Whenever I load up a source port like Quakespasm for the first time on a system, the first thing I do is tweak it to resemble the software renderer as much as possible. Hell, I even turn off animation interpolation because the choppy animations are just so iconic to me.
I want to give a huge congratulations for the Digital Foundry team, no doubt now one of the greatest teams covering gaming of all time. Sensational job Richard, bringing John & Alex was a master stroke & the rest of the crew too. Simply outstanding. Happy birthday DF Retro!
Quake's Soundtrack is by far some of Trent Reznor's best work. It's haunted, unnerving soundscapes transforms Quake into something dreary, uncomfortable, & thrilling. Production-wise, it sounds like an extension of the ideas found in Nine Inch Nail's "The Downward Spiral" & that era of NIN's discography, though it's by far more surreal & abstract than anything else the band put out at the time. If you're even remotely into NIN, Reznor, or ambient music, please give it a proper listen either by playing Quake or streaming the album.
I heard it countless times, and it always reminds me of the Diablo 1's soundtrack from Blizzard North. These two games are so alike, dark fantasy but mostly medieval. You can see tortured and torn people in both game's dungeons.
Yeah, modern FPS's prioritize covers, aiming down sights and sniping while Quake is more about impulsively blasting rockets at whatever moves before your face. Having played Q1 for years, my first reaction to early console FPS's like Halo was as if it's playing in slo-mo.
%100 I grew up on COD and Battlefield and only started playing quake when the remaster came out on PS4, its now one of my favourite games ever. Deathmatches have a pace that I always wanted but never knew existed.
What fascinated me most about the predecessor Doom, as well as about Q1, was the aggression of the opponents against each other and using it strategically.
When I first saw Doom I was blown away. I remember thinking "nothing will ever top this". Then a couple of years later I saw Quake. My jaw was on the floor. These games changed my life forever. I hope iD's next project will be a SP Quake game. I would be soooo happy.
There was another contemporary 3D accelerated quake that was missed in this comparison: Quake RAVE, which used the low-level layer of Apple's QuickDraw 3D called the Rendering Acceleration Virtual Engine (RAVE). It was platform-specific and never gained much traction, being replaced by OpenGL and dropped entirely in OS X.
DF team is a godsend to the gaming community. Everytime i feel my generation of gamers is fading away they give us a reminder that we were, we are and will always be a part of some of gamings greatest moments. To my fellow old gamers and to my dearest late friend.. Game is not Over.
@@M.W.H. sure lmfao, keep thinking that and go deeper into your egotistic boomer hole. Any generation can still enjoy Quake as much as anyone did back in the 90s, if not more because even the current generation's low-end PCs can run the game without any problems, Quake destroyed PCs back in 1996.
Back around 1996 or so, when I was working at Intel in Oregon, testing some of the first 3D video cards ever, we played a hell of a lot of Quake, to see how the OpenGL support of the cards worked in the game. Good times.
I love homebrew and beta/unreleased game. There is a homebrew and a "demo" if Quake for DC I still have copies sitting on a CD spindle. 😅 HL Blue Shift was great on DC. Back in the day i downloaded a few versions of Thrill Kill, unreleased MK2, betas of Tony Hawk for PSX. Now it's cool you can easily find things like Ecco 2 and Castlevania for DC.
3 года назад
This video is a masterpiece, especially for someone who grew up on a Quake.
One of the biggest improvements I've noticed is that the shots of John with his OLED as the background are much better looking. Great color balance between John and the BG.
Didn't feel like an hour, I was drawn in and loved every minute of it. Great work! Quake is one of my favorite games - one of the few I've completed several times and also used to mod back in the day. It's always a great day when well-made videos are released that underline exactly why I love the game. Quake is a sum of a bunch of different things that aligned perfectly.
playing quake over 2020 and 2021 with my friends with our own little custom mod and maps (one of us is EXTREMELY talented!) has been an amazing way to ride out the pandemic and still stay connected. outstanding video, john!
Excellent work as always John! I'm beyond happy to see that there's now a DF Retro Patreon tier; I've never supported something so quickly before. Can't wait to see what's to come, hope you have fun with it, and wishing you nothing but success with this new chapter for DF Retro.
In 7th and 8th grade, the science teacher in my school was a lowkey gamer...he overheard my friends and I talking about Quake. He helped us set up an after school "computer club" in the lab where we all played shareware quake multiplayer. Man I love this game.
What a coincidence. I have been getting back into Quake again for the past month or so and really been obsessing about it, and here John comes with an hour-long deep dive into everything Quake to satiate my needs! Thanks a lot John, I am going to thoroughly enjoy this.
My old crew has apparently already rounded up the troops in the last few months to play some Q4 CTF and Duels again. I was just about to go reinstall all my Quakes again. lol and this video pops up
Same here, and I had the Saturn version only. Don't think I ever beat it though because the battery for saving games has been dead for as long as I can remember. I had to leave the system on the entire time I was playing a game if I ever wanted to complete it.
This video should be preserved as the definitive handbook on the technical legacy of Quake. Relatively concise, yet deeply informative and captivating. All first-person shooter fans should watch - especially younger generations - and know this history behind modern 3D gaming. Just brilliant.
I have one sitting on the floor in my bedroom. It may or may not work. All yours for S&H ;-) Sadly, all of my ViewSonics are history :-( Another case where "retro" tech is better, if less convenient.
Wow so happy to see this in my feed this morning John, DF Retro is the best, I really appreciate the hard work and love you put into these. Quake is amazing!
Man, that VQuake at 240 with the anti-Aliasing looks like how my brain will tell me N64 games looked. Like the rose tinted lens version of them. I was playing N64 Quake a few weeks back and having a blast with it. Need to get that Saturn port some day.
Amazing video - thank you! God, I miss the gothic gloom of Quake so much. Sad that almost everything after that went scifi. Lucikly there were Hexen 2 and Heretic 2 to enjoy, but other than those two it was and is slim pickings. Also: software rendered Quake looks a hell of a lot better than that early 3Dfx smoothed out mess.
Living in the edge of a small town in rural North Carolina, USA I forget that there are other tech nerds who enjoy the minor details until I see your df retro notifications and remember they just shipped them all to Great Britain. Keep up the good work guys.
This episode of DF Retro was great. One of your best. Brings back memories from my first computer, a Pentium 133 with 32Mb of Ram. This was one of the first PC games I ever played.
Excellent. One thing that rarely gets mentioned re Quake is the subtle yawing motion added to movement, particularly when you strafe. It added so much to the feel of your character having weight and heft, and not just being a mobile crosshair.
There's a way to put your xbone into dev mode to be able to sideload windows store apps. That's probably the most realistic way to get it done nowadays.
I'll never forget my brother's friend bringing the demo over on a big stack of floppy disks. I was so blown away by it. Spent freshman and sophomore year of high school completely obsessed with Quake.
I slaved away a summer to afford dual voodoo 2s in SLI to play quake and quake 2 back in the 90s. SLI allowed me to run at a grand resolution of 1024 x 768 at 60 FPS... it blew my mind at the time along with the first cable internet, quake had insane multiplayer back in the day. I can absolutely attest quake drove me into pc gaming and building systems. Great video! Very nostalgic take on a golden age
One thing that always stood out to me, at least in GLQuake, were enemy animations. They have very few key frames with no interpolation so they end up looking like stop motion animation. Modern source ports fix this via interpolation, but for some reason, the enemies seam to animate perfectly in the Saturn port. But it could just be that the low animation frame rate more closely matches the low overall frame rate.
Considering the nature of the Saturn port, I wouldn't be surprised if the monster animations were redone and/or somehow handled differently. Personally, I kinda love the look of the animations without interpolation. It just feels *right* for Quake in a way I can't really put into words.
@@LonelySpaceDetective it kind of fits for the unsettling and almost unreal (ha) horror aspect. I think it was the first terminator film, where the t1000 was animated at a slightly lower framerate than the film reel ran at, giving it an unsettlingly jerky and unnatural feel. it's probably something similar
The first 3D accelerator I bought had only 4 megabytes of video RAM. It let me play Quake 1 in OpenGL at a glorious 640x480 resolution. That doesn't sound like much today but in 1997 that was a big upgrade over software render at 320x240.
Let's be fair: I was initially sceptical about the content and the duration of the video but I have to say that this was surprisingly very entertaining! Thanks.
Quake changed my life. It was the game that needed a graphics card upgrade for the first time, we opened up the box and "upgraded" Ive been working in computing ever since !
What a superb video! Seeing GlQuake for the first time time was one of the most memorable moments in my gaming experience. Good to see proper credit given to Carmack and Abrash for this work of art.
glQuake at 512x384 at a silky smooth 60 FPS with _transparent_ water! SO many good memories also playing CTF, Thunderwalker, TF, and MegaTF! Quake was literally THE killer app!
I’m eagerly awaiting a fully featured RTX version of Quake 1. I’ve always loved the first game over the others, from its style/atheistic to its sound track (which I’m lucky enough to own on vinyl). There’s still nothing like it.
Yay, DF Retro! Nice to see the historical perspective on Quake. Would love some Quake or Unreal games on Switch one day... Those low poly high-speed FPS games with '90s techno music have a special place in my heart.
I first played Quake on an N64 since my dad got it bundled at a pawn shop. It was mesmerizing to go through the stages and see all the monsters. One thing that really blew me away, besides the whole game itself, was when I saw 2 AI monsters fighting each other, it just made it so much more immersive.
I remember that it was tried but it was a disaster even as a prototype. I don't remember what magazine it was that had a blurb on it. But to be fair the Jaguar was a disaster all around. Where the few 32x + Sega CD games are essentially as good as a Jaguar game. So, considering how weird the Sega Saturn port was. One can only imagine how bad a Jaguar port would had been.
Thanks so much John, what a feat. Absolutely fantastic production and storytelling. 1 small criticism, dropping your head at the end of sentences to change page or move the script or whatever is happening there takes me out of the feeling of having you tell me this story.
Masterpieces from the community such as the Arcane Dimensions mappack make me believe that Quake will be eternal, and our grandchildren will still be captivated by it, decades from now.
This is the best DF Retro yet, you takes in all way to Quake in tech of the same time, with details and quotes from the developers really strike well. And you own personal take in the tech, style of gameplay and how it's now in the present it's what make this video section shine.
Awesome stuff, can't wait to see more old school pc gaming goodness. That early era of 3D acceleration will never be beaten and it was made for guys like you to make DF retro videos :D.
I remember as a teenager working a job at our local grocery store to pick up Diamond Monster 3D (3DFX Voodoo) after seeing Quake play at a local computer store. Now almost 25 years later and I still love playing games on my pc.
DF needs to do another quake video as the enhanced version of quake has now been released by night dive studios...and as with doom 64 and the original doom's it's a fantastic version.
Fantastic documentary - a real labour of love! I remember playing the first ports of AmiQuake back in the day. It wasn’t so much a case of “frames per second” but “seconds per frame”! It looked great on my scanlined TV output though.
Fantastic episode John. I don’t think that people who wasn’t there during PC Gaming in1996-1997 understand which impact Quake had as a game for the entire gaming history. When buying a modem back then all we could think of was the ping time in Quakeworld. And there was this whole spectrum of various competing graphics card manufacturers who all tried to market how good their cards could handle Quake. A fascinating era indeed. I wish that you also would have covered the various computer platforms. Quake was ported to everything from SGI Irix work stations to Solaris and even Amiga.
I still have the my original N64 cartridge and have shown my kids that this was the beginning for FPS shooters along with GoldenEye. So very creative for the times.
i revisit this after pleasing launch of enhanced Quake and i got admit it, give me the full picture here. Many thanks and thanks to you personaly for you presence on QuakeCon 21 :)
Glide and GL Quake were the reason for my first 2 gpu pc. Them voodoo and voodoo 2 cards were such an expensive purchase for this 15 year old me back in the day. So much extra shifts at McDonald's to support my PC habit. Thanks for going down memory lane
I was a kid with a N64 back then, I did not see the importance of Quake beyond the Nintendo bubble back in the day, "mind you". Love your take on it, John!
I do enjoy the modern Digital Foundry content, but DF Retro has a special place in my heart. I find it so much more interesting how developers worked within greater limitations.
