RockPaperShotgun Quake Article

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How old were you when you first played Quake?

0 - 6 years old
2
5%
7 - 11 years old
4
11%
12 - 16 years old
15
41%
17 - 22 years old
9
24%
23 - 30 years old
3
8%
Shub-Niggurath
4
11%
 
Total votes: 37

scar3crow
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RockPaperShotgun Quake Article

Post by scar3crow »

RockPaperShotgun has an article up in their Gaming Made Me series, wherein an author relates how a particular title marked a changing point in their life. The current entry is Quake, as related by a "yung'in" who first played it in 1996 at the age of 8 and had his eyes opened to what video games could be. Go give it a read and don't forget to post your own early experiences of Quake below!
...and all around me was the chaos of battle and the reek of running blood.... and for the first time in my life I knew true happiness.
leileilol
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Post by leileilol »

I was 17 when Quake came out, so............................. when I was 8 I was playing Vette, driving around virtual San Fran rather than racing.

Quake's atmosphere was awesome (especially pre-1.07 for some reason mostly regarding sound attenuation) and Pain Keep was awesome frosting to it. There's something special about its two blue rows in the palette that add a lot.

I wanted guns that could do everything. like a mountain cutter


now i feel old. and I still want guns that could do everything

seriously, in the era when Descent, Hexen and, Duke3D were the other big things, Quake is like........really relevant. you kids will never understand its influential role, beyond being a bootstrap kit for unoriginal copies of games
i should not be here
ajay
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Post by ajay »

So I guess as I was over 30 I've got to go with Shub-Niggurath? Tut *ageism* etc... ;)
mankrip
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Post by mankrip »

leileilol wrote:seriously, in the era when Descent, Hexen and, Duke3D were the other big things, Quake is like........really relevant. you kids will never understand its influential role, beyond being a bootstrap kit for unoriginal copies of games
This.

Today I was thinking about how games are more like a kind of sport than like an art form, and then I realized how much of the gaming experience comes from how well its techologies are implemented rather than from the atmosphere of its content. Games are a technological challenge, not a simulation; this is what the "kids these days" don't understand.</random_gibberish>
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh mankrip Hell's end wgah'nagl fhtagn.
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scar3crow
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Post by scar3crow »

ajay; It means you are an Elder, which as Threewave once taught us all, that means regeneration.

That and I got tired of typing in options for the poll.
...and all around me was the chaos of battle and the reek of running blood.... and for the first time in my life I knew true happiness.
leileilol
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Post by leileilol »

I remember used to saying 'shub' in fear of unfortunate implications of the second half of the name said aloud.

Come to think of it, in a politically correct world this might prevent a new Quake-based Quake game from happening.
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Baker
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Post by Baker »

leileilol wrote:you kids will never understand its influential role, beyond being a bootstrap kit for unoriginal copies of games
I think to some disagree you are underestimating the new age of modders. Sure they start out with a blank slate, but I mean a few years ago more than a few people thought I was a naive knobster [I both was and wasn't] and I think it is a bit jumping the gun to presume that what I would describe as the Quake developer cultural heritage doesn't rub off a bit.

I mean, PSP modders wouldn't look to Quake if it weren't both relevant and significant. The platform neutrality of Quake alone is a marvelous thing and many see with just a bit of tuning that you can do great things with the Quake engine. It was more forward thinking than anyone in 1996 could have ever imagined.
The night is young. How else can I annoy the world before sunsrise? 8) Inquisitive minds want to know ! And if they don't -- well like that ever has stopped me before ..
Error
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Post by Error »

Back when I was ... 12 I discovered Quake, at a friend's house (some of you may remember a "GBLW"). It was a shareware disk, and he had the crack to do full version installs. Up until that point, I'd only played crappy computer games like "Mad Dog McCree", and I sometimes when I was lucky I'd get to play Doom. Shortly after the release I convinced my parents that buying a PC was the way to go. Maybe a month later we got our first real PC... 90mhz, think it was 4-8mb of ram, 800mb harddrive. God that was an amazing machine. I saved up my allowance for many weeks and bought a legit copy of Quake. The amount of happiness never ceased. We acquired the internet soon there-after. A 14.4k modem. I soon learned about the moddability of Quake and downloaded the progs106 source and qcc. From then on till this day I've rarely missed a day where I didn't mod.

Previous aliases I've used on this site:
Errorabove
SoulKeeper
Error on Parm0
QCLord (to piss people off... sorry I was young)
SBLW

I think there were more way back when, but I can't recall.

I've had some amazing times with this community and the games/mods we've made. Just remember, this community doesn't ever die unless every single person deletes their code/compiler.
Sajt
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Post by Sajt »

leileilol wrote:I was 17 when Quake came out, so............................. when I was 8 I was playing Vette, driving around virtual San Fran rather than racing.
DUDE! I used to play ColorVette all the time in the years before we got a pc! I love bashing into the paperthin motorcycles when going really fast, and they slide like a whole block. Or hitting the pedestrians hard enough that they never get up again. YEAH!

Anyway, I'm not very old, relatively. I played a lot of old games, but they were old already when I was playing them. Our household didn't get a PC till 1998, and then I played the Quake2 demo from a PC Gamer cd. I probably played through that demo a hundred times. A year or two later my brother came home with a Quake CD which he had found in a bargain bin. It had never occurred to me before that there was a Quake "1" and I'd never heard of it before (we didn't have the internet). He paid $10 for it, and typically of him he said I had to pay a loonie each time to play it. I somehow came into the possession of $5 and gave it to him so that we could share co-ownership of the CD. I remember being freaked out by the first shambler, and not knowing how to beat Chthon (incredible as it may seem).

At that young age I would become immersed in any game automatically, with absolutely no pretensions or even awareness of how they work, or whether this or that mechanic sucks. But this immersion wasn't of the "I AM the player" sort, which I suspect is impossible except to seriously messed up nerd types. Instead, I accepted the game as a game, but completely. I thought the square-particle blood looked really cool without ever noticing that it was "crappy" or unrealistic as blood (I probably never even mentally associated it with real blood, it was just part of the game reality, red pixels that fly out when you shoot an enemy). This was a pure and invincible sort of immersion, since I simply didn't possess the level of brainwaves that could question or be aware of it. I also didn't notice that there were pentagrams on all the wall buttons until at least five years later, when it was pointed out to me by someone who noticed it right away.

So in short I was kind of an idiot, but a blissful one I guess. At least half of this effect was due to my retarded brain, rather than some immersive quality that old games had but new ones don't. (However, the other half of the effect probably is indeed such a now-lost quality, due to old games now trying to imitate reality so closely and feebly.)

What's interesting is that I was already programming by the time I first played Quake. I guess Quake was so far out of my league that I didn't realize that "real" games were, in fact, programmed just like my crappy ones were. (It wasn't until I got the internet, and maybe a year or two after that, that I realized that Quake could be something called "modded".) Anyway, you'd think that if I was programming I would be smart enough to take a critical approach when playing games. But perhaps my right brain was sharp but my left brain was retarded. Anyway, that cynicism came soon enough and has long since ruined all possibility of me truly enjoying a video game ever again.
F. A. Špork, an enlightened nobleman and a great patron of art, had a stately Baroque spa complex built on the banks of the River Labe.
ceriux
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Post by ceriux »

i only knew about quake a little bit ago. yet, i know how significant it is. or at least i believe i do. i dont make clones of other games nor do i want to. I may not fully understand how big the impact was. but with out quake i dont think half-life would have existed, let alone the way modding is handeled now a days. personally i wish all games were as easy to edit as quake. i love quake and i hope it never disappears, let alone all of the great people in it's community. i may not always get along with everyone. but i sort of look at it like a family. i dont always get a long with my siblings but i love them, and i love quake and this community.
qbism
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Post by qbism »

If Ajay had voted, at this point it would be 10% shub. And there are one or two even older guys out there. Sometime I feel like one of those guys who builds a Civil War diorama in the basement that's never finished.

I didn't get interested in Quake until the source was released. At the time I was tooling around with the VPE.
Baker
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Post by Baker »

qbism wrote:I didn't get interested in Quake until the source was released.
qbism, it goes without saying that a lot of people like the ideas you've implemented in the engine arena.

I do have to say I wasn't as aware of the possibilities of the Quake engine until I started engine coding. I thought it was like maintaining a fossil at first, that just could use a bit of modernization. Then after some of the Nexuiz/Xonotic stuffs and looking at the Cube engine and recent stuff like Quake Reforged, studying some of Spike's modifications and LordHavocs and reading MH's blog ... well, I never did realize in the distant past how profound the Quake engine is. I was particularly struck by Avirox's work with FTEQW.

/Slightly off-topic, but hey ...
The night is young. How else can I annoy the world before sunsrise? 8) Inquisitive minds want to know ! And if they don't -- well like that ever has stopped me before ..
MasterSplinter
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Post by MasterSplinter »

I was in High School, already loving Wolf3D, Doom, Duke3D, and Decent... Then I came across Quake. ~18 or 19?

Back then it was all dial up and null-modem connection. As a little time went on, I'd play against Q1 Reaper Bots with my best buddy for hours.
Madfox
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Post by Madfox »

Quake struck a hole in the wall of my imagination. Since then there is a mistral coming from I can't resist.
I was playing with the Build engine of DN3D that days when it arrived and left a crater in my further creative process.
A year later quake2 came out but I felt like there is only one.
The possibility for monsters to roam in their ancient caverns, just because they were so hazy,
made a world that scatters my sense of exploration, to create and to evaluate for much longer I could have ever suspected.
Nowaday games may go faster and have more controll aspects, with quake I always be searching my id in unexplored legends.
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Post by revelator »

about 20 when i had my first match against some roomies :)

i remember dying (a lot) :lol: at the time i was pretty well versed in duke nukem alongside a plethora of other old games using the build engine like redneck rampage.

my first experience with quake was more or less limited to LAN play
at the time the story didnt mean a lot to me.

about a year later while searching for help on setting up a game server i joined quakesrc. (back then my nick was daemon) later i changed it to reckless.

at some point nehahra surfaced and after playing it i was hooked,
one should take the time to watch the full ingame movie its gold rofl (warning its very long but damn worth it).

the new stuff in nehahra triggered my creativity and i started my own engine based on an early joequake source (before nehahra support was added) and modified it to support nehahra (back then only darkplaces and nehquake could run it i think).

later joe added nehahra support amongst other things i had in demonquake himself and i scrapped my engine.

though the engines old as methusalem now it still has possibilities
just look at darkplaces :)

or even half-life2 (yep its quake behind the scenes).
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