Soon after Quake's release, more than half of the original dev team weren't working at id anymore. And it somehow worked, earning strong sales and reviews.īut as with all supposed crunch success stories, the human cost was heavy. On June 22, 1996, after a long and draining crunch, id Software finally released Quake: a strange mix of sci-fi lasers, nail guns, eyeless horrors, haunted castles, elder gods, and alternate dimensions. McGee did much of the sound design), Quake especially empowered level designers with strong auteur control over the game experience, in a way that almost never happens in the games industry today. While the whole project was a dense collaboration where everyone did everything (e.g. Episode 1 features Willits' tidy castle levels, Episode 2 has Romero's clockwork wizard lairs, Episode 3 holds McGee's metal viking lava tombs, and Episode 4 trembles with Petersen's disorienting eldritch labyrinths. Romero triaged the project into four single player episodes, each led by a different level designer.

From David Craddock's excellent in-depth book Rocket Jump

(left) John Carmack and (right) John Romero crunching in 'the war room' in January 1996 it probably smelled terrible. So id Software hired a Doom modder named Tim Willits, moved everyone into a single open plan office dubbed 'the war room', and hunkered down into a marathon crunch, working 7 days a week for 7 months. they were so BROWN', McGee said in a 2011 interview.)īut as long as John Carmack and programmers Michael Abrash and John Cash could nerd out on engineering the most advanced 3D game engine the world had ever seen, maybe it didn't matter if Quake was a Doom clone. Artists Kevin Cloud and Adrian Carmack (no relation to John) had spent a year painting Mesoamerican-themed 'Aztec' textures, but discarded everything after level designer American McGee didn't want to use them. Level designer Sandy Petersen pushed for Lovecraft-inspired elements. Most of Romero's levels were dark, medieval 'wizard' themed. They hadn't set out to make another sci-fi shooter. The certainty was a relief, but still disappointing. Then in one fateful team meeting in November 1995, an exhausted team decided they should just make another Doom-like FPS with sci-fi elements.

Half the team thought they were making a fantasy adventure about a guy with a magic hammer.

For a year, lead programmer John Carmack and lead designer John Romero kept changing directions, forcing people to redo work repeatedly. Doom's success left the company under heavy pressure for a follow-up.

How to get better at quake champions