As of this writing it seems likely that Machinegames (or another studio in Bethesda’s orbit) is making a sequel to/soft reboot of the original Quake. Given the success of the Doom and Wolfenstein revivals (and the earth-salting failure of Rage 2) it’s the obvious next cash cow to milk.
While I’m confident that this rumoured project is in good hands (Machinegames rarely miss, and the expansion packs they made for the Quake re-releases alone show that they ‘get’ Quake), I still have reservations. Quake is a different kettle of fish to Doom and Wolfenstein. A direct reapplication of the Doom 2016 formula (a bit like how Quake 4 was a retooling of Doom 3) wouldn’t do Quake justice, I feel.
It’s hard to overstate what a staggeringly important game Quake was at the time of its release. For those who could muster enough PC hardware into one place, Quake deathmatch over a LAN was the best gaming experience available in any context in 1996, and there wasn’t a close second. Quake’s level design was mind-blowing, realising recognisable places while other 3D games were still futzing with Freescape-style boxes and ramps.
Beyond all that, Quake laid down the blueprint for how PC games were going to work in the age of the internet – in terms of multiplayer, modding and supporting evolving 3D hardware. It was the capstone of 15 years of DOS games. This has all been discussed exhaustively (including on this very site a few times over the years, I’m fairly sure), but it’s worth stating again as it fades into history – particularly for the younger generation or the (majority of) people who didn’t have access to PC games until much later.
But Quake is unusual as seminal classic games go, in that the end product wasn’t one that anyone involved seemed very happy with, or had any appetite to revisit. The core of id were at the height of their creative powers, so what they ended up shipping was still astoundingly good (and still holds up almost 30 years later in a way almost no other prototypical 3D games do), but the pressure of following Doom permanently fractured id as a team – meaning almost all of the key people other than Carmack left soon after.
(I’d recommend John Romero’s memoir and Sandy Petersen’s YouTube channel as solid – albeit sometimes contradictory – sources about what went down during Quake’s development.)
While there have been several games marketed as Quake sequels, none of them use the original game’s story or setting, at most making attempts to retcon it into the backstory of the (originally completely unrelated) Quake II. Quake’s setting wasn’t planned: it’s stitched together from the most viable work that was made based on different interpretations of a vague initial outline.
Romero wanted to make a medieval fantasy game; the artists started making several different thematic texture sets as they had done for Doom; the monsters seem to be mostly 3D modelling experiments or direct lifts from Sandy Petersen’s Call of Cthulhu bestiary; the Doom-echoing weapons and structure were decided on late (and to Romero’s dismay) in a bid to get the game out the door.
So how does one go about revisiting this orphaned world, this game that almost unconsciously reflects the mood of a specific time and set of circumstances that can’t be recreated in the cubicle farms of a modern triple-A developer decades later?
Well first off you probably need to have some of the following things on your mood board:
- Twin Peaks The Return.
- David Bowie’s final album and accompanying videos.
- H.P. Lovecraft, obviously.
- Army of Darkness, probably.
- Piranesi. (The novel and, I suppose, its namesake.)
- From Software’s games, inevitably.
- Roadside Picnic.
- Oh, let’s say… The Lighthouse.
I’ll try to explain some of these as we go.
1. Bin off the lore
As I mentioned above, none of the later games in the Quake ‘franchise’ (such as it is) really have anything to do with the first Quake. Quake 2 was going to be the start of a separate franchise before they opted for the bankable name. Q3A is a Smash Bros-esque ‘daydream’ about pitting id Software’s all-stars against each other outside of time and space. Quake 4 is a sequel to Quake 2. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars actually makes a pretty valiant effort to connect Quake 1 and 2, but it’s mostly a straight prequel to Quake 4. Quake Champions is like dining in a questionable Quake theme restaurant with service staff in bad costumes.
(QC is fun, but it’s firmly an idsploitation game rather than a proper canonical Quake game. I feel that Tim Willetts’s understanding of what id collectively achieved with Quake can be compared to any individual member of the Beatles’ contemporary grasp of Being In The Beatles.)
Attempts to retroactively give Quake a backstory have been consistently stupid. This was a tweet by the Quake Champions account in 2018:
“In Quake, Ranger used his Dire Orb to teleport directly into the mother of all monsters, Shub-Ngurath(sic)—ripping her apart. He’s been searching for a way out of the Dreamlands ever since.”
Not one single proper noun in this paragraph (aside from that iffy Lovecraftian monster name, in its original even sketchier spelling) existed during the development of Quake.
If Quake is supposed to be anything it’s (a precursor to) a generalised Metaverse, and the player character is supposed to be the player. (Following the tradition that had persisted from Colossal Cave right the way up to Doom.) The name ‘Ranger’, as far as I can tell, only turned up in Q3A (applied to one of the skins for the Quake Guy character model) as a cute nod to the ‘Ranger Gone Bad’ machinima.
The places where you find yourself are an approximate idea of how a medieval castle worked, shaped and populated by the premise that you’ve been brought there by some ancient, unknowable enemy to fight your way out. The level names and the text scrolls at the end of episodes are evocative rather than literal – they’re there because it would’ve been awkward if they had been left blank.
Unfortunately modern big budget games generally can’t be this vague. The good news for probably-Machinegames is that (as with Wolfenstein) the skeletal nature of id’s narrative affords them plenty of opportunity to offer their own interpretation.
My personal take is that Quake (the big baddie, whatever it is that picks up at the other end when humanity starts opening interdimensional rifts) is some elder being so fantastically long-lived and powerful that it has exhausted its home dimension. Biological life is perceptible to it in the way individual electrons in a powered circuit are to us. It’s been waggling its interdimensional tendrils around in manifold space like an anteater’s tongue to find weaknesses in space or civilisations discovering slipgate technology, and trying to influence them.
Anything getting slorped through a slipgate is being spat out in Quake’s dimension(s) of the doomed, where the laws of physics can be rewritten with conscious intent. As per Roadside Picnic, the tangible effects of this can be so strange as to be almost like magic.
Death and aging don’t work normally. (The medieval architecture and humanoid enemies the player encounters have arrived from technologically primitive worlds, maybe aeons before.) The protagonist quickly figures out that they don’t need to sleep. Perhaps gravity, the workings of electronic devices or specific chemical reactions are sometimes simply ‘commented out’ (explaining why there are loads of pneumatic nailguns and pre-industrial machinery around the place?).
One could tell quite a compelling Shaggy Canine Parable of the protagonist figuring out the rules of the world, in the early stages of the game. Make it a mystery, and make the ultimate resolution satisfying in game terms (a big monster dies, a secret is revealed, etc.), but don’t spell everything out to the n-th degree.
2. Don’t make the main character a sad dad
Machinegames did a good job of subverting this tired trope for their Wolfensteins. Sure their version of B.J. Blazkowicz is a maudlin elderly man, but it’s in the service of a thought experiment: what if an all-American comic book WWII hero was a real person, in a universe where the Nazis were real (historically accurate) Nazis, but amped up to the same exaggerated level (causing them to be able to take over the world)?
How does someone whose approach to any problem is “kill all the Nazis and escape” react to a situation where they’ve emerged from cold storage decades later to find the entire world is chock full of Nazis and there’s nowhere left to escape to? It’s a trick that probably works once, and relies quite a lot on Wolfenstein 3-D being so inherently ridiculous and having so little narrative meat of its own to fall back on.
Quake’s premise as described in Quake Champions would suck: a sad old man is stranded in another dimension and wants to get back to his family. No.
If Quake is about anything, it’s an expression of the exhilaration and terror of a group of young(ish) guys having their horizons expanding at a rapid pace. It’s a 20-something Carmack at the wheel of a Ferrari. It’s graphics hardware power doubling every few months. (It’s not a legacy act shuffling around the stage for one last paycheck, please.)
Which isn’t to say that a Quake game should be a rollercoaster thrill ride or a power fantasy, in mechanical terms. But the feeling that it has to convey (and the non-trivial challenge that the developers have to overcome, now that gamers are so deeply jaded) is one of the player stepping into the unknown, and that anything might now be possible.
Refer back to the first two items of the mood board list: artists at the very peak of their craft, taking the viewer on a journey that confounds their expectations and is seered, moment by moment, into their memories. The feeling of witnessing an Event. This was what booting up QTEST was like. Michael Lopp talks about ‘holy shit’ moments, where the implications of something you’re seeing rewrite what is possible in the world. As someone who likes computer games, Quake is probably the most significant one of my lifetime so far.
If money were no object, the obvious way to recapture this feeling would be to design a new Quake as a VR native game. (That would certainly be in line with Carmack’s ambitions at the time.) But in reality the developers would sadly be constrained to having to support the mainstream platforms, and using the de facto standard industry control interface. (Though it would be nice to get some VR-style motion control in there, I always thought this was abandoned too quickly for first person games after the Wii/PS Move generation.)
Still, as Nintendo have repeatedly shown, there are plenty of other ways to surprise and delight players that don’t require bleeding edge technology. And there are probably some things id envisioned for Quake that would be technically feasible now.
Shamblers, for instance. If you look at the relative size of the character models, a shambler is supposed to be the size of a small house, but because of the way they’re lit and animated (and because like everything else they don’t interact with the environment much) this never really comes across. A shambler that functions more like El Gigante in Resident Evil 4 could be cool, and could be used as sparingly. Or how about finally having first person melee combat that isn’t rubbish?
3. You’re not making a movie
Ideally a new Quake game would eschew cinematic conventions as much as possible – no cut-scenes (or cutting away from the first person), no dialogue, no conversation trees, no exposition dumps. Sadly the modern blockbuster game market (and certainly the people holding the purse strings) would baulk at this, much as children once complained about that dialogue-free issue of the Superman comic because they ‘read it too fast’.
If Quake Guy simply has to be a dramatic character, at least don’t make them a generic action hero. (Strike Nolan North and Troy Baker from your call sheet.) The role demands a performer with two (or maybe three) main strengths:
- A mesmeric screen presence (and voice, ideally).
- A physical build that would be plausible for running around and shotgunning fools (but not tearing them limb from limb – no Rambos).
- An eccentric streak that would make the player believe that they really wouldn’t be phased by Lovecraftian nightmares unfolding, and to suspect that they might in fact be getting up to far crazier things in their daily life.
I’m thinking someone in the Willem Defoe, Spalding Gray, Dean Stockwell, Cory McAbee, Timothy Carey, Peter Weller vein (most of whom are either too old or dead). Bruce Campbell would be eye-rollingly obvious.
But then I’m failing to follow my own ‘no sad dads’ advice here – there’s no reason it has to be an aging white guy, and in fact it probably shouldn’t. Fill in the most exciting name you can think of to come before the word “VERSUS” on the opening title card of your E3 trailer here.
If the developers are obligated to include a Famous Name Talent for the sake of marketing they should at least try to do something interesting with them (either that or completely take the piss – see Yul Brynner in Futureworld or Dolph Lundgren in Johnny Mnemonic).
4. Don’t make it po-faced
A major part of id’s charm is how rambunctious and life-affirming their games often are. No matter how horrific the subject matter, there are always goofy jokes to leaven it. They understand that extreme violence can be hilarious and cathartic – as far back as Wolfenstein 3-D they were making key decisions about game features, graphics and particularly sound effects based on whether they got a big laugh.
(This is why id’s games will always be cooler than Bungie’s – id’s games feel like they’re channeling Sam Raimi, whereas when Bungie games try to have ‘comic relief’ it’s like, I don’t know, Peter Gabriel or someone trying to tell a joke.)
For Quake specifically, there’s a strong impression that they earnestly wanted to make a dour, grimdark gothic horror game, keying into the contemporary fashion for grimy, industrial decay (think Darkseed, MDK or Azrael’s Tear, or films like Alien 3 or Se7en) but couldn’t fully disguise their big goofy nerd personalities.
Ogres are hilarious. Quad Damage is hilarious. Having to messily blow up zombies with grenades is hilarious. The appalling noise Shamblers make when they teleport in to jump scare you is hilarious. As is falling in lava. The player model’s chonky appearance (what are they even supposed to be?) and Benny Hill animation conspire to make multiplayer look absurd, combined with the (very Freudian) tongue in cheek death messages resulting in a game that feels tonally starkly at odds with the gruff militarism that would come to dominate FPS a few years later.
I’m not saying that the Quake Guy should be cracking wise every few seconds like Duke Nukem, or making reference to memes (the lamest and most immediately dated part of Doom 2016 and Eternal). But making the player laugh (for whatever reason) is a valid emotional response to go for, and should be factored into the design process.
5. Give it an injection of fresh blood
The stakes for mainstream blockbuster games are now so high that it’s almost impossible for the senior roles at studios to be held by anyone under 40. Risk aversion and inertia at big publishers was already becoming creatively stifling in the 1990s – it’s no accident that Doom was an independent project even though the major publishers at the time had ample resources to make a similar (albeit probably still slightly technically less advanced) equivalent.
I think that Bethesda/id/Machinegames would do well to reach out to up and coming developers either from the mod scene or the commercial boomer shooter and indie horror subgenres if they’re not already doing so.
Amon26 or Cyriak or Amelie Langlois or Robert Yang or Brendon Chung would probably have more exciting ideas about digging into the guts of Quake than a Powerpoint jockey like Marty Stratton. (Please don’t remind me the ages of anyone on that list. Feel free to substitute in whatever the modern equivalent is – some zygote making games in Roblox or whatever.)
6. Don’t make multiplayer an afterthought
Bethesda recently confirmed that Doom: The Dark Ages is going to ship without any multiplayer component. While this is a sensible business decision (although I’m not sure if it’s going to look like a great deal for consumers if it’s still carrying the same price tag as a Call of Duty game), it’s still a bit disappointing if you consider what an integral role multiplayer has always held for Doom and Quake games.
The problem is that any discussion of multiplayer modes in big budget games inevitably degenerates into the publisher asking why they’re not trying to carve out a piece of Fortnite’s market. I’m really not sure how you could get them to agree to a straightforward mode that recreates deathmatch, team deathmatch and CTF without committing to endlessly churning out new content and cosmetics.
There would be some poetic justice if Quake was made into an ‘always on’ game with players dropping in and out of each others’ sessions, finally realising the vision for the game that John Romero would describe to journalists early in development, where all the servers were running maps that were linked together, and players would roam the world challenging each other to melee combat.
I realise I’ve still left a lot of the specifics vague. (Should it be open-world? My instinct says probably not. Small environments with tons of detail and interactivity would be better.) But these are the guiding principles by which I think anyone trying to make something worthy of the name should be steering their decisions.
Now we just have to wait and see what Machinegames (or whoever) actually come up with. I really, really hope it’s not just God of War in Quake trousers.
Tags: bethesda softworks, boomer shooters, bungie, doom, Doom Eternal, doom: the dark ages, enemy territory quake wars, etqw, FPS, gibs, hugo martin, Id Software, john carmack, john romero, machinegames, marty stratton, microsoft, PC, q3a, quake, quake champions, Quake II, quake III arena, quake iv, retro, sandy petersen, tim willetts
