John Carmack recounts Quake
Seminal shooter 15 today.
id Software wizard John Carmack has recounted the experience of creating Quake, the seminal first-person shooter that turns 15 today.
"My defining memory of the game was fairly early in development, when I no-clipped up into a ceiling corner and looked down as a Shambler walked through the world with its feet firmly planted on the ground," Carmack, who is knee deep in Rage development, said on the Bethblog.
"This looked like nothing I had ever seen before; it really did seem like I had a window into another world. Of course, as soon as he had to turn, the feet started to slide around because we didn’t have pivot points and individual joint modifications back then, but it was still pretty magical.
"It seems silly now, but at the time we were very concerned that people wouldn't be able to deal with free look mouse control, and we had lots of options to restrict pitch changes and auto-centre when you started moving."
Carmack goes on to describe the game's online play as "almost an accident". He has kind words for its 3D graphics and modding, however.
"The most important thing about Quake for me was that I met my wife when she organized the first all-female Quake tournament. She still thinks Quake was the seminal achievement of id, and she glowers at me whenever I bemoan how random the design was."
At E3 Carmack outlined his vision of the next Quake game - what would perhaps be Quake V - in an interview with Eurogamer.
"Nothing is scheduled here, people are not building this," Carmack said. "We went from the Quake 2 and the Quake 4 Strogg universe. We are at least tossing around the possibilities of going back to the bizarre, mixed up Cthulhu-ish Quake 1 world and rebooting that direction.
"We think that would be a more interesting direction than doing more Strogg stuff after Quake 4.
"We certainly have strong factions internally that want to go do this.
"But we could do something pretty grand like that, that still tweaks the memory right in all of those ways, but is actually cohesive and plays with all of the strengths of the level we're at right now."