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It’s been 15 years since id Software’s Quake stormed onto the fledgling PC gaming market and spawned the multiplayer first-person-shooter genre.
Id Software’s new parent company Bethesda posted on the BethBlog to mark the anniversary, including a video of the launch of the multiplayer-focused QuakeWorld from 1996.
"Quake is carnage. Carnage is good," summed up one of the attendees at the event. The video also features legendary programmer John Carmack who describes the multiplayer QuakeWorld as a pet research project.
"Mostly we’re doing it to figure out the lessons of what we’re doing here, because nobody has really done it on this scale before," he said.
Posting on the BethBlog, Carmack recalled the period of Quake’s development as having "bitten off a little more than I could chew."
"No matter how hard I worked, things just weren’t getting done when we wanted them to," he added, going on to describe Quake as the "golden age of game modding."
Pointing out that the low requirements of creating Quake mods allowed enthusiasts to get into home game development much easier than games today, Carmack said he was proud that "many of today’s industry greats trace their start back to working with Quake."
Carmack also said the most important thing to him about the Quake period was that it was during this period in which he met his wife.
"She still thinks Quake was the seminal achievement of Id, and she glowers at me whenever I bemoan how random the design was."
