Comment by karim79
1 day ago
Quake is 30 years old. I can't believe I'm still alive. I love this game so dearly. The mods were just incredible, KQP and Girobot in particular.
Those were the for real LAN party days which I'll never get back. As in I had friends bringing over their big ass CRT monitors and PCs for a single occasion and also had ludicrously long network cables. My parents didn't mind, they somehow understood, even with LAN wires running across the kitchen floor. Priceless.
Edit: typo: lab -> LAN
3 weeks ago, John Romero did a play through while discussing the entire design and build process of the game.
It was actually pretty cool how they designed the first room to demonstrate almost every new feature of the engine and how the first level is made to walk you though most of the new gameplay features.
https://youtu.be/PU7HkttPfAo?si=LnD4vJeCiUojhojt&t=728
Yeah ... "new features", especially the torches, to show me that FPU of 486 OCed to 150MHz is not enough :)
Good old days of 7-15 FPS being better than nothing.
Oh yes. I remember first playing Quake on a 486 and not liking it, because it felt like I was moving in a heavy sluggish tank, and later playing it on a Pentium, and loving it for the agile movement. The difference was huge!
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Fun fact: The pattern of the torches' flickering is encoded via special strings in the source code:
https://jasemagee.com/post/2022-03-27-26-year-old-quake-ligh...
with a resolution of 640x480 or below !
YOU CAN JUMP ACROSS
And as I typed that I can still hear the noise all these years later.
At shop.nin.com you can buy a quake ammo box keychain. It makes the jump sound effect.
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That is also the approach that Nintendo took with Super Mario Bros, as in the first level you almost cannot avoid to learn that, for example mushrooms=good and goomba=bad [1]
[1] https://mainstream404.wordpress.com/2018/01/03/how-super-mar...
Story time! I was a kid when the original Quake came out in ’96. I don’t remember if I saw it in someone’s .diz file, a FAQ, or somewhere else, but I learned you could change the actual game physics through the console and most importantly you could do it mid-game.
I used to host LAN parties where all my friends from school would lug their PCs over, and we’d hook everything up over 10Base-T. One match, somebody was chasing me down and I’d completely run out of ammo. I fled down a corridor and jumped over a pit of lava - immediately spun around dropped the console and typed as fast as I could:
> Those were the for real LAN party days which I'll never get back
I still remember hours-long marathons of Doom2 deathmatch at my cousin's Novell cubicle farm after office hours, ca. 1994. Then Duke Nukem 3D (using Build to make custom maps [anybody here play NukeCity 1 and/or 2? That was me!]), then eventually Quake. Oh nostalgia, you rickety tower of mixed emotions.
crazy played both of those. nany many years later when i looked into the build engine finally :'D
my game was HL and CS (later days) which got me into modding so years after i looked at build engine.
i made for worldcraft a human launcher one day (ripped entities from some HLDM map by valve) and that got chucked into awp_1337_sk337 (by other guy, superjer).
miss those times :') still occasionally crack open the worldcraft to make a room with zombies and nades!
The original Shadow Warrior used the same engine as Duke3D, and when 3DRealms hired a company to build an add-on campaign for Shadow Warrior, that company reached out to me to design a level based on the popularity of my NukeCity levels. I designed the level and everything, and the add-on was completed, but it was shelved when Shadow Warrior sales underperformed. Sad.
I never got paid for that work, but the campaign is out there: Twin Dragon[1]. I built Level 11: the Fortress.
[1] https://www.moddb.com/games/shadow-warrior/downloads/twin-dr...
I got so much networking experience from hosting lan parties with quake and q3. Crimping cables. Installing 10 mbps pci card in people's computers, running dedicated servers with mods and map cycles. Good times...
hell yeah, my first real LAN game experience on Windows was the Quake test/alpha that preceded the release of the game (IIRC?), when I was at a local tech school for a class. We weren't technically allowed to load the game on the uni PC's but like.. yeah... it happened. And we did zero work for that day (or days). (Prior LAN experience was Marathon and Bolo in the Mac lab which was insanely awesome too, and a year earlier lol)
Quake came out just before I started high school and I played it a lot in those three years. I remember playing quake 1 in the LAN in university around 2002 because it was easy to share the 50MB of portable files. Things moved so fast back then that it already seemed like a retro game. I didn't realise at the time that it was a timeless classic and I would still be playing it 25 years later.
There was a way that you could trim the files just right that you could fit the Quake executable and a single multiplayer map onto a floppy disk. Those things were treasured as you could easily just hide them wherever.
Definitely made high school much more fun.
I remember the days where our data center PC had CDROM drive so someone installed Quake (can't remember II or III) and we would play while the overnight multi-hour batch jobs were running.
You can go download it again here:
https://archive.org/details/q3DemoTEST
There were multiple test releases. You can find the older ones out on the web.
Honestly the best of times. I wouldn't be able to pay rent were it not for videogames which inspired me to work in the software industry.
I wish we could get those days back. Cars loaded with CRT monitors and big machines and bags of all sorts of stuff.
LAN parties were an odd but super fun part of being a teenager at the time!
> lab -> LAN
Ah yes, those lab parties.
I to recall the days of all synthesising LSD and playing Quake too.