Others proved that the sky wasn’t close to being the limit. Experiments gave way to full ‘total conversions’ like AirQuake, which swapped the players for vehicles and turned deathmatch into a 3D vehicle combat game. Initially this was limited to simple-but-cool additions, like giving the player a grappling hook to scale and swing around levels in ways that had been impossible with previous 2D engines. When you bought Quake, you were buying into a whole universe of content online. They could completely bend the engine to their wishes.Īnd the modding community ran with it. It was the first game-as-platform, made possible by not just by the 3D engine, but Carmack including an interpreted language called QuakeC that allowed modders to do more than simply create their own levels and make the monsters look like Bart Simpson. What all of Quake’s technology really empowered though was its community. It became impossible to ignore that sprites were just two-dimensional, and that when killed, their collapse was a totally canned animation rather than a reaction to physics (though it wouldn’t be until Half-Life that games took the next step and made it standard to give characters skeletons instead of keyframed animation, ushering in the still ongoing ragdoll comedy era). Playing fairly or not, the raw sense of place and weight that 3D offered soon made the fakery of 2.5D untenable. The result? One of the net’s first famous speed-runs- Quake Done Quick, in which the whole game was obliterated in under 20 minutes with tricks like bunny-hopping to raise incredible speed, and rockets to hop through what were meant to be tantalising doors only intended to be accessed after collecting a key or going all around the houses. This wasn’t an id invention, but a discovery by fans, so of course the maps hadn’t been designed to handle it. The rocket jump alone took Quake to a whole new level. The raw sense of place and weight that 3D offered soon made the fakery of 2.5D untenable.Īnd so, people played Quake, and saw that Quake was good. Of course those who could got to enjoy a truly wonderful experience. At home, gamers were lucky to have a null-modem cable to connect two PCs together, never mind enjoy the fun of epic LAN parties. While Doom had spawned a huge scene in its day, getting online in 1993 was a pipe dream for most players outside of universities. Outside the game, it helped that by 1996 online play was finally becoming viable for PC gamers across the world. Here, the stripped down simplicity and full 3D allowed for fantastic arena design in genuinely atmospheric levels full of cubby-holes to camp and launch assaults from, and even the occasional gimmick, like hitting a button to slide back a level’s floor and drop unwary players into a pool of lava. Luckily, multiplayer was a whole other matter. (In a case of history repeating, his co-founder Tom Hall had done much the same over the original Doom, which he’d also envisioned as being much more of a story-driven experience than the shooter it ended up being.) John Romero packed his bags to go start Ion Storm and create the more narrative/detail driven game that he wanted to make. All the RPG features, most planned new gameplay concepts, even the idea of a main character wielding a hammer, had been sucked out, mostly to get the thing out of the door. The main problem was that after years of promises and expectation, to have a game that was basically Doom again-only set in a castle-was something of a letdown both internally and externally. It was a technical showpiece and on a decent PC it moved like a greased-up ferret. To do this, though, they typically had to choose between simple and slow. There had been full 3D games of course, like Descent, or the Freescape games that powered the likes of Castle Master even as far back as the ZX Spectrum. Quake was truly 3D, doing things like spiral staircases and lava pits for real, and being as twisty and turny as it liked. When you jumped into water for instance, you were actually invisibly teleported into another zone elsewhere on the map. Duke Nukem 3D and other Build engine games, particularly Shadow Warrior, used advanced cheats to fake the effect. It wasn’t possible to have rooms under rooms and the like. Doom offered different heights, but everything was still drawn in 2D. Wolfenstein 3D took place on entirely flat maps. Until then, most games had just faked it. When Quake arrived, it was a true 3D action game-everything built in polygons.
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