Behind the Gun: Quake

I played a lot of computer games in the summer of 1997.  My father had bought us a new computer that February, and I was making my way through a number of games I’d heard of and been interested in previously (but which our old computer couldn’t run).  I pushed myself through Another World (it was still called Out of This World in the U.S. at that time), in what felt at times like a long bout of masochism, and was surprised to find that the game was beatable in about 20 minutes once you knew what you were doing (it was figuring that out which took so godawfully long).  I worked through Legend of Kyrandia, and like most reasonable people, I had to look up a guide for the maze in the caves.  I got my ass handed to me over and over and over again by Spectre VR, but kept coming back for more; I’ve never beaten it, I probably never will, and that has always been joyfully irrelevant to my enjoyment of it.  I got bogged down somewhere in the middle (I like to think it was the middle, anyway) of Prince of Persia: The Shadow and the Flame.  And I played a fair bit of Magic: The Gathering, which had recently been made into a sort of RPG by MicroProse (now more or less defunct, I think).  But more than any of these – probably more than all of them put together – I played Quake. 

Really, that might not be quite right.  It’s probably more accurate to say that I lived, breathed, ate, slept, and dreamed Quake.

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The last first-person shooter I’d been able to really play prior to this had been Wolfenstein 3D.  Doom was a far-off fantasy that I played mostly at other people’s houses.  We owned the shareware version of it, but never bought the full version because it would only have been torture.  The computer we’d first had, back when Doom was the new hotness, was an HP 386/SX.  It could technically run Doom, but the game played like the slideshow highlights of an epileptic seizure.  The only way to combat this effect was to shrink the screen down to postage-stamp size, at which point you could barely see anything, so what was the point?

I still forced myself through Doom, though, because I was too young to have a job, and therefore too young to buy games on my own.  When you rely on parents and relatives to buy you games for your birthdays and Christmases (also possibly on special occasions after many carefully constructed appeals that invariably culminate in pleading), you learn to eke whatever enjoyment out of them that you can.

During that summer of 1997, though, a friend loaned me a binder of what must have been at least a couple of years’ worth of demo discs that came packed in with copies of PC Gamer.  On one of those discs was the shareware edition of Quake.  I no longer recall for sure, but Quake may have been the main reason I asked to borrow that binder in the first place.

I couldn’t run Quake at its maximum resolution, because this was 1997, and you had to be a very special kind of computer geek to have a machine capable of that back then, but it ran just fine at normal resolutions.  I spent a lot of afternoons, evenings, and nights (and, this being summer, the small hours of God alone knows how many mornings) glued to the computer chair, eyes fixed on the screen.  To this day, I can play the first few levels of Episode One from memory.

My familiarity with Quake has gotten to a point where I may go months, or even a year or more, without feeling the need or desire to play it.  In this, it shares a spot with Halo (which came much later in my life), in that I played it first for the novelty, and later, when it stopped being new and started becoming familiar, came to seek it out precisely for the comfort of that familiarity.  It’s a sort of mental comfort food, a thing to consume when I don’t know what else I want, or when I’m feeling too stressed to make sound decisions about how to while away an idle hour, and anything new seems too taxing to focus on properly.  My wife plays The Sims (in all its many and sundry variations) for pretty much the same reasons. 

I wonder about this part of myself, sometimes.  When my wife wants to retreat into something comfortable, she chooses something productive and constructive, shaping lives and helping people.  Virtual people, it’s true.  People who sometimes are too stupid to understand how to climb out of a pool if the ladder is taken away, to the point that they will drown, sure.  But still.  Meanwhile, I retreat into power fantasies and shoot aliens and eldritch abominations in the face, (occasionally pistol-whipping them and stabbing them with knives wherever applicable or preferable) over and over again.

But to this day, there is not a single computer I have owned (either personally or jointly) that hasn’t had Quake installed on it.  Even if I don’t have the urge to play it, I need to be able to play it pretty much on demand.

All of this is probably no more than a really long-winded way of explaining that it’s difficult for me to be critical about this game.  But since that’s what I’m here for, I suppose I’d better try.

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In its design, Quake really adheres more to the old school than the new.  Of course, in its time, there were no schools, new or old, unless you wanted to make purely technological distinctions.  While it helped to usher in the age of 3D acceleration and specialized graphics cards, its overall structure is far more reminiscent of Doom, and to a certain extent Wolfenstein 3D before it.  The game is broken up into four episodes (the first one is shareware; this was toward the final days of shareware in general, I believe), each of which in turn is divided into discrete levels.  This is a far cry from, say, Half-Life (which came out just a year or two later), or Halo, both of which are split into chapters, but for narrative purposes rather than for reasons of game structure.

A criticism that has been leveled at Quake, and at Id Software games generally, is that the enemies are dumber than a sack of hammers.  They simply pursue the player once they become aware of him or her, and attack.  For a new-school FPS, this would be a problem.  But there’s a crucial difference between games of Quake’s vintage and most newer FPSes which makes this “problem” forgivable.

In my own personal experience, more recent FPS games tend to exist on a spectrum.  On one end, there are more linear games (like Half-Life, and Halo after the first one).  On the other end, they tend to be wide open (like Far Cry and Crysis).  The linear games usually direct you where to go next, either by designing the environment so that that it’s essentially a tunnel (figuratively speaking) with only one really clear path or objective in the first place, or else by resorting to on-screen markers pointing you in the desired direction.  The more wide-open games might place a destination on the map and tell you that you have to get there and do a thing, but leave the route and method of approach entirely up to you.  But the thing about these games, regardless of where on the spectrum they fit, is that they are focused almost exclusively on combat, and the structure of the environments is designed to control the pace of, and options available to the player in, combat.

Which isn’t to say that old-school FPS design shies away from combat, of course, because that would be a completely ridiculous thing to say.  Also, it would be untrue. 

But old-school FPSes do not rely exclusively on combat; they combine it with problem-solving.  Typically these problems takes the form of navigating your way through a maze, finding doors tucked out of the way, discovering which switches to hit to trigger changes elsewhere in the level, and finding the right keys and remembering where the doors they unlock are.  In this style of FPS, the enemies are more like an additional obstacle.  They may not be smart enough to employ squad tactics, take cover, flank, etc., but they don’t need to be. 

Each enemy has a specific way of moving and a set way of attacking.  They may not be intelligent in themselves, but their placement is fairly smart, and they’re one more element of the game that you need to learn.  You learn their patterns so that you can begin to out-maneuver them and attack when the time is right.  You learn their weaknesses so that you know which weapon (of the more than half-dozen you carry; another element of old-school FPS design) will damage them most.  You can evenlearn to exploit them, luring one enemy into attacking others, doing at least some of your work for you.  And if this still isn’t enough, you have the environments to worry about.  I don’t like to think of how many times I wound up traveling in endless circles in Satan’s Dark Delight or the Dismal Oubliette, wishing I could mix it up with some monsters, because that would be less frustrating than being lost.  There is something uniquely frustrating in being defeated not by any enemy, but instead by passive terrain features.

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In terms of story, Quake may as well not have one.  What it has is less of a story and more of a premise, and not a terribly complex or interesting (or even particularly present) one.  You’re a soldier or Marine of some kind (because you always, always are, in games like this, unless it’s Half-Life, where you’re a physicist… who’s doing soldier-type shit).  The scientists at the base where you’re stationed have been working on a bit of technology called slipgates, which should in theory allow for teleportation.

Unfortunately, these aren’t one-way gates, and the demonic agents of an extra-dimensional entity known only as Quake are able to slip through and attack.  Your goal is to eliminate all enemies and destroy Quake.  Once you play through the last level of the first episode, your goal gets a little more concrete.  At the end of each episode is a rune key.  When all four are brought together, they will open a way to Quake’s realm.  While the episodes do escalate in difficulty, you can attack them however you like.

That’s pretty much it.  There are no real characters to speak of.  Quake, when you finally encounter it (it bears the name Shub-Niggurath, straight out of Lovecraft) has no dialogue and doesn’t really do anything besides require you to run through the most brutal gauntlet of the worst enemies the game has to offer (in multiples!).  Finishing a given episode (even the game itself) results in nothing more spectacular than a still shot of the environment you fought in and a brief crawl of text letting you know what happened.  This is maybe a half-step above “Your princess is in another castle” storytelling.

But I wasn’t playing Quake for the story back in 1997, and I don’t play it for the story today.  Nobody did.  Nobody does.

You play Quake purely for the rush of it, and the atmosphere.  The dark, grim, gritty, bloody feel of it.

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Like a lot of technological achievements, Quake was mind-blowing in its time, and is pretty quaint today.  It’s difficult to imagine someone new to the genre, who grew up on Halo and Call of Duty and more modern FPSes, really enjoying Quake the way I and people my age do.  For younger players, it must have all the appeal of a high school history lesson.  And yet…

Id Software knew how to work well within limitations.  Quake’s technology was at the bleeding edge of what was possible at the time.  But as true as that is, even then, no one was ever going to mistake Quake for reality, and Id knew it.  As 3D graphics go, the engine was rudimentary.  It was incapable of rendering a natural, organic environment.  Knowing this, Id chose rather to play to the strengths of the engine.  If you can’t make natural environments, so be it; make the most unnatural environments you can manage.

There’s no better example of this to be found than Hexen II, developed by Raven Software using the Quake game engine.  Hexen II isn’t a bad game at all, but the ambition of its design occasionally exceeds the capabilities of the software.  Walking around in more natural outdoor areas, you really start to see the seams, so to speak.  Mounds of turf and grass just look wrong rendered in sharp angles and simple geometric shapes.

Quake aims to make you uncomfortable with just how unnatural its environments are.

Each episode starts with a level that’s meant to represent a high-tech military installation with a slipgate in it.  As you fight your way through these, machinery grinds and groans and hums and thrums in a way that you know makes the whole room vibrate.  It doesn’t matter that there’s no way to express this during play (this was a little before the days of force-feedback).  You know it, just the same.  When you run through these levels, you understand, in your gut, that the floor beneath your feet is shaking ever so slightly.  Doors open and close, and lifts rise and fall, with a whine of hydraulics and a deep, muted banging of metal that makes everything feel substantial.

The remaining ninety percent of the game occurs in a series of nightmarescapes comprised of castles, fortresses, dank grottoes, and labyrinths, all shot through with a touch of eldritch horror.  Think of it as a sort of gothic-medieval Lovecraft-lite.  All looming towers and dark stonework and thick, half-rusted-out iron, and everything joins at hard angles.  The world is rough and unforgiving and sparse.  These are places that were meant to be defended, but never really lived-in.  There is a sense of tremendous, ponderous, oppressive weight to these rough-hewn hulks of stone and metal which any number of more recent games, rendered with far finer and more minute detail, have failed to capture.

But it isn’t all the visuals, oh no.  The sound is part of it, too.

All these years later, there’s something deeply satisfying about how crisp and distinct the various effects are.  There’s something almost comforting about the clear POP…pong… pong, pong tones of a grenade launching, then bouncing until it contacts a target.  Or the deep, crunchy, percussion of said grenade exploding.  Or the sharp rasping sound whenever you pick up ammunition.  Or the grinding, slightly electric-guitar sound when you pick up a health pack.  Or the music.  Dear God, the music…

To call most of the Quake soundtrack music is to use music’s most technical definition, which is to say that it is a series of sounds deliberately orchestrated to achieve a specific effect.  The desired effect, incidentally, is to creep you right the fuck out.  So Id recruited someone from their Doom fanbase to compose the soundtrack, and that someone was Trent Reznor.  This much could not have gone more perfectly.

The soundtrack is not bad, not even remotely.  But it’s difficult to describe in typical musical terms – harmony, melody, beat, rhythm, etc.  None of those really apply.  Quake’s soundtrack is in no way radio-friendly.  It’s full of all sorts of intermingling swells and pulses of sound and samples produced by no discernible instrument (beyond probably a synthesizer), calculated to create a deep sense of unease.  Like the physical environments themselves, the “music” is dark and sinister, unnatural, uncomfortable, and utterly alien.  You can play the game without it, should you choose, but it really heightens the atmosphere, and should absolutely accompany the experience if at all possible.

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The thing about a story is that while it provides a reason for what does happen, and an overall sense of structure, as a consequence of this, it puts limits on what can happen.

In itself, this isn’t a bad thing at all.  Stories have to have limits, rules, however you want to think of them, for the same reasons games (of any type) require them.  Rules provide structure and meaning for the actions within the story.  If anything can happen, then nothing that does happen matters.  An occurrence matters pretty much in direct proportion to its unlikelihood.  The more rare, the more remarkable.  This requires rules.

The thing is that the rules of a story are not the same as the rules of a game.  The rules of a story – a good story – are logical, in that they make sense within the context set forth by the story itself.  There must be internal narrative consistency.  A game’s rules are mechanical, and demand consistency only so far as the mechanics themselves go.  It’s always nice when a game manages to marry its story to its mechanics, because it gives the mechanics more psychological weight, and gives the narrative a greater sense of immediacy and urgency.  But “nice” isn’t the same as “necessary”, and sometimes throwing out that connection is what works best.  The makers of Quake must have come to understand this quite well, because it’s apparent as early as level two of episode one that there was no real unifying principle or concept (let alone something as solid as a coherent plot), or even much more than the vague suggestion of a narrative structure. 

“Games need stories like porn needs stories” someone at Id – I believe it was John Carmack, but I may be wrong – once famously said (I’m paraphrasing, but I’m using the same comparison he did).  The developers appear not to have been really troubled by their lack of a story, and it shows in the game’s aesthetics.

Lest you think I mean this as a criticism, I feel obligated to say that this utter lack of shit-giving could not have gone more right.

Quake’s development process might charitably be described as “higgledy-piggledy”.  It began, in the minds of the developers at Id, as a fantasy role-playing game of sorts, starring an axe-wielding barbarian who would himself be named Quake.  I remember reading this in an interview printed somewhere in the strategy guide for Doom II, years (decades) ago.  This was back when Id, like the Beatles, were probably bigger than Jesus for some people.

Of this original idea, only the title (which is now completely arbitrary, even in context), the axe (it’s your character’s melee weapon), and some medieval-ish castles remain.  The game itself got compromised into a nominally sci-fi first-person shooter with a light patina of H.P. Lovecraft.  You have possessed soldiers wearing Kevlar and wielding shotguns, and you have possessed knights swinging bloodied swords at you.  You have ogres who attack by throwing grenades from a distance, and slicing you with a chainsaw when they get up close, and you have giant shamblers, bipedal white behemoths who will wreck you with their claws if they get close, and shoot lightning at you from afar.

And it’s carried off like a grand Bavarian Fire Drill.  Id just showed up looking authoritative, acting like they knew what they were doing, and because of that, we all just sort of went with it.  Chainsaw-wielding ogres in arcane fortresses don’t make sense, you say?  Especially not alongside all the other weirdness?

Eh, screw it. 

And really, who cares?  Quake, the game, clearly doesn’t care about any of this sense-making business, and neither should you.  Why on Earth (or any other plane) would you?  What has sense done for you lately?  Has it let you shoot ogres in the face with a shotgun, or blow up zombies with a grenade launcher, or take down demonic spider-creatures with a gun that shoots pure lightning, or electrocute a giant lava-dwelling creature while it throws fireballs at you?  Ever?

No?

Well, then, quit worrying about sense.  Go play Quake.

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Author’s Note:  While getting Quake to run as-is on modern PCs is apparently sometimes an exercise in teeth-grinding, hair-pulling frustration, there are a number of source ports which allow the game to run on modern machines with all sorts of bells and whistles.  These are completely free, and absolutely worth the effort to track down.