"They are usually a lot more comfortable playing what they are used to." "It's incredibly difficult to get hardcore players to adopt new multiplayer maps," says Bal. LadyHavoc's 2002 graphic enhancing engine DarkPlaces became the most popular, paired often with remastered textures from the Quake Revitalization Project.Īnd with every year, Quake looked more modern.
Congregating on Inside3D (now InsideQC), many coders sought to update Quake's aging graphics. In late 1999, id Software open-sourced the Quake 1 engine and new Quake engines multiplied.
The homepage of PlanetQuake from December 2020. Every creative community has at least one Nehahra-like project - even if it's not that good, the hype means the community ecosystem is strong. Third, no one can / will even download it without hub sites like PlanetQuake and FilePlanet. Second, "all-star" reputations and critical consensus come from review sites like Prominence and TEAMShambler. First, a team of online volunteers need shared trust and norms from socializing at early mapper hangout sites like QBoard, QMap, and #terrafusion. Nehahra was a spectacle, and required many factors to align. " the machinima stuff helped attract players who were less interested in custom maps, it really helped it reach a wider audience." "Not all of it has aged so well by today’s standards," says Benoit "Bal" Stordeur, one of the original Nehahra designers back in 2000. Clockwise from top-left: Zerstörer, Beyond Belief, Shadow Over Innsmouth, Nehahra. It also had its own four hour machinima film expanding on Quake's very rich backstory.
The most significant early single player mod was The Nehahra Project: over a dozen levels designed by an all-star team, along with new monsters, side-stepping AI, and cutscenes with voice acting. Beyond Belief was an early polished map pack in a classical Quake style, matched only by the sinister mood setting of Shadow Over Innsmouth. Fantasy Quake experimented with RPG systems, and Zerstörer bathed in bleak blood-soaked horror.
While Quake's single player mods weren't as popular at first, they did exist. Team Fortress (left), Kickflip Quake (right). By 2000, only the nostalgic or the hardcore were playing Quake 1 multiplayer anymore.
But as always, eventually the future moved on. Fantasy, racing mod Quake Rally, aerial combat mod Airquake, and even a skateboard mod called Kickflip Quake.įor a year or two, Quake multiplayer seemed like the hot new platform for young amateur creativity, the Gen-X teen equivalent of Roblox. Some mods retrofitted other genres onto Quake, like RPG mod Future vs. Popular multiplayer mods set standards across the industry: Team Fortress popularized character classes, Threewave CTF popularized capture the flag, and there's a Rocket Arena game mode in every shooter. Sites like Multiplayer Quake (MPQ) and Ramshackle curated hundreds of custom arenas for deathmatch-hungry Quakeworld players. Upon its 1996 release, Quake mapping and modding focused on multiplayer.