Quake Designer Celebrates 20th Anniversary By Releasing Fascinating Archived Documents

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Quake, id Software founder and designer John Romero has reached into the archives and pulled out some fascinating historical documents.

One of these is QUAKETALK 95, an FAQ created by Joost Shuur, who used it to "keep people up to date on everything that had been posted about Quake up to that point."

Shuur, somewhat of a superfan, collected any and all information about the game and its development. The document features everything from interview transcriptions with Romero, to magazine articles written about the game, and a catalogue of unconfirmed rumours.

"This Quake FAQ was created on 10/22/1995 to keep people up to date on everything that had been posted about Quake up to that point," Romero explained on his blog. "People wanted to know what the game was about and information was spread thin all over the place: magazine articles, IRC logs, even in hint books.

"Joost did a great job scraping this information together," he continued. "You can see the original design thinking behind Quake while we were making it.

"Just one month after this QUAKETALK 95 FAQ was released was our fateful, big company meeting that determined the final direction of the game into the Quake that was released. It bears little resemblance to the designs discussed here but it lets you see how volatile game design processes can be."

It's a fascinating insight into the game's development path, and what it was before it became the Quake we know and love today. You can download QUAKETALK 95 here.

In addition to this, Romero also re-published the first ever screenshots of Quake. You can see some of these below. The full set is available here.

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At E3 2016, Bethesda announced id Software is working on a new entry in the series called Quake Champions. Studio director Tim Willits appeared on stage to reveal the competitive arena-based first-person shooter and said it is designed for newcomers and veterans. You can see and read more about Quake Champions here.