Quake is 10

Quake is 10.

No, no. You didn't read that right: Quake is 10.

I remember when Quake came out. I remember being unbelievably excited about its predecessor, Doom 2 (who wasn't?), and the possibilities now that it was fully 3D and needed no fancy 2-D tricks. You could look in all directions, you could have rooms on top of rooms, there was just no limit to the fun unleashed.

My billy badass at the time was an NEC Pentium 60 (overclocked to a P75, thas right), with 64MB of booty-slappin RAM, and a 500MB Hard Drive. I must've installed Windows 98 on that machine a hundred times. I installed Linux on it about 20 times, and even tried BSD (a Unix variant) a few times. I put it through the paces, to put it lightly.

I found my first internet girl on that machine. I played my first game of Quake on that machine. And it was glorious. The game, I mean.

The graphics were to die for. The atmosphere was incredible. The music was done by none other than Trent Reznor, who, in 1996, was still absolutely the King of Cool. The Downward Spiral anyone? March of the Pigs, Hurt, Head Like A Hole? And it had an awesome new gun: The nailgun. While it was no rocket launcher, it was fun and adequate if you were out of rockets.

The game was also frighteningly open and modifiable. Never before had a game (since Doom 2, also by id software) been so customizable. Players began to tear out huge chunks of the game and write their own modifications—using a language called QuakeC to make amazing stuff like Rocket Arena and Painkeep kept me enthused for hours on end.

However, there was a problem—lag. The game had issues with the dominating modem connections of the era. So what to do? Create something better called Quakeworld. It introduced a groundbreaking idea?prediction. If the game knew a rocket was being fired from point A, then that rocket will continue until it hits Wall B. So it could then predict the movement and show that movement to the user, even if they hadn’t “officially” seen it with their slow connection.

Confusing? Doesn’t matter. The point is it worked flawlessly compared to the horrors that came before it.

Quite simply it exploded multiplayer gaming much like World of Warcraft (and, a better example, Ultima Online or Everquest) exploded Massive Multiplayer Gaming.

The game set a new industry standard: Make a game that is extremely modifiable, runs flawlessly online using a modem, and gives away its source code in a few years.

Who has done that since it came out? Plenty of games have made their setup extremely modifiable (to amazing results), but few have been as open or as giving as id software.

So allow me to appreciate, for once in a decade, the incredible contributions that Quake the game has given to the world, my life, and yours.

Tomorrow will cover the Tony extravaganza. But today is for fraggin!

Well I met a girl called Sandoz
And she taught me many many things