The GOAT with a Thousand Young

From Lunaran's "Mothers Be Good to Your Spawns"

While I’m on the subject of greatness, I guess it’s time for me to fulfill my promise a couple months back to make the case that “Quake is the greatest game of the past 15 years, and of all time.” (We’re talking greatest PC game, to be clear. Identifying the greatest game, period, or even the greatest videogame, is probably beyond my ken.)

There are, of course, plenty of valid alternatives. You might say World of Warcraft, for its enormous longevity and industry-warping profitability (greatness doesn’t have to be good, remember), or Minecraft, for its sheer ubiquity, or maybe one of the Sims or Civilization titles…but I feel a strong inclination, when we’re talking PC games specifically, to reach for a shooter. Maybe one of the early id titles, which defined the genre—Wolfenstein 3D or Doom. Maybe one of the slightly later, more refined iterations on the formula, like Half-Life, which created such a strong blueprint for subsequent FPS titles, on consoles as well as PC, to follow, and which spawned the mods, especially Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat, that shaped multiplayer FPS gaming for the next two decades. Half-Life is an excellent choice.

For my money, though, it’s Quake. It wasn’t the very first fully 3D game, but it was the first huge success, and the one a host of others would build on—the Quake engine was the chassis on which Half-Life itself was built, in fact, and Quake’s level design established the archetypes for multiplayer arenas that nearly every later shooter would iterate on, from those Half-Life mods right down to the present day. Quake’s influence is immeasurable. But to me, Quake’s greatness, and its greatness as a PC game specifically, isn’t so much in its groundbreaking technology or its trailblazing level design and gameplay. It’s the accidental masterpiece of the game itself, the way it fired my imagination and the imaginations of countless others, and the community that grew up around it and continues to thrive today, almost thirty years later.

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I think it starts with the setting. Quake, famously, was a half-baked hodgepodge of themes, with the various principals at id all pulling in different directions: the original concept involved a trad fantasy setting “bleeding into” the modern world—giving us our cyborg ogres with chainsaws and grenades—and subsequent iteration introduced Lovecraftian horror elements, only for the whole thing to be reconceptualized as a more straightforward Doom-like sci-fi shooter and rushed toward release. There was no time to build a whole new set of assets, though, so the new blaster-wielding enforcers just got dumped into the stew with those cyborg ogres, some straightforwardly medieval knights, and a whole Lovecraftian menagerie. Military bases, castles, and otherworldly dungeons were stitched together into a hallucinatory patchwork of levels.

This wasn’t what anybody at id had wanted, and they swiftly corrected course, releasing Quake 2 the very next year with a much tighter, purely sci-fi theme—one that every subsequent release in the Quake franchise has stuck with. (It’s basically Aliens with cyborgs instead of xenomorphs. Hard to overstate the influence of Cameron’s film on the games of the late 90s and early 2000s; Bungie’s Halo series and Blizzard’s StarCraft are both so dense with Aliens references that they teeter on the line between homage and unlicensed adaptation.)

Quake 2 was a bigger commercial successes than Quake, and Half-Life a far larger success still. They were all built on the same engine (as were a host of less successful titles like Hexen 2, Kingpin, Daikatana, and Heretic 2), and each is as easy to mod as the next. Quake 2 and Half-Life (particularly the latter) gave us a host of popular and influential multiplayer mods, many of which were spun off into standalone titles. But among this family of games, the original Quake is the undisputed single-player queen. Her acolytes have churned out literally thousands of maps, and continue to push the engine’s limits to outdo each other in artistry and ambition. For all that they were thematically cohesive and told engaging stories, Quake 2 and Half-Life never fired creators’ imaginations the same way; they never inspired so many people to tell new stories in their worlds. Quake is a lucid dream, immersive in a way few games are, always inviting players to make it their own.

I wouldn’t say that literally everything works with Quake…but almost everything does. New art, new themes—the dreamscape assimilates them easily. Many of the “classic” map aesthetics that have been iterated on dozens of times and centered by contests and jams began life not at id but in the community—the occult horror of Knave, the Moorish austerity of IKblue and IKwhite, the blood-soaked weirdness of Zerstörer. Those checkerboard-floored libraries, soaring minarets, and grimy monoliths feel as authentically Quake now as any military base, castle, or dungeon.

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I might, one of these days, embark on the Herculean task of visiting all of the All-Mother’s children (or at least all the ones rated 3.0 or better on Quaddicted). To round out this post, though, I have thoughts on just a few enduring favorites.

The maps and mods at the very tippy-top of Quaddicted’s rankings are all great, of course. Arcane Dimensions is one of the coolest things any fan community has ever created. Alkaline is right up there with it. Rubicon Rumble Pack is outstanding (“Ceci n'est pas une pipe” is one of my all-time favorite maps). All the work that’s been featured in the recent Nightdive/MachineGames remaster (Honey, Underdark Overbright, The Punishment Due, Rubicon 2, Beyond Belief, etc.) is fabulous. But I’m going to highlight a few that are a bit farther down the list (although, to be clear, these too are all beloved and highly regarded in the community—this isn’t a list of “hidden gems” or anything like that):

• Zerstörer: Testament of the Destroyer (1997, Nihilism Unlimited): I was 13; this was the most metal thing I had ever seen in my life. The graveyard! That bleak ending! Some of it seems a little cheesy in retrospect (starting with the team calling themselves Nihilism Unlimited), but “True Love Waits” will live rent-free in my head forever.
• Insomnia (2000, czg): I know czg hates this one, but it blew my mind then and it still does now. The scale! The curves! The atmosphere! Yeah, maybe it’s a little lurid and over the top in its fleshy ooh-it’s-so-evilness, but you better believe it hit hard when I was 15.
• Contract Revoked (2002, Kell): I wanted to shy away from maps that’ve been added to the official remaster, but Knave is too important not to touch on, and the OG, despite having been eclipsed (ratings-wise) by the Knave jam, than’s “Subterranean Library,” and Kell’s own “Red 777,” is still my favorite. It has an ethereal quality that a lot of the later, grander, somewhat overstuffed Knave maps lack—an atmosphere of loneliness and desolation, but without feeling empty or unchallenging for want of danger.
• Adamantine Cruelty (2004, Vondur): Beautifully built, cleverly designed. Gorgeous, sinuous architecture and a fun little micro-theme derived from a mashup of vanilla texture sets.
• Warp Spasm (2007, ijed): Something of a throwback, resembling much older releases like Zerstörer and 2000’s wildly ambitious machinima tie-in mega-project Nehahra in the way it brought in custom assets and a substantial backstory. Also like Zerstörer in that there’s something a bit puerile in its embrace of the evil and grotesque. But you know what? It works, even when you’re not a teenager. It’s gnarly. It feels oppressive.
• Dead Memories (2012, Scampie): Another little map that’s just beautifully, elegantly constructed. Takes all the elements of the original base theme and spins something inventive out of them.
• Backsteingotik (2013, sock): Gorgeous, and one of the best implementations of the original game’s “wind tunnel” mechanic and theme. Majestic. Dripping with atmosphere.
• Retro Jam 3 DLC (2015, ionous, negke, and skacky): These are all great, but “It Seemed to Devour Light” by ionous is another all-time favorite of mine. Creates a totally original aesthetic and deeply sinister atmosphere out of (I believe) only vanilla textures.
• Waldsterben (2022, Paul Lawitzki): Manages to feel almost like something that could’ve been in the original game (it couldn’t possibly, but it somehow feels like it) and yet creates a totally novel aesthetic. Moody and rewarding.
• Head Reattachment Trauma (2022, Suzanne “Trashbang” Will): Claustrophobic and urgent. Slightly reminiscent of System Shock while remaining unimpeachably Quake-y. Tells a powerful story—or communicates a powerful sentiment, anyway—in an sly, playful way.