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My thoughts about the gameplay, design, and soundtrack have evolved quite a bit since my first experience with Quake.  Quake is, had to be, and will remain a product of its time.  The unusual combination of medieval knights, cosmic horror-inspired nightmare creatures, military weapons, and odd level structure was a result of the constraints of its development process.  It's not a game made from careful deliberate choices.  It was brutally Frankensteined together to make a mismatched whole that somehow managed to work despite all its problems.  That same brutal crudeness is reflected throughout every aspect of the game as well, from the weapons to the enemies to the models and environments.  True 3D games were a new thing, and Quake was pushing the hardware of the day beyond its limits.  Everything had to be as simple as possible while still being truly 3D, so you got angular models that wobbled due to vertex precision limitations placed into chunky, crudely shaped environments with simplistic weapons that went from weak to insanely powerful with no real refinement.  The soundtrack was even a huge gamble, favoring an ambient feel over the pulse-pounding metal music from Doom.  Yet... somehow all this managed to work.

...

Looking back on Quake 1 from my present position I can fully appreciate it for what it is, what it tried to be, and I find it sad that it was never properly followed up on afterward.  Overall I do like Quake 2 better.  It is certainly a more polished game, with thought-out design, deliberate flow in the level structure, a very balanced progression of weapons, and the weapon variety just seems more flavorful.  It's just more to my personal taste, but I certainly like what Quake 1 has become for me in the time since it's initial release and my very unpleasant initial experiences.  It's hard to imagine a world of 3D games without Quake squarely at the beginning, like a brooding Great Old One awaiting for the stars to be right once again to awaken from its slumber and terrorize the unwary world.

Well said.

It's not even id's first time they did genre mash in their games. Doom was entirely derivative of 80's action movie culture, with the concept being James Cameron's Aliens sci-fi but the extraterrestrials are replaced with interdimensional hell spawn. In my opinion Doom aged better than Quake (although the gameplay is a different conversation) because the sci-fi of Aliens remains relevant in popular media. Quake's grunge dark fantasy stopped being "cool" the moment stuff like (and its equivalents) Nirvana or NIN were no longer transformative agents of cultural taste, and by the time of Quake 1's release those were already on their way out. As a standalone work of art, Quake 1 suffers from its incoherent mix of action sci-fi and horror fantasy. Notably the tech base levels are nice but thematically do not belong.

Nevertheless, I think Quake 1 will always be attractive because of its idiosyncrasies gathered from early 90s pop culture that have never quite resurfaced like other eras have (eg the endlessness of 80s inspired media of the last two decades). The angst, anger, and attitude of Q1 is wonderful. Underappreciated, even? Every element from visuals, gameplay loops, and music channels the vibe of grunge and teen angst. You're fighting for your life just to escape the masochist death traps of Azure Agony, where players are purposely thrown out of their element via level design, where the game actively plots against you with slime and shamblers, trap doors, makes moments like the thunderbolt and quad damage pickups much more satisfying, being able lash out against a hostile world and briefly turn the odds in your favor. In a way, Quake 1 is condemned to be the moody little teenager, the kid who's not bad just misunderstood, making for an excellent mood piece that excels when compared to Doom or Quake II. Its a shame that the release version didn't turn out to be a video game cultural reset like Doom was before it.

Maybe it's a blessing after all that Quake was released in the state it's in. Romero's next attempt at another historical video game moment failed pathetically. Besides, all the failures of Quake guaranteed that the genre would no longer be led by a single studio or game. Duke Nukem 3D, Unreal, Half Life, Halo CE heralded the changes for the fps genre without occupying such a towering position Doom had or Quake expected to.

id completely fumbled the Quake reboot, but I do feel like there will be one more Quake revival before 2030.

The second point was that Quakeworld's super-shotgun lies. ...  visually the gun seemed to pattern all its shots in one spot when that's not what was happening on the server.  A long-standing gameplay misconception was finally put to rest.

IT'S STILL REAL TO ME, DANGIT

Oh boy, down the Quake rabbit hole I go.

So Quake for me, initially, was... disappointing.  I had seen preview articles and teaser pictures with the dragon, knights with arms missing from locational damage, and the general idea was that Quake was going to be some kind of medieval fantasy game in full 3D.  I had just finished playing Hexen and was looking forward to this 3D castle romp... so that expectation was completely shattered when I got a copy of the Shareware and got to play the actual game.

But let's stop right there.  I heard Quake before actually playing it.  I put the CD in a player and listened to the... soundtrack?  The Quake theme was awesome.  Great stuff.  Then... what was this other stuff?  It's just ambient sound.  What's going on here?  That was a source of confusion.  It only got worse....

I read the manual.  Shotguns?  Military installation?  What happened to the dragons and knights?  Oh well, let's see where this goes.

I installed the game.  My first thoughts were in dealing with the performance.  My computer was not up to the task, so it was very choppy.  I got into the first level, and yikes.  The animation on the enemies was nauseating.  I was watching a slideshow playing another slideshow.  And... I walk into buttons?  I no longer have a "use" function?  What if I don't want to push that button?  And everything looks bad.  Those shotguns... so weak.  What happened to the punch from the shotguns in Doom?  The Rocket Launcher blew stuff up, sure, but it all just felt so bland.  Where were the gun animations?  Why does switching weapons just instantly put up a new gun instead of letting me see the old one lower, and raise up the new one?  Why no BFG?

I slogged through the first episode.  I got to the end, and I didn't want to play again.  Quake was thoroughly unenjoyable.  I went back to playing Doom.

Time passed...

I wanted to revisit Spear of Destiny.  I hadn't played it in a long while, and I noticed that my floppies had gone missing.  I purchased a CD replacement.  On this CD was a demo for Quake 2.  Hmm... well, let's look at it and see how it is.  I installed the demo, and I never looked back.

The performance was absolutely horrible.  I was playing 320x200 software mode, it was choppy, but the gameplay was absolutely fantastic.  I loved the cyborg enemies, the soundtrack was epic, and the weapons just punched where the Quake 1 weapons felt lacking.  There was variety to the weapons and enemies.  The gun models moved, raised and lowered, the enemies had personality in their actions.... I got a retail copy.  Eventually I got a Voodoo 2 card and I was hooked on Quake 2 since.  It was also my first foray into online multiplayer, as I was very, very slow in deciding to connect to the internet.  I wasn't sure I wanted to.  It was a tremendous personal risk that I wasn't certain I wanted to take.  But... the access to all that information was too much to pass up, so internet access, then multiplayer gaming for Quake 2 followed after.

At some point I stumbled across a source port for Quake 1 that described itself as bringing in model interpolation, among other features, to improve the performance of the GLQuake engine.  It was Q2K4, which was an evolution of a project called Phoenix Quake (I was not involved with that, despite the name).  I gave it a try, and that changed Quake for me forever.

It was far from perfect, but the smooth rendering performance and addition of model interpolation fixed the problems I initially encountered with Quake the first time around.  I found myself playing Quake and actually enjoying the game.  I began to appreciate the atmosphere, monsters, and level design for the first time.  Later sourceports such as Quakespasm further improved on the experience, and I finally learned to love a game I initially hated and largely skipped.  I realized most of my dislike was due to the technical performance problems that plagued my hardware at the time, along with the aforementioned model chop.  I'm visually very sensitive to certain kinds of movement patterns, so that was a huge fix for me.  I was late to the party, but Quake finally hit all the right notes.

So enter Generations.  Without going too far into the history of how I got involved, my joining the Generations Arena project pushed me to delve a lot deeper into all the Quakes than I had been before.  I was dissecting model files, looking at weapons code, and seeing just how everything worked.  During this time I also read the collective works of H.P. Lovecraft, so I also got to experience the lore that lead to Quake's environments and bestiary.  That provided some understanding of some of Quake's odder design decisions.  Learning more about the design changes that happened late in Quake's development brought the rest into focus.

My thoughts about the gameplay, design, and soundtrack have evolved quite a bit since my first experience with Quake.  Quake is, had to be, and will remain a product of its time.  The unusual combination of medieval knights, cosmic horror-inspired nightmare creatures, military weapons, and odd level structure was a result of the constraints of its development process.  It's not a game made from careful deliberate choices.  It was brutally Frankensteined together to make a mismatched whole that somehow managed to work despite all its problems.  That same brutal crudeness is reflected throughout every aspect of the game as well, from the weapons to the enemies to the models and environments.  True 3D games were a new thing, and Quake was pushing the hardware of the day beyond its limits.  Everything had to be as simple as possible while still being truly 3D, so you got angular models that wobbled due to vertex precision limitations placed into chunky, crudely shaped environments with simplistic weapons that went from weak to insanely powerful with no real refinement.  The soundtrack was even a huge gamble, favoring an ambient feel over the pulse-pounding metal music from Doom.  Yet... somehow all this managed to work.

My experience with multiplayer Quake 1 was quite a bit lacking.  I did not play Quakeworld until becoming involved in Generations development, and that was mostly to understand the mechanics of the gameplay rather than just playing it for the sake of playing it.  I learned two valuable things from my experience.  The first is that Quakeworld players are entirely fanatical.  They play Quakeworld.  Period.  Many of them never moved on to Quake 2, and the ones that stuck around long after were absurdly skilled.  The second point was that Quakeworld's super-shotgun lies.  During development for Generations there was a constant nagging from some people to make the Slipgaters' super-shotgun pattern super tight like in Quakeworld.  Yet... when playing Quakeworld I discovered that the SSG did very little damage even if the entire pattern was focused on another player.  So I did some testing and discovered that it was all a lie to save on network bandwidth.  The SSG ran the exact same pattern for doing damage that the SSG did in normal Quake, but it was transmitting a single network event, then drawing that multiple times on the client - but in the same spot.  The result was visually the gun seemed to pattern all its shots in one spot when that's not what was happening on the server.  A long-standing gameplay misconception was finally put to rest.

Looking back on Quake 1 from my present position I can fully appreciate it for what it is, what it tried to be, and I find it sad that it was never properly followed up on afterward.  Overall I do like Quake 2 better.  It is certainly a more polished game, with thought-out design, deliberate flow in the level structure, a very balanced progression of weapons, and the weapon variety just seems more flavorful.  It's just more to my personal taste, but I certainly like what Quake 1 has become for me in the time since it's initial release and my very unpleasant initial experiences.  It's hard to imagine a world of 3D games without Quake squarely at the beginning, like a brooding Great Old One awaiting for the stars to be right once again to awaken from its slumber and terrorize the unwary world.

I don't know how I managed to push this off for so long, but I finally beat Quake 1 yesterday! In retrospect, I think it's super impressive that as a kid I tried to play through Quake via Quake 64 via emulator... one that ran in a browser window with 320p max resolution. That was like 10+ years ago and I got as far as Q64's version of episode 4. Within that time, I'd try to beat Quake but always quit around episode 2.

Personally, I was always more into Quake 2 with its power fantasy gameplay as opposed to the lite-survival horror vibe of Quake mixed in with difficulty spikes of id's older shooters. I saw news of the Nightdive remaster and took a week or two to wreak havoc once more on Stroggos. Finishing Quake 2 recently really pushed towards the realization that I should force myself to beat the original!

What really got me back into Q1 though was a Noah Caldwell Gervais' video essay tackling the franchise from a narrative/story perspective. Playing through Quake I kept in mind Noah's observation that each episode is sort of accomplished through auteur style design of the levels. Despite being the most difficult, I really enjoyed Sandy Peterson's levels. E4 feels abstract, but not in the way that Doom was. They all unfold in a way that reflects the game's cosmic horror vibe.

It's wild to see the direction the level designers went in after Quake, since time constraints forced them to settle on Doom 3 but in 3D but it's not doom, but there are traces of that original vision littered throughout the game. I'm sure folks here have played 1000x more Q1 than I have, so it'd be cool to hear any opinions on the meta and design of Q1.

Jennell Jaquays (formerly Paul Jaquays) of Id Software fame passed away today, from complications of Guillain-Barré syndrome.  Jannell was 67.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennell_Jaquays

Please take a moment out of your day to reflect on her life and pay respects to a departed friend.  Farewell, Jennell.  You will be missed. 

SIGIL II is live, and can be downloaded here.

Purchase link for the version with the THORR soundtrack appears to be missing completely but I'm sure that will be fixed soon enough.

Wow, you even had a Nightdive connection?! That's awesome.

But I still feel that there will be a port of Quake 3, for a few reasons: First, it's an online game, and the publisher loves online games, so they'll want to remaster it. Secondly, they will leave both the original parts in one launcher game (Quake 3 arena, Team arena), and they can put there little needed Quake Live.

And then, the publisher will be calmer when fans will get a working remaster working on modern machines without dancing with tambourines.

But what I have doubts about the remaster (and from that it will be sad for me) is not getting a remaster of Quake 4, which I wanted with all my heart, but.... reality is cruel.

I also want to add that I'm exploring the Quake3e engine as well as IOQuake3 at present due to someone introducing me to it and I'm actually kind of impressed with how freaking FAST Quake3e loads everything.  So... I might port to both engines because why not?

Regarding Nightdive and a possible Quake 3 KEX port, that's something completely in Id/thesda's court, and based on what discussions I've had with some people on the Nightdive team there's no publicly available information as to whether or not that would happen.  If it does I'm certainly not averse to cooperating with anyone in an official capacity for Generations to be compatible with a KEX port.  As it is, 99% of the logic for Gen resides within the .qvm logic, with only a few special considerations requiring direct modifications within the engine so having Nightdive port Gen from the current modified Q3A engine to a KEX build should not be difficult in theory.

We'll just have to wait see what happens down the line. 

I don't think it's terribly likely that Nightdive does a port of Quake 3 for modern platforms, given that their work has largely been focused on obscure single-player titles; Quake and Quake 2 are the only real exceptions to that, and even those ports are most likely to have a single- rather than multi-player legacy in the long term.

Also, working as directly with Bethesda as that would immediately open up questions of legality that, especially with how things in the games industry work these days, would most likely result in a quick "no" at best, and a "you need to end your project right the frick now" at worst.

The better scenario, should KEX compatibility ever actually become a concern, would be for someone on their end to approach Wirehead about making sure the mod works with such a version, much like they did with various MegaWAD's for the Unity port of Doom. And while I won't presume to speak for Phoenix, being the only workhorse (work...bird?) of the project at this point, I doubt such a thing would push forward without some amount of actual compensation... and even then, I have my doubts.

Here's what I was thinking... Bethesda has already released 2 remasters of Quake (1 and 2). And what if Nightdive Studio will release a remaster for Quake 3? Just then in that case we could contact them to adapt Generations Arena on the KEX Engine, so that it would be easier to work with the mod.