Incurable lover of the grotesque

    

id software may have been absent from this journey for awhile now but no game on this list has escaped the legacy of DOOM.  Romero, Carmack, Willits and the rest of id had crafted a genre that was rapidly growing financially,expanding with creativity and budding technology. Video games as a whole by 1996 was a well oiled, money making tech industry by then bringing extreme competition as we see with Duke Nukem 3D. Within the context of the time its remarkable id had lightning strike twice. Quake fundamentally changes what we could experience and imagine with not just FPS games but video games as a medium. Quake also holds the test of time. By all present day standards the shooting and level design are still lofty design goals. Quake is the first time in this blog where I can easily tell a fundamental rebirth of the genre.
                                               Quake brought a world to video games unlike anything before. Shooting and chopping your way through rusty, grimy sci-fi hallways and arenas. Wading through thick, gray moats to literally storm from the bottom up a massive castle of interwoven platforms and hallways. Mystic Lovecraftian  dark hallways lit up with magic and lava. All tied together by a ghostly soundtrack from 90's icon Trent Reznor. The slow high pitched string tunes, moaning, foreboding bass and occasional ripping of industrial sounds for the main track take you on an emotional and atmospheric roller coaster that makes the varied horror filled world of Quake unique and timeless.
           The immersion is further built upon with incredible physics simulation for the time. Bodies blow into meat chunks that bounced around the environment. A decapitated head may blow off and land at your feet looking up at you. Blood splatters in three dimensions. The amount of brutal carnage this throws at the player makes even DOOM look kid friendly. It's clear id was very much intent on keeping their controversy intact, even relishing it. The breakneck speed of games like Duke Nukem or id's own DOOM was turned up a notch. It allows the player to literally blow through enemies and fly around the level as the gore I mentioned rains down like grotesque confetti.  Quake is one of the best feeling shooters of all time and without hyperbole no game on this blog so far can begin to compare. Romero and company return with genre leading level design.  Allowing plenty of ways to bounced around in horizontal and vertical space, make and gain ground with interwoven platform and hallways along the outside of arenas.
Because of Quake's incredible speed its not uncommon for the game to vertically stack and cross long hallways to blow through and move vertically throughout. I mentioned with DOOM II how the movement system only worked cause of fantastic level design accommodating it. Quake does this along with the gunplay in a way that only could be done from a talented and now veteran studio like id Software. It all comes together and stuns me even today. In the context of 1996 and this blog Quake would redefine my expectations and believed limitations of not just first person shooters but games.  Where even Duke Nukem 3D struggles from uneven parts at times Quake feels like a skilled blacksmith made it. Quake is shocking in terms of how special and unique the atmosphere is.  Its hard to describe the shift from all the games on this blog and then Quake. I don't think we see anything like that in modern games or have in maybe over a decade if not longer.

              The weapons in Quake follow what at this point isn't DOOM as much as it is id's DNA. Almost all FPS games I've played in this blog, bar 3D Realms and Star wars, try to steal this so it certainly was an industry staple by 1996.  Like Duke Nukem 3D though Quake really changes it up. The movement system in Quake , along with its level design, makes it incredibly fluid to play even today. The weapons play just as much a part of this and add to the games most important character, violence. Instead of DOOM Guy's fist you get an axe to chop enemies up with, after enough hits they will explode into meat chunks flying around the room. The nail gun or as it should be called NIN gun. Uses Nine Inch Nails ammo and looks the part. Dual barrels firing on even and odd turns held together with a metal plate. The nails fly through the air in three dimensions as well. This gun is probably my favorite. Another gun to use the NIN ammo is a rotating three barrel nail gun that fires slower but does more damage. The game loves to let you play with explosives. Its a trend I saw in Duke Nukem 3D and love seeing id's take on it. Rockets are plenty and essential to making the game so brutal. Also rocket jumping becomes a thing and getting thrown around the level because of shock force and doing the same to an enemy is just too much fun. The grande launcher is a blast allowing you to kill enemies around corners or arch and pop them with a direct blow.  Quake's arsenal is timeless fun and I think in 1996 it would have thrilled me.        
             The enemies in Quake would drastically change from DOOM II and use the id Tech 2 engine to make combatants not possible before. The grunt doesn't try to hide his function at all and functions very similar to Pig Cops in Duke his sci-fi borg like look could be something out of DOOM. The Death Knight however delivers a very new enemy type to the FPS genre. Fast, hulking, and badass he will either slay you with a powerful melee attack or send out a spread of fire balls. He's my third favorite enemy in the game.  Scrags fly and float but are much more nimble than say the Octobrain or Caco Demon, they also shoot poison darts that are very fast requiring lots of strafing. Enforcers again are just beefed up grunts but layering them in with multiple other hostile characters create for a good flow and they are important to the game. The Orge is my second favorite character dragging a chainsaw arm and grenade launcher around.  The grenades physically bounce around the world and its pretty incredible to see after playing the other games on this blog. Shambler makes it to my favorite as a Lovecraftian nightmare that strikes you with lightning and is much faster than your comfortable with. Fantastic and very much sums up the vibe of Quake. Vore serves similar to the baron of hell from DOOM II but in true Quake fashion is a spider monster with horrible bloody teeth and smile. Quake like Duke Nukem has the most unique enemies from this blog so far and its real nice to see by 1996 the creative design of enemy encounters was branching out as well as becoming more contextually aware.

                 All these design choices I talk about aren't without fault. I bring up Duke a lot because I think 3D Realms made many of the right choices when it came to interactivity and grounding the player in a reactive environment. Being able to push those pool balls or blow apart environments must have been pretty incredible in 1996. It also made the game feel like it respected the players interactive intentions and presence by reacting to it in so many ways. Make no mistake. I love that part of Quake's atmosphere are these dead, foreboding, filled with ambient places. But they feel lifeless in an artificial way compared to Duke Nukem 3D. It feels like a step backward after 6 months and the otherwise massive leap elsewhere. Also Quake feels very disjointed. I love the variation in the environments and being able to select difficulty and levels through 3D space was novel at the time I'm sure. However none of it fits what so ever together or seems barely intentionally together. After having such consistency in games like Heretic, Dark Forces, or Duke not having that makes it feel rather off the entire time even if the atmosphere is great.
                   All this is only possible because of idTech 2. A game engine is the essential canvas for a game. As with DOOM II in order to exist in the form it does new tech had to be made. Quake was one of the first true 3D video games. It was the first true 3D shooter. Using polygons and mapping textures to them idTech 2 was the forefront of real time rendering and would lay the fundamental foundations of what we largely still use today. It makes me wonder if any piece of video game software has ever been as important. All this ambiance and terrible blood lust is only possible because idTech 2 took FPS rendering not just to the next level but several orders of magnitude above anything on this blog before it. The jump here is astronomical and hard to describe. In 1996 this would change everyone's perception about what was possible. The gore, the weapons, the physics, the incredibly immersive visuals. Whatever Quake lacked in interactivity it made up for with that. Jon Carmack is genius of our time with idTech 2 certainly being one of his hallmark achievements.
                        This blog continues to get more and more enjoyable. I've played Quake 1 plenty before it came time to replay it with conextual lenses for this blog.  Its great to be able to look back at industry moments or years and playing games leading up them really just gives you an appreciation for it in a way reading never will. I played Duke Nukem 3D and wrote on and on about how great and innovative it was. Duke did in fact blow me away in the context of this blog. I meant what I said about it by far being the impressive thing since DOOM II. However Quake is light years beyond even that. Its by far the best and most impressive thing I've played for this blog. The entire genre owes its modern life blood to Quake. We see its influence in everything from modern rendering to design. id innovated and problem solved where no one had even had to approach the same problems before. Quake may be a bit off and disjointed but the rest of it is a perfect symphony of its parts backed by what was tech from the future. It was a very real phenomenon in 1996.  A summary of that year in technology and innovation distilled into the worlds new medium video games. Quake is the best game on this list by a landslide as of writing. Forever one of my favorite games.