Trivia / Quake

• Ascended Fanon:
  • The 2021 remaster's tweak to Nightmare difficulty - reducing the player's max health to 50 instead of reducing the interval length between monster attacks - was first explored in the Copper gameplay mod.
  • Downplayed with the Dimension of the Past addon: it was originally released for free in 2016 as an unofficial expansion by developer MachineGames, and was later included in the 2021 anniversary release alongside the previous expansions and the new Dimension of the Machine. MachineGames, however, was already owned by the same parent company (Zenimax Media) as id Software, having taken the reins of the latter's Wolfenstein series years before, giving Dimension of the Past a somewhat official status from the beginning.
  • Like with the Doom remasters, Id later added curated third-party mods via an Add-Ons page, some of which were created by some of the community's most renowned modders^note For tropes related to those episodes and addons, check the Recap page for the game.
  • In celebration of QuakeCon 2022, the original Threewave Capture the Flag mod by Dave 'Zoid' Kirsch was added to the 2021 remaster as an officially-supported gamemode. The mode comes with some of the original maps from the mod's release (and some new additions), alongside its exclusive mechanics including the grappling hook^note using the grappling gun model featured in Dissolution of Eternity, as opposed to the original mod's kitbashed flail model and rune power-ups.
• Author Appeal: Adrian Carmack and Sandy Petersen are Lovecraft fans, and it shows.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Trent Reznor did the soundtrack free of charge just because he really loved Doom.
• Canon Name: Quake III: Arena and Quake Champions gave the Player Character of this game the name "Ranger".
• Creator Killer: An interesting example as Quake was a phenomenal success that cemented id as the top FPS company in the games industry, however, internally, it also tore the previously tight-knit company apart. In a retrospective about its creation, designer Sandy Petersen recounted how working on the game killed the friendly atmosphere within the company and led to 7 of id Software's 12 developers leaving, himself and John Romero included, and id was never the same afterwards.
• Development Gag:
  • The Chinese title for Quake, as well as a scrapped weapon, literally translates as "Thunder God's Hammer". Scourge of Armagon would later feature the Mjölnir, which fits that description.
  • The Dragon boss fought at the end of Dissolution of Eternity is inspired by the unused dragon model from Qtest.
  • The slipgates were originally meant to be powered by Cray supercomputers, as part of a deal where id would receive one for $500,000 so long as the computer was placed in the game. The deal fell through when Cray was acquired by SGI. "DM3: The Abandoned Base" contains a computer room as a homage.
• Dummied Out:
  • A fully functional monster called the Ogre Marksman is present in the files and can be placed into the game with some simple commands, but it never appears naturally in the levels. Its purpose is unknown, as it's completely identical to the standard Ogre, the only exception being that, since it's tagged in the code as a different enemy, it will infight with regular Ogres.
  • The public beta version of the game, Qtest, released in February 1996, has a mysterious unfinished model of a dragon hidden away in its files, which many players were expecting to encounter in the final game all the way up until the end. Dissolution of Eternity's boss is based upon this rumour.
  • Some players discovered that, by inputting a command line parameter in the 2021 remaster, players could have access to more (untested) third-party mods.
• Follow the Leader: Quake, with the antecedent of Doom, began the multiplayer experience in the 3D FPS genre, but Quake III: Arena, along with its rival game Unreal Tournament, paved the way for the multiplayer FPS. 20 years later, it's still one of the biggest feuds in gaming history.
• Hey, It's That Sound!:
  • The "get key" sound effect is identical to the one from GoldenEye (1997).
  • The Ogre alert sound is the Pig Cop alert sound from Duke Nukem 3D.
• In Memoriam: One of the names the AI bots can get in the 2021 remaster is "Mr. Elusive", named after Jan Paul van Weveren, the creator of the Omicron bot for Quake, the Gladiator bot for Quake II (the latter of which even acted as the basis for the AI of Quake III: Arena), and the widely-adopted DXT5 compression algorithm, who passed away on January 31, 2017.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Due to the unique legal circumstances of Nine Inch Nails' soundtrack for the game ^note Trent Reznor fully owns all of the rights to his music tracks, but not the "Quake" name or trademark, it was not commercially available for many years, and was removed from most re-releases as well. Trent Reznor finally obtained permission from Id to release it on vinyl in 2020, and it was reimplemented into the 2021 rerelease.
• Killer App:
  • The game spurred many a gamer to update to Pentiums, as the architecture was required. It performed so much better on Intel's Pentium processors to the point that prospective PC gamers upgrading from the old 386 and 486 would steer away from AMD and Cyrix alternatives, to the point that it's commonly speculated that Cyrix's relatively poor FPU performance at the time, and thus Quake performance, put Cyrix out of business. Not even the Nintendo 64 could hold frame rates as good as the PC version at just 240p with its Quake port; the PlayStation and Sega Saturn stood no chance, further cementing the sheer advantage that PC gaming had over console gaming.
  • When GLQuake was released, 3dfx Voodoo Graphics accelerators started flying off the shelves, now that people could suddenly play it at 640x480 resolution (at a time when people were content with 320x200 on the software-rendered version because higher resolutions were too demanding) and still maintain liquid-smooth framerates.^note Note that VQuake for Rendition Verite cards predates GLQuake, but did not result in massive success for Rendition like it did for 3dfx. GLQuake was allegedly developed to run on id Software's workstations with no intentions of running on consumer PCs, but by coincidence, the 3dfx Voodoo Graphics card handled it very well, and so they made it available to consumers anyway. The rest is history.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: Limited Run Games produced physical editions of the 2021 remaster. Besides a standard physical copy, the "Deluxe Edition" came with an outer big box like the PC version that had a reversible poster, a Quake logo keychain, and a 25th-anniversary coin. There is also an "Ultimate Edition" that comes with the Deluxe contents plus an additional outer box resembling a nailgun ammo case, a Ranger pin, a T-shirt, a 3-inch metal Shambler figure, as well as a defictionalized Ring of Shadows replica and a motorized rotating Quad Damage statue.
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: The game began its development as a large, free-roaming Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, with players taking control of Norse-style warriors armed with Mjölnir-like hammers. However, this idea (and eventually the whole RPG setting) was scrapped and instead switched to a more Doom-like FPS direction while keeping the original level design, just like id's previous FPS boomfests.
• Milestone Celebration:
  • For Quake's 10th anniversary, John Romero released the source code for the maps under the GPL license.
  • For the 20th anniversary, now under the wing of Zenimax Media, MachineGames developed an unofficial fifth episode called "Dimensions of the Past".
  • For the 25th anniversary, Nightdive Studios remastered the game and its Expansion Packs for both PC and consoles. It includes the previously released expansions, plus a new episode called Dimension of the Machine, inspired on Arcane Dimensions.
• Model Dissonance: The Nightdive re-release introduced updated, higher-fidelity models for weapons, pickups and monsters... but not gibs. Thus, gibbing enemies with the newer updated models activated causes their corpse parts to revert back to their original low-poly versions.
  • Also from the Nightdive remaster, only models that were present in the original game ever received updates, with those from the third-party expansions remaining untouched in their original low-res looks. The issue is at its most blatant in Dissolution of Eternity, where loading up the alternate ammo types suddenly makes the guns look extremely chunky. This issue reared its head again with the release of Nightdive's Quake II remaster, which conversely included expansion content in its model updates for all of its products (except the PSX monsters).
• Pop-Star Composer: Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails composed the score for Quake. The game includes a nail gun weapon with ammo packs featuring the band's NIN logo. The man himself even voices Ranger, the main character.
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • id hired some of the best level makers to their team (most notably American McGee), and several of the creators of the various Game Mods or tournament winners below have gone on to have jobs in the industry. Additionally, part of the reason Trent Reznor was hired to do the music is that he was such a huge fan of Doom.
  • YouTuber user and Nightdive Studios programmer ModernVintageGamer once worked on a homebrew port of Quake on the original Xbox known as Quake-X. He would go on to work on the official Kex Engine remaster with other modders like Quaser and Samuel "Kaiser" Villareal.
• Prop Recycling: Dimension of the Machine uses textures recycled from Quake II, which seems odd until you remember that the episode was released 25 years later, and therefore is more than enough time for developers to port textures between games.
• Refitted for Sequel:
  • According to an interview to Sandy Petersen, the title of the game originates from a discarded weapon, the Quake Hammer, a powerful mallet that would hit the ground and send enemies flying. The weapon was reworked for the Mission-Pack Sequel Scourge of Armagon as the Mjölnir.
  • "E2M6: Dismal Oubliette" had an additional watery cavern section - an actual oubliette - as the level's original starting point, which was later cut due to exceeding a self-imposed map size limit. This section was later released as the standalone level "E2M10: The Lost Entrance to Dismal Oubliette" by John Romero in 2001. Two decades on, the 2021 Updated Re-release would reimplement this section back into E2M6 proper, restoring the original level in its entirety.
  • Qtest had a dragon who, according to John Romero, would've flown outside the map and occasionally swooped in and breathed fire. Dissolution of Eternity would revive this concept as the final boss of the pack.
• Recycled Script: The premise of this game is similar to that of Doom, with a lone soldier fighting a myriad of enemies in high-tech military bases and then going through portals to nightmarish realms. But instead of fighting demons from Hell like in Doom, the protagonist faces a wider variety of enemies (human soldiers and guard dogs in early levels, medieval warriors, ogres, and zombies midway through, and then Lovecraftian monsters towards the end), all of which were leftovers from the various incarnations the game went through before release.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: The vinyl remaster of the game's soundtrack was supposed to come with essays written by John Carmack and American McGee, according to the Nine Inch Nails website "A certain unnamed video game publisher made it impossible to include this in the package", followed by links to the essay itself, which contained pixelated screenshots of the game. However, the links were later removed entirely.
• Shrug of God: The Enforcer enemies have a few brief lines of dialogue ("Halt!", "Stop!", "Freeze!", and "You there!"), but nobody on the development team can remember the identity of their voice actor. American McGee and John Romero have both speculated that it could have been one of them, Trent Reznor, a member of Reznor's team, or even another Id employee they've forgotten about, but neither is really sure.
• Trope Codifier:
  • The game codified the "mouselook" control scheme, where instead of only using a keyboard to control an FPS character, you control the view with a mouse as well while using the keys to control the direction of movement for your character: forward-backwards-strafe. Bungie's Marathon is the Ur-Example and Terminator: Future Shock is the Trope Maker, but due to Marathon being on the then-unpopular Apple platform, and Terminator: Future Shock just not being popular, it took until Quake and its innovative online multiplayer before the mouselook feature became codified.
  • Also, although this one was by mistake, Quake codified Jump Physics for the First-Person Shooter genre such as the Rocket Jump and the Strafe Jump/Bunny Hop. For the former, it was initially discovered as a glitch but was left in the game for one reason or another. Later sequels consider this glitch an integral technique, to the point that it's referenced in many games^note The "Launch Command" level of Quake II, the BFG in the map "Hero's Keep" in Quake III: Arena, the introductory tutorial in Quake Live, and Ranger having self-damage immunity as his passive ability in Quake Champions, to name a few..
• Troubled Production: The game engine was being changed constantly, requiring already-designed levels to be scrapped and recreated from scratch over and over again. Nearly everyone was burned out and drained creatively by the end of production. According to John Romero, he suggested splitting id into an engine design team and a game design team to avoid another gruelling production, but he was shot down, this being one of many suggestions that went ignored that prompted him to leave and form his own company. John Carmack later at least implied that Romero might've had a point in an interview with Joe Rogan, admitting that their internal "when it's done" philosophy wrecked id internally and created unnecessary strife and that perhaps releasing a new engine between Doom and Quake, a bit like a "half-Quake" or a "Super-Doom", and then perfecting Quake itself later would've been preferable to avoid issues and stress.
• Vaporware: In 2009, following the great success of Id's iPhone ports of Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom, John Carmack announced that a Quake port was next on their list. This official port never ended up coming to pass, with fans picking up the slack instead.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The Norse-style MMO as originally described by id, before the Mid-Development Genre Shift. John Romero once stated that Darksiders was very much the sort of game he wanted Quake to be initially.
  • The game was also going to feature a magical artifact called the Hellgate Cube that had its own AI and would hover near the player and follow them throughout the game. The cube would react to how the player treated it. If the player treated the cube well, it would return the favour by assisting the player during combat, healing them when they were injured, and even teleporting them to a different location if a combat encounter was going badly. If the player displeases the cube, it might abandon them for a while or even deal damage to them. The Hellgate Cube idea was scrapped when it was decided to make the game more of a Doom-style action shooter. Incidentally, Hexen II, based on the same engine, includes a similar item called the Force Cube, although all it does is float around the player and shoot at enemies.
  • The story for the game was going to feature more Old Ones than just Shub-Niggurath. The player would collect Freedom Artifacts instead of runes to free the Old Ones from Shalrath's otherworldly prisons, upon which Shalrath would fight the player in the form of Shub-Niggurath. For that matter, Shub-Niggurath was going to have an actual boss fight at one point, but time constraints forced the team to pare the boss down to a brief Puzzle Boss. This is later referenced in Quake Champions, which gives every realm of this game a Top God.
  • The game was going to feature nowadays common-place mouselook as a default activated setting, but John Romero thought the feature was "too advanced" for its time. Later updates activated it by default.
  • The intro level "Welcome to Quake" was going to feature an ad from an early Internet company, but it was thumbed down because Id themselves considered it "tacky".
    • The beta version located the Well of Wishes Easter Egg in this level, next to the entrance to the Nightmare difficulty level, but it was later relocated to its current position.
  • "E3M5: The Wind Tunnels" was going to be a Secret Level.
  • Shub-Niggurath was originally going to have some way to attack (in the final game she's basically an invalid who can't attack or even move and is entirely dependent on her mooks), as there is a message for when she kills the player: "player became one with Shub-Niggurath".
  • Qtest contains scrapped elements and monsters which were never fully implemented:
    • A Serpent enemy whose exact behaviour is unknown.
    • The Vomitus, a blob that would've spat out Spawns. In Qtest, it only has a harmless melee attack.
• Working Title: The Fight for Justice, and then Timequake.

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