09/15/24

 I have a love for Quake. In a way, I’ve always had it. The engine is familiar, the motions and physics comforting, even, the muscle memory returns immediately when I play it.

However, I only truly played it at length for the first time with the 2021 remaster. I had owned it for years on Steam, but had never really played it. How do these two facts reconcile?

I have what I think is an interesting relationship with the game. You see, in a way, I have been playing it since I was a little kid, through my teens and into adulthood. But I also hadn’t.

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time playing the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight series, I started originally with Jedi Academy, but switching halfway through it when my dad bought Jedi Outcast for me on Gamecube to shoo me off the computer. I played it through, enjoying every minute of it. When summer rolled around, I plowed through Jedi Academy on PC while he was at work, playing through the whole campaign, then playing long hours of the multiplayer, discovering modding along the way.

I installed hundreds of mods, I even made some! Nothing particularly interesting, and certainly nothing I have around anymore, but I did it. Mostly simple edits, but it taught me a lot, and I had fun doing it. I spent easily hundreds of hours on the game and Jedi Outcast alike. Somewhere along the way, I discovered my dad had a copy of Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight, practically untouched, I guess he didn’t really take to it.

But I sure did. I didn’t finish the game until years later, but I sure did try, and I really enjoyed the game nonetheless.

Later on, I discovered Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, and through it, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, another game I realized my dad had, but hadn’t really touched. Once again, spent hours playing that, though less so on modding and multiplayer.

Later on, when I was older, my dad allowed me to play Half-Life and Half-Life 2, Portal, everything in The Orange Box, and I loved those games too! I spent all that time anew on these games. I spent hundreds of hours playing multiplayer, trying out new mods, spending ungodly amounts of time on Garry’s Mod.

If you weren’t already aware, or didn’t put the pieces together yet, all of these games are somehow related to Quake. The ties with Wolfenstein are easier to piece together, as both are directly related to id. For those unaware, though, both Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy, run on the Quake 3 engine, as does RTCW. Half-Life’s GoldSrc engine is a heavily modified version of the Quake engine, and Half-Life 2, along with every other game in The Orange Box, run on Source, an even more heavily modified version of the Quake engine. Hell, even Half-Life: Alyx has remnants of the Quake lighting engine in it. Dark Forces 2’s engine, the Sith engine, is not directly related to Quake, but it came out not too long after, and it definitely took cues in the feel and aesthetic.

This is why I know it so well despite having only played it through once.  It is intensely familiar and comfortable all at once, because despite never really touching it before prior to last year, I have been playing it all along. The movement, the weight, the game feel is very similar across all these disparate games, all childhood and teenage favorites for me.

Last year I decided, having never really played them prior, to marathon all the Doom games, I had played an episode or two here or there, but something very much clicked this time, and in the span of a few weeks, I played through Doom, all its expansions, Doom 2 and all its expansions, and then Doom 64, even Doom 3 and, yes, its expansions as well. I capped it off with a re-run of Doom Eternal, having played Doom 2016 a bit too recently to play it again.

I felt a bit of an emptiness there, like I just wasn’t satisfied yet, even a few weeks after this sudden binge. I needed just a bit more! I considered giving Quake another shot, but didn’t feel like setting it all up. I was lazy and had played the Bethesda releases of the old Doom games, I found myself wishing for a modern Quake re-release in the same vein.

Lo and behold, mere days later, the new Quake remaster (remake?) was announced and released in short order. I didn’t even have to buy it, it was a free upgrade and available on Xbox Game Pass.

I took that for a sign, and found myself giving Quake a fair shake. I proceeded to beat the entire game. And then its expansions. And hell, I beat Quake 64, included as a free bonus, essentially a shorter version of the main game, just for shits and giggles. Then I played every free addon also available. I was in love with this game. It felt so good, so familiar and comfy. I understand I keep saying those words, and that is a really weird way to describe a game that looks like this:

But as I alluded to in another work, I am a bit of an odd girl with odd tastes. And that’s the only way I can describe how I feel about it. I very much enjoy the heavy-metal power fantasy of something like Doom, but I am often more at home in something like Quake. I love the dark, reflective, and quiet atmosphere, the dark, grim and grimy solitude. It’s a much more somber tone. Something I very much enjoy. And that, layered with the instant familiarity of the mechanics, cemented this game deep in my heart. I have a bit of an odd relationship with this game, as I said, but it’s very special to me, like a friend I somehow knew all along.

I really look forward to spending many more hours in this game, modding it, replaying it, re-experiencing again and again.