Quake 1 was an excellent game when it was first released in 1996, it had full 3D monsters, items, weapons, the sounds were great and the online play was phenomenal!
So what is it that makes such a game wither, fade & eventually die?
Quake 2 in my personal opinion was not a sequel to Quake 1. Quake 2 was more like the actual realization of what Quake 1 could have been if the producers (id software) waited a year or so before making Quake. Lets face it, have you ever played Quake 1 and realized how almost none of the enemy/monster tiers seem to blend into one believable storyline? Quake 1 is a very gritty game and I'm not talking about the 640x480 resolution. Quake 1's textures were almost memorizing, from the abandoned base to the Elder Shrines, it grabbed you, pulled you in, you were the Quake marine standing as Earth's only hope against the wicked minions of Quake!
Quake 1 has been around for 12 years and believe it or not, people still play! don't believe me? check out http://www.quakeone.com. The map source was released a couple years back and the game can be turned into freeware easy enough.
Yes people still play Quake 1! Some of the most popular mods are the old school ones such as Clan Arena (Now upgraded to CAx) RuneQuake & 3Wave CTF. Newcomers are also an amazing thing, Quake 1 still gets new players! So why isn't Quake 1 still the #1 game in 2008? My opinion would be that the teenagers who grew up playing Quake still play Quake 1, while newer/younger gamers tend to look whats fresh in the market with games like Battlefield 2, Half Life 2, Doom 3, Quake 4 & Crysis.
Quake 1 is the mastermind behind all the latest & greatest first person shooters. Even though its graphics can't even be compared to a newer game, it isn't about the graphics really, show someone something pretty and they can easily get bored of looking at it, hand someone fast paced competitive game play with rockets flying, rocketjumps, grenades bouncing around to always remind you of your pending doom, thats what grabs players attention.
Don't think I'm just stuck in 1996 either, I've been playing games since the Atari 2600 till the current day Crysis by Ubisoft and have owned many consoles like, NES, SNES, Gameboy, Genesis+32bit, Jaguar, PSX, PS2, PS3, Xbox360 and I favor the first person shooters over almost any other type of genre.
Quake 1 just does it right. From the physics when you bunnyhop to the air you catch when you rocketjump, nothing is more of a natural feeling when it comes to Quake 1's multiplayer. Other games in the past have definitely tried to grasp the feel of Quake 1's havoc and personality, but it cannot be mimicked.
While I do enjoy realism in my video game adventures, I believe that making a game to real can leave it boring and more like a task then an escape to blissful carnage. Some games today can easily and proudly admit that they have over 100 buttons to configure just before you can begin to enjoy the full experience of the game in question.
In my view, I play games to escape reality for a brief moment in my busy day. I don't want to spend 20 minutes just to make sure my hover car doesn't eject me if i accidentally press the wrong button as my hand fumbles around my keyboard trying to remember if I binded eject to X or M. I WANT FAST RUN AND GUN ACTION IN A VIRTUAL WORLD geez. Then to add on, theres the loading times of new games reaching upwards to a whole minute! Nothing kills my gamer buzz then taking a minute to think about what I could be doing in real life. Quake 1 has not these issues.
Quake 1 can be loaded up, online and playing with other players in under 10 seconds, thats from double-clicking your Quake 1 shortcut to blasting someone to little juicy frag bits in under 10 seconds. I miss the days when games were more focused on game play then how many menial tasks they can make a player execute over and over before getting to the real meat and potatoes of the battlefield. If newer games want to really have excellent gameplay, they will focus more on how gamers can interact with other gamers while on a server instead of how much players can interact with the game environment.
Quake 1 has gone through some face lifts, or, clients as some might call them, with such clients as Qrack, JoeQuake, Darkplaces pushing Quake 1's graphics and realism foward. While its a long shot from being able to walk up to a soda machine in a newer game, grab a soda and then throw it away in a virtual trashcan, its simply effective.
Quake 1 was never broke, and I still don't consider Quake 2,3 or 4 true sequels to this masterpiece of pure carnage.
If you are an old schooler who use to Quake or if you are interested in the Quake 1 game feel free to visit one of the friendly Quake 1 communities that still exist over at http://www.quakeone.com I'm a registered member there, my username is Phenom.
Rant over.
