Quake's multiplayer was as fast and furious as it gets.

The Game That Keeps on Giving

The spirit of grassroots, home-brewed game development that id Software pioneered with Doom came fully to bear with the release of Quake. The company included its own mini-programming language, Quake C, with which budding game makers could modify just about any aspect of the game. Aspiring developers created so many modifications, big and small, for Quake that an entire community sprang up around them. Your $50 got you a whole lot more than one discrete game when you purchased Quake.

GLQuake: The free add-on that launched a million 3dfx cards.

Even id Software got into the act, as id master programmer John Carmack continued development on aspects of Quake long after the game's release. Gamers decried the poor network performance of Quake's initial release, so Carmack released QuakeWorld, a version of the game that enabled smoother online play for modem users and added a host of competition-specific features. Quake was a DOS game, but id also ported it to operating systems as mainstream as Windows and as obscure as SGI IRIX and Solaris. Perhaps most importantly, Carmack single-handedly sold millions of 3dfx graphics accelerator cards with the release of GLQuake, the first killer app for the growing PC 3D hardware market. Finally, in 1999, id released the full source code to Quake, allowing programmers the world over to extend the game's life for years to come.

Fact: The Quake rocket launcher is the best FPS weapon ever.

Throughout the early 1990s, PC gaming made a transition from the slowly paced, thought-driven adventure games of the late '80s to more mainstream, action-oriented fare. The charge was led by id Software, the small Texas-based developer who broke onto the scene in 1992 with Wolfenstein 3D and then, literally, redefined the gaming rules with 1993's monumental Doom. Doom's success was unparalleled, and so id's next game, which it began to drop hints about long before release, was among the most hotly anticipated ever. By the time 1996 rolled around and the long-rumored Quake had failed to surface, gamers began to wonder just what id was up to. Finally, the game's shareware was uploaded during the summer of '96, but many of the gamers who downloaded and played it were left scratching their heads. The graphics engine seemed improved, but the single-player game lacked the constant scares and cohesive, creepy atmosphere of Doom. A disjointed hodgepodge of maps, with incongruous motifs and a handful of not-very-scary monsters, sadly comprised Quake's four single-player episodes.

If the initial response to Quake was so lukewarm, why has it made our list of the greatest games ever? One word: Deathmatch. Quake was released just as the Internet was commercially coming of age, and gamers were graduating from local bulletin boards to the global online community. id Software recognized, before anyone else, that the future of competitive gaming lay with the Internet, and so Quake was the first game whose multiplayer could be played against many people on the Internet rather than with only three other people on a local network. Quake lost all semblance of context and storyline when you took it online; the warriors were merely signifiers for other human players, the grungy, techno-archaic levels were reduced to faceless arenas that housed the carnage, and the weapons became raw extensions of your wrath. Ultimately, Quake distilled competitive gaming into its purest and most visceral form.

Though the improvements made to Quake's engine weren't apparent to the first gamers who ran it at low resolutions, they were, in fact, as revolutionary as the game's multiplayer. Every first-person shooter before Quake had used animated 2D sprites for its enemies; Quake was the first game in which every enemy, item, and object was fully 3D. Furthermore, previous FPS games had operated on a single plane, but Quake's levels had far more realistic architecture, with rooms located above and below other rooms, holes in walkways you could shoot through, and a lot more places to hide. The Quake engine represented a brilliant evolution in graphics, level design, and networking, and the sheer number of developers who licensed it for their own games is testament to its incredible design.

Quake is an incredible game in its own right, especially for its multiplayer, but it will also be remembered through the years for all of the innovations it brought to both its own genre and to gaming in general. id Software's continued efforts with Quake brought mod making to a new level and made hardware 3D acceleration a must (see sidebar). For its unmatched competitive gameplay, its amazing technical features, and its contributions to gaming as a whole, Quake is undoubtedly one of the greatest games of all time.

I can't even guess at the number of hours I spent playing Quake online from '96 to '98. How many games can you even say you've played nearly every day for two years? The nature of the gameplay was so fast and frenzied, and the competition in the game's community was so intense that the rush of playing Quake against 15 other people was damn near intoxicating. What really made Quake's deathmatch, for me, was the total and absolute focus on the extreme potency of the rocket launcher. That weapon had such a crazy damage level and huge area of splash damage that if you got really good with it, you could lay waste like no other. I remember winning a game online once where I scored 50 frags in four minutes (my hands hurt after that one). It is, bar none, the best weapon ever in a first-person shooter, and every rocket launcher ever put in a game since Quake sadly pales in comparison.