| abstract | - Quake traces its origins back to a promotion in the first Commander Keen trilogy, where it was titled Quake: The Fight For Justice. It was going to be much more like a role-playing game than a shooter. The player was named Quake (taken from a Dungeons & Dragons character in Carmack’s world ), the strongest and most dangerous person on the continent. He would have a weapon called the Hammer of Thunderbolts, a Ring of Regeneration, and a trans-dimensional artifiact. Quake would fight for Justice, a secret organization devoted to vanquishing evil from the land. The game would contain fully animated backgrounds. All of the people one would meet would have their own lives, personalities, and objectives. There would have been interesting puzzles and decisions that wouldn’t be simply yes or no, but complex correlations of people and events. They commenced working on it in 1991; id Software did some prototyping and they decided that it was not yet time to fabricate that game since technology needed to advance more. Their technology was only two dimensional scrolling tiles, but they wanted Quake to be in a fully three dimensional world. Sometime after id Software finished Doom II, they worked on a new, fully three dimensional game engine. The engine was not prepared to make a game for a year, and during that year, id Software always thought that it was going to happen at some point. John Romero wrote QuakeEd, and simultaneously exploring Quake level design wondering what it would appear as and what rules they should be following. There were nine people working on Quake, but only Adrian Carmack, John Carmack, John Romero, and Kevin Cloud had been with a game during its entire development, whereas both Sandy Petersen and Dave Taylor arrived halfway through the Quake’s development. It was very difficult for the team because they had to continuously dispose of concepts that they worked on. For example, American McGee was working on various levels for John Carmack’s engine, only to have to delete them constantly. They also had to dispose of code in the scripting language because they just recreated the scripting language. Quake was originally going to have a VR tie-in with a ‘major’ manufacturer, producing the game with a specific headset in mind, in addition to its multiplayer link-up. Sound was to be a major integral part of the game’s design, with the player possessing a headset or a microphone unit which they would also vend (manufactured by Koss), and players would speak to each other exclusively over a local area network, but not as a headset communication. One would be ‘speaking into’ the game world, so the closer one was to somebody else, the louder one’s voice would be. The monsters would also be capable of hearing this. That year without any game design was quite hard on everybody at id Software. At one point, Adrian Carmack had prepared a set of Aztec textures because the designers thought that they would have an Aztec section, but American McGee was unexcited about them, so they had to be deleted. (Nonetheless, Mesoamerican textures were later reintroduced in Dissolution of Eternity.) They had to conceive a theme from which McGee could be inspired. John Carmack had no desire to enlarge the company, so nobody else was hired at the time. The engine was eventually prepared, but everybody else was mentally exhausted. In November, id Software held a meeting to discuss the game, but the designers were so exhausted that they couldn’t think of any new game design, and they desired to just finish Quake. American McGee proposed that the game have weaponry in the style of Doom, and his proposal gained overwhelming support. This disappointed Romero, because he really desired to make a new game design. Early on, Quake was supposed to be merely a fantasy world with swords, balls with chains, &c., but they decided to make the game more like Doom, as fast as they could, instead of a role-playing game. Romero worked on the game for seven more months, and it was ‘insane’ and arduous to make it. McGee was mysteriously absent, and the crew could not get a hold of him, so Romero had Tim Willits finish McGee’s works. Romero had to do a lot of sound work on it. Quake was likely to be released on every playable computer and console except for those made by Nintendo due to id Software’s ‘righteous indignation’ over the censorship of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System version of their game, Wolfenstein 3D. id Software claimed that while they may have good technology, they did not understand design, and they simply didn’t know what it would require in order to create an interesting video game. Having moved on to their next project, they were not concerned at all. Nonetheless, Quake would later receive a Nintendo 64 port by Midway Games in 1998. According to id Software, Quake, like id Software’s other releases, was to be the first of its kind and nothing else was be even approximately similar to it. On February 24, 1996, Qtest was released. It was available on fourteen mirror sites all activated simultaneously. The server software was one of the major tests of that release. The size would be approxmiately four point five megabytes. Approximately two weeks before the game’s official release, a beta called Beta3 was leaked. The project was originally referred to as Timequake because the Slipgates took the player to a different time and place. Later, when id Software attempted to use the name "Quake", they found that a German company had taken every variation on the word. This German company started insisting that id Software buy the rights to the name. The lawyers for id Software eventually convinced the German company to give, instead of sell, the word to them. Trent Reznor was on the team from the very beginning, he loved playing games and wished to work on one. id Software was listening to Nine Inch Nails around the time of Doom and Doom II, meaning they were excited to have Trent Reznor working on Quake. Similar to the team at id Software, some of Reznor's sound effects had to be deleted when the genre shifted from a strict medieval theme to a more futuristic orientation. id Software originally wished for the game to have no music, feeling that the ambiance was strong enough that music was not needed. Trent Reznor was bothered by the lack of music, so he ended up discussing the issue with the team near the end of the development process. id Software accepted the concept of music in the game as long as Reznor would help on the design of the songs. The Nailgun was created before id Software knew that they would be working with Nine Inch Nails, but it soon came to be considered a way of tying the band into the game. As a joke, id created the Nails with a Nine Inch Nails logo, "NIN". As Trent Reznor liked this addition to the game, id decided to keep the logo in the game. Romero was alone at work on the product’s final day. He had to find a new program to compress and extract content, because the material that they had before would not do a subdirectory, then he inserted it into the Internet. When the time came to focus on publicity, id Software was told to not include stickers on the CDs that would promote Trent Reznor's involvement with the game. The team understood and accepted this request.
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