Quake is a first-person shooter video game that was released by id Software on June 22, 1996. It was the first game in the popular Quake series of video games.

Quake was released just as the Internet was commercially coming of age, and much of its popularity arose because it was one of the few games of its kind playable over the internet rather than just a local network.

Quake and its four sequels, Quake II, Quake III Arena, Quake 4, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars have sold over 4 million copies combined. In 2002, a version of Quake was produced for mobile phones. A copy of Quake was also sold in 2001, labeled Ultimate Quake, which included the original Quake, Quake II, and Quake III Arena.

In 2008 Quake was honored at the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for advancing the art form of user modifiable games. John Carmack accepted the award.

History

A preview included with id's very first release, 1990's Commander Keen, advertised a game entitled The Fight for Justice as a follow-up to the Keen trilogy. It would feature a character named Quake, "the strongest, most dangerous person on the continent", armed with thunderbolts and a "Ring of Regeneration." Conceived as a VGA full-color side-scrolling RPG, The Fight for Justice was never released.

Pre-release and QTest

Quake was given as a title to the game that id Software was working on shortly after the release of Doom II. The earliest information released described Quake as focusing on a Thor-like character who wields a giant hammer, and is able to knock away enemies by throwing the hammer (complete with real-time inverse kinematics). At the start, the levels were supposed to be designed in an Aztec style, but the choice was dropped some months into the project. Early screenshots then showed medieval environments and dragons. The plan was for the game to have more RPG-style elements. However, work was very slow on the engine, since Carmack not only was developing a full 3D engine, but also a TCP/IP networking model (Carmack later said that he should have done two separate projects which developed those things). Eventually, the whole id team began to think that the original concept may not have been as wise a choice as they first believed. Thus, the final game was very stripped down from its original intentions, and instead featured gameplay similar to Doom and its sequel, although levels and enemies were closer to medieval RPG style rather than science-fiction. Praised throughout the gaming community, it quickly dethroned previous FPS titles and revolutionized the way multiplayer games were developed.

Before the release of the game or the demo of the game, id software released "QTest" on February 24, 1996. It was described as a technology demo and was limited to three multiplayer maps. There was no single player support and some of the gameplay and graphics were unfinished or different from their final versions (notably the boxes of nails, then called flechettes, displayed the NIN logo). Nevertheless, the game's multiplayer support caused Quake servers to spring up everywhere overnight. QTest also gave gamers their first peek into the filesystem and modifiability of the Quake engine, and many entity mods (that placed monsters in the otherwise empty multiplayer maps) and custom player skins began appearing online before the full game was even released.