldenboy]

[Sajt]

[Error]

[LonePossum.]

[Sajt]

[Irritant]

It wasn't so much Quake that I was drawn to, but id Software, which by proxy of making it easy to modify it's games, created the online community that grew and flourished around them. Way back in the day, talking early 90's here, the only real "community" was via the ftp archives that were run by Joost Schuur, and the readme.txt files that accompanied the Doom mods and maps.

By the time Quake was released, the interwebs were upon us in full force, and everything was changing dramatically. From 1996-1998, this was the "glory years" of Quake, and eventually Quake II. The amount of cool mods and community activity was amazing, and will probably never be duplicated. Nothing really compared to it, and nothing really has since.

So why Quake? Well, when id Software began releasing the sources of it's engines, we were given a base toolkit to learn about engine programming, and the template for creating even greater creations. Sure, the original game is dated, and probably not that often played anymore, but the projects that have spawn out of it continue on, and the engines that were based on it continue to evolve into much more modern marvels.

[Baker]

[Downsider]