The best video game ever made (considering pc-games AND consoles), Quake generated a cult-community with its own idiom and special rules of engagement. Five years after first release, Q1 still lives ferociously and heretic and the thrill of it all is that you can play it on any obsolete pentium system (75 Mhz, 4MB video-card and 60 MB hd-space ran fine for me). And besides that, the Linux-servers where the best of all! There are about 40 levels in the game (incl. multiplayer and secret levels): Quake consists of 4 episodes (like Star Wars and Alien so far), but there are still herds of people who haven't seen the game once (let alone 3dfx accelerated OpenGL Quake).
'Cheapo' and other downloadable 'cheating' local proxies make it harder for newbies to understand why they were being fragged and to like the flagellating game at all. On top of that, hardcore players construct their own configuration files with pre-written actionscripts (rocketjumping etc.) to climb faster in the ranking, although anybody can check out the console tutorials for miscellaneous commands and scripts. There is no taunting (as in Duke Nukem 3D and Unreal) in Quake, except for the few lines of text on top of the screen where you can spout your indecent proposals and pre-fab messages. Newbies who don't understand the game or have a slow connection (HPW: high ping whiners) are allowed (by consensus) to 'camp' (wait in a corner and shoot unsuspecting passers) to at least prevent a negative end-score (after unintentional suicide etc.). But the lucky few with pings of below 20 ms become the real 3D acrobats (LPB: low ping ba**ards). I'm really not interested in professional gamers, but I would have liked to get some dough for all the time I have spent in those dungeons, arenas, grottos, vaults and oubliettes.
Q1 is less humourous than Duke3D, in fact: no humour at all. Also less empty and post-apocalyptic, but more macarbe and dismal. I do not only love quake for the looks of it, but especially for the mechanics. That was never topped by Q2 and Q3Arena. Q3A looks infinitely better, but as Q2 it lacks the aggressive and direct gameplay of Q1. Duke Nukem was already addictive, but has flat pictures moving around without changing perspective, in contrast with Q1's 3D entities in a convincing medieval setting or more uplifting futuristic surroundings. This engine proved to be revolutionary although most game-developers were interested to use the Q2 engine (Half-Life, etc.). id software proved itself as the most innovative developer of eye candy and gameplay itself. Funstuff like incorporating your own sounds into the game has become a lot harder with Q3A unfortunately. And there aren't as many hiding places, secret passages and exploitable level bugs anymore. Let's hope those will be back with Quake4 (resurrection?).
Quake Done Quick is a downloadable (5 MB) speed demo of 90 minutes recorded by several people running through Q1 as fast as humanly possible, for which you also need the full game installed first. You can sit back and relax and watch the protagonist killing everything and opening every secret in first-person view or movie mode. There are people who did a lot of effort choosing the right camera-dynamics and even incorporate some jokes in the 'plot'. Besides that, there is the Q3A movie 'Quad God' that unfortunately never really saw the daylight because of copyright issues (?). These entities will be locked up in there forever.
Other enthusiasts built their own maps with their own favourite interiors and entities (mods and total conversions like Capture The Flag, Weapons Factory, Malice, Rocket Arena, Team Fortress, Airquake, Future vs. Fantasy, Awesome, Carnage etc for which you'll still need the original game to function). Finally, Unreal and UT are also some of my favourites as they are better than Q2 and Q3A, but the deathmatch multiplay mode of Quake1 is still unsurpassed. HF!
