Trivia / Quake IV

• Budget-Busting Element: As shared by various Ritual Entertainment employees (among them former Ritual QA Manager Michael Russell), the SiN franchise and the company itself weren't sunk by the lack of success of SiN Episodes: Emergence; the game actually did well enough to fund most of the planned 9 episodes. It was instead all the resources spent on a failed expansion pack called Quake IV: Awakening, whose development was dropped after the main game didn't perform as expected. This led to Emergence having a very short budget (and the reuse of Half-Life 2 assets due to the game using the Source game engine) and later Ritual being sold to MumboJumbo and dissolved.
• B-Team Sequel: Developed by Raven Software instead id Software, the Quake series' creator and developer of the first 3 games.
• Creator Killer: Not for Id nor Raven, mind you, but for Ritual Entertainment. It was revealed during a play session that Ritual bet up the house on an expansion pack for this game that got canned after the commercial failure of the game. Not only this led to a considerably reduced budget for SiN Episodes: Emergence, but it also forced Ritual to sell themselves to MumboJumbo and can all further episodes for SiN.
• Fake Nationality: Peter Stormare, the voice of Strauss, is Swedish, and is often cast as non-Swedish characters, due to his skill at mimicking accents.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content: The Community Mappack, as its name suggests, is a multiplayer map pack comprised wholly of community contributions. An example of which includes "Phrantic", which originally was a Quake III: Arena Custom Map that would eventually find its way also in Quake Live.
• Playing Against Type: Peter Stormare switches from his usual villain roles and plays the timid Insufferable Genius Johan Strauss who is still unambiguously a protagonist.
• Pop-Star Composer: To some extent, though. Chris Vrenna, a former member of Nine Inch Nails, created the soundtrack of this game.
• What Could Have Been:
  • In February 2018, Vitaliy Naymushin, former Ritual Entertainment employee and character designer for the game, showed artwork for a cancelled Expansion Pack titled Quake IV: Awakening.
  • There was supposedly a variation of the Tactical Strogg called the Tactical Elite, but all that remains of the concept is a selectable skin for deathmatch.

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