It is the 30th anniversary of the release of Quake. To celebrate this MachineGames released a new set of levels for free as an update to the NightDive remaster. I thought I’d give them a go and found them excellent but extremely hard. That seemed like a good reason to go back to the original levels and play a few to practice. Instead I ended up completing the entire game for the first time in probably decades.
The game was released in 1996 as the follow up to Doom. My family had newly gotten a PC, and I had been playing some video games on it. Quake really was foundational for me, I would get together with friends and play LAN deathmatches, all of us squeezing into rooms each with our computers. I would create my own levels and weapons with the freely available editors. It’s the game I learnt mouse and keyboard first person controls. I bought one of the very early 3d graphics cards to play glQuake.
Coming back to it today I’m amazed at just how great it plays. Like Doom the game is incredibly simple, a handful of weapons, a handful of enemies and lots of maze like levels with keys and locked doors. You move extremely fast, you can jump, the enemies each have very particular attacks and movements. They’re nearly all excellent, though I do hate the little blue blobs that jump around attacking you and explode when you kill them. They’re just much to fiddly, and very irritating to deal with.
The levels are separated into four different themes, ranging from sci-fi futuristic areas and gothic fantasy dungeons. The soundtrack was created by Nine Inch Nails, and is very atmospheric and creepy.
I’m going to make my way through each of the available mission packs, hoping to get back to the new one with refreshed skills.