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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

Compared to everyone else here, my impression of quake back in the day was quite different. Back then I honestly couldn't appreciate the added 3D, but I found the art direction beyond boring, especially compared to the vibrant, changing and funny environments in Duke Nukem 3D. I found quake incredibly uninspiring and stuck with Duke for a long time.

Today I can appreciate how much more advanced quake is.

Does anybody know why it was called quake instead of doom 3?

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The earliest concepts for the game were quite different than Doom. You were supposed to be playing a Thor-like character named Quake, who wielded a giant hammer.

Stomping the ground to cause Quakes ?

The name Quake came from Carmack's D&D character, who was an inspiration for the original game design

i thought the atmosphere was great, in large part due to the soundtrack. honestly, the soundtrack was my favorite part of the game. i still listen to it every now and again.

A fellow Nine Inch Nails fan I see.

for sure, and the quake soundtrack was actually my first exposure to nine inch nails.

I was already a massive NIN fan so I LOVED the soundtrack. Even though I haven't heard it for years I can a) still hear it and b) picture the points in the game where it switched.

Trent Reznor makes great soundtracks. Natural Born Killers is incredible.

The Quake CD was some sort of hybrid data/music CD. It was possible to play the soundtrack in a regular CD player.

This was true of a lot of PC games from that time IIRC.

Yep. Basically the trick was to make one track as data, and the rest as redbook audio.

I seem to recall running into the odd album that was done up in a similar way to bundle images and such for fans.

Found the Wikipedia article on it btw, Mixed Mode CD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_Mode_CD

I was weirded off by Quake in both bad and good ways. It was between Doom colorful gore and Hexen pale gothism. The 3D made texture a little bit too simple too. But it was a nice alternate reality to dive into. More like a feverish absurd dream.

I remember reading it was supposed to be an RPG game where you run around with melee weapons. It turned into almost doom eventually.

Totally agree. Duke 3D was far superior to Quake IMO. The only good things about Quake were the engine and the soundtrack. Everything else was just boring. Especially the weak sound effects (especially when compared to the Doom SFX) and the art direction as you said (everything being either brown or grey).

You're missing a lot of stuff.

- The multi-player was tremendous for its time.

- The upgrades Carmack made for OpenGL that ushered in the modern GPU era was very big.

- QuakeWorld was a cutting edge experiment that showed other developers what could be done online.

- The modding was excellent. The Quake community of modders helped lay the foundation for the entire 3D gaming industry that was to sprout in the following decade. So many developers that went on to great things cut their teeth modding Quake.

The modding was indeed a class of its own. One guy even implemented a rudimentary flight simulator called Airquake.

Basic thing was that the engine had few hardcoded limits.

You could implement a crazy number of weapons and/or weapon modes for example. Quake 3 on the other hand was hard capped to the number of weapons the game launched with, iirc.

And all you needed to write a mod, as long as you didn't need new models or maps, was a freely downloadable compiler for quake-c. And compiled mods were easily decompiled. So others could have a look and learn.

I wonder if it would make sense to add clang/llvm to a game nowadays to make modding as easy as that again.

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