Quake

id Software / June 22, 1996 / Rated Unrated

Data last updated July 24, 2026

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Released

1996

Publisher

SEGA

Time to beat

~1 hrs

Community

3,313

The roots

One of the classic representatives of the first-person shooter genre. Designed and released in 1996 by the authors of the groundbreaking game Doom - iD Software. This is the first game to start the still ongoing series. Unlike its famous predecessor, the game uses an engine capable of rendering full-fledged 3D: the game supports an earlier version of 3D acceleration through OpenGL. After moving to a new engine, the game needed a new control scheme: the movement is now possible in all three directions, including the vertical axis. This feature added to the game an additional difficulty: player have to expect the enemy attack from any direction. The game also has a full-fledged multiplayer, the previous version of which the Doom players liked.

Key features

In a single player campaign, the player takes control of the main character named Ranger, who went to the portal in order to stop the unknown enemies, code-named Quake. The plot of the adventure consists of 32 separate levels. Six more maps are available in multiplayer for the battles between the players for deathmatch mayhem. Two mission packs were released for the game, which adds new enemies, new levels, new maps, new weapons and a new experience for players to the original game. Both packs were greatly received by both players and critics.

Quake is a 1996 first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and published by GT Interactive. The first game in the Quake series, it was originally released for MS-DOS and Windows, followed by Mac OS, Linux, and Saturn in 1997 and Nintendo 64 in 1998. The game's plot is centered around teleportation experiments, dubbed slipgates, which have resulted in an unforeseen invasion of Earth by a hostile force codenamed Quake, which commands a vast army of monsters. The player takes the role of a soldier, whose mission is to travel through the slipgates in order to find and destroy the source of the invasion. The game is split between futuristic military bases and medieval, gothic environments, featuring both science fiction and fantasy weaponry and enemies as the player battles possessed soldiers and demonic beasts such as ogres or armor-clad knights. Quake heavily takes inspiration from gothic fiction and in particular the works of H. P. Lovecraft. The game went through many revisions during development, and had originally been inspired by a Dungeons & Dragons campaign held among id Software staff.