Retro Shooter Journey: Quake

I went into Quake thinking it was going to be something of a watershed moment for the journey. It was the first True 3D game, after all. Finally, I could look up and down without my screen doing any bizarre geometry warping, on something that wasn’t a source port. And the enemies I was going to be shooting wouldn’t just be weird, flat, pixelated masses that vanished if I was directly under them. I also thought these innovations in technology would allow the level designers to go above and beyond with verticality, detail, and atmosphere. Something that would be a huge step in the direction of Half-Life.

But instead, I got a game that felt great, but fell short of Duke Nukem 3D in almost every other measurable metric. It hurts me to write that. I was really looking forward to Quake. I’d fired it up here and there over the years to play multiplayer, maybe do the first mission or two, and I always loved running around with the different weapons you get initially, and I always thought those early missions were pretty well designed.

Then, while I was playing Duke Nukem 3D these past couple weeks I kept thinking, “Man…these weapons and enemies feel awful, I bet Quake blows this game out of the water.” I am now reporting live, after just finishing Quake: it most certainly does not. I was very surprised to learn that Quake came out less than four months after Duke Nukem 3D. They were competing directly in the same year. This fully 3D game about killing an eldritch god, that looked better than anything on a contemporary console, was released alongside a sprite-based FPS with a one-lining lecherous pervert. And now, I’m even more surprised to say, I think I like the game with pervert better!

Quake and Duke together represent what could be great about these fast-paced FPS games. Duke Nukem 3D has these interactive levels with interesting set pieces, tons of personality, and great music. While Quake has these static, drab levels that all pretty much look the same, and instead of a real soundtrack, they got Trent Reznor to do a horror movie soundtrack. And while it is a great soundtrack for a Lovecraftian horror movie, it is not a great soundtrack for blasting horrors-beyond-comprehension. I haven’t looked into it, but I think half the team thought they were making Evil Dead and the other half thought they were making Army of Darkness. 3D Realms were all on the same page when they made Duke Nukem. They were thinking, “what if we made Escape from New York into a video game, but it starred Ron Jeremy.” And while I question their vision, there is no doubt they achieved that vision.

On the other side, Quake pushed the mechanics and feel of the combat in the genre to never before seen heights. In Quake you can actually jump into rooms that are above and below. Which doesn’t sound impressive today, but in Doom and Duke Nukem 3D it was completely impossible. Duke Nukem 3D let you jump and fly into different levels of verticality, but at no point were you actually in one room that was directly over another room; the Build Engine simply couldn’t do that. In Quake you get this grenade launcher that can launch a fully-rendered, 3D grenade, that can bound off surfaces before colliding with an enemy and exploding. An explosion which can turn that enemy into a dozen red meaty pieces that then—themselves—bounce off of different surfaces. It was mind-blowing to me after spending dozens of hours trapped inside these 2D games. The squishy sounds of their entrails splattering against the stone walls sounded like a symphony promising freedom of movement, dynamic encounters, vertical exploration, and more engaging enemies.

The promise was partially delivered upon as I explored the different weapons you were given in Quake. I thought they all blew Duke Nukem 3D out of the water. Duke’s weapons all felt like novelty additions. The designers were saying “look at this cool thing you can do in our engine!” rather than Doom where they said “This is your boomstick. Get to it.” Quake falls squarely into the latter camp for me. Especially the rocket launcher. Which, while not the most powerful, is probably my favorite rocket launcher ever. The perceived velocity of the rockets is magnified by the mostly smaller levels. Enemies can just dodge Duke’s rockets, but the rockets in Quake could chase down even the fastest enemies. And there’s only one enemy I found in Quake that could take more than three rockets.

What both games fail at, I think, is enemy design. The enemies in Quake all feel unfair in different ways and can also feel extremely boring to fight. The worst offender is the ogre, who also happens to be the most plentiful enemy in the game. If you get caught in the wrong corridor without the right weapon, you could be popping in and out of cover against a group of ogres for over a minute, whittling them down inch by inch in between their salvos of grenades that you then need to wait for to explode. The other lower tier enemies are just boring melee enemies you back pedal away from and unload shells into. Then the higher tier enemies, while more interesting, are brutally punishing and demand to be taken down as fast as possible. The shambler, in particular, has this bullshit hitscan attack that you have less than a second to react to.

But the worst of them all is this awful pile of goo that is somehow faster than the player, it can clear even the largest rooms in Quake in less than a second to attack you, bouncing so quickly to different corners of the room it is nearly impossible to hit unless you see it coming. And, to top it all off, it explodes on death. If you don’t kill it before it can get to you, you’re pretty much dead. And the final episode of Quake has over a hundred of them. Sometimes dozens in the same room. It’s terrible. I thought Duke Nukem 3D had my new least favorite enemy ever with its bullshit suicide robot drones that kamikaze you, but that fucking pile of blue goo in Quake is 100 times worse.

I’m looking forward to when I finally play the game that marries these two standards. You might be thinking to yourself, “You'll get there soon! That’s Half-Life!” but no, it’s not. While Half-Life certainly drew a huge amount of inspiration from both games, it is—by design—a cinematic experience. The fights in Half-Life don’t come close to picking up a quad-damage power-up in Quake and churning half the enemies in the level into a red paste. I want Quake with better levels, more interactivity, and set pieces punctuating the blood-pumping encounters. And after going through so many of these shooters, I’m beginning to worry it doesn’t come along until Doom (2016).

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