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Gaming has been around for a long time. Games come and games go, but the truly great ones never truly go away for good. The best of the best, no matter how old they may be, are just as good now as they were before the dawn of the millennium. Games like Baldur’s Gate 2, Doom, or Ocarina of Time have trundled through history without a care in the world, and are still swinging with the best of them.
Quake falls into this rare category of games. Where its graphics may have failed it, its unshakeable resolve when it comes to delivering excellence in other areas is undeniable. It even got an excellent remaster in 2021 that dragged this masterpiece back into the light, bigger and better than ever.
5 Excellent Style And Theme
Graphics are the week-old apples of gaming. No matter how shiny they may have once been, they lose their luster pretty damn quickly. There will always be a crisper bag of apples waiting around the corner, so it’s hard to retain any level of awe. That being said, art style and theming age much slower - sort of like honey. Years, decades, or in the case of actual honey, millennia, can pass but a rock-solid style with interesting themes will still be nice and fresh.
This is where Quake’s visuals shine. Sure they are chunky, angular, and primitive, but look beyond the technical limitations and you’ll find the magic. Quake’s base game has a Space Ranger, called Ranger, fighting through diabolical facilities filled to the brim with dastardly space marines to hop into a portal. This portal transports him to giant gothic castles filled with sword-bearing knights, bloated grenade toting butchers, and Lovecraftian abominations all whilst skipping through fountains of blood and jamming to Trent Reznor. Quake has had many sequels, but nothing really feels like the original Quake.
4 Banging Weapon Roster
Many things make up an arena shooter, but the most important is the weapon roster. Modern military shooters get away with the bare minimum. You have your rifles, rifles with a scope on them, a pistol, and usually a shotgun of some sort. Then you have reskins of all of those weapons with slightly different stats. It’s realistic, sure, but it’s not the main draw.
Quake is far from mediocre. First things first, you rock a bloody axe as standard. Screw piddly knives, we are playing like it’s 1996. We brandish hatchets. The first weapon you pick up in Quake is a pump-action shotgun, and it only gets better from there — a gun that fires a harrowing stream of nails, a grenade launcher that causes enemies to erupt into a cascade of gibs and gore, and a gun that harnesses the power of Zeus to unleash streaks of deadly lightning. You want something dead, Quake has a badass gun just for you. The cream of the crop is the rocket launcher. Boasting a nearly bottomless ammo supply and physics-defying projectiles, it's basically the savior of mankind - accept no substitutes.
3 Satisfying Gunplay
All the guns in the universe would be for naught if your game felt awful once you hopped in the saddle. id Software has always been the master of its craft. If you look at their lineup of games, you will struggle to find anything they have made that doesn’t control like a knob of butter dancing on a bed toast. It doesn’t matter how far you go back either. Wolfenstein 3D? Still holds up. Doom? One of the all-time greats. Quake? Lightning struck again.
Quake rocks fast movement speeds and tight aiming. You point to where you - or you salvo - want to go and you better believe you'll get there and feel awesome doing it. You could be dancing through a room filled with traps unloading two barrels of hot lead into a shambler, rocket jumping through the air and carpet bombing a courtyard, or bunnyhopping in circles pumping nails into soon-to-be-corpses. It’s easy to pick up and play, but hard to master. The key, however, is that it’s still a blast to play when you are just learning the ropes.
2 Quality Content
Content is a double-edged sword. A game that has too little content, no matter how good that content may have been, can leave a lot to be desired. On the other hand, a game with too much content, especially underwhelming content, can, ironically, be overwhelming or tiring. There is a balance to be had.
Quake is a pretty long game. The base game has oodles of episodes with each episode having about a dozen levels to blast through. It also has a bunch of expansion packs, each rocking a substantial number of levels. Heck, if you are playing the 2021 remaster, you even get a whole new expansion pack filled to the brim with (you guessed it) even more levels. You are looking at over 100 gib-fuelled gun-fests if you want to see it all, and this can be a daunting task to face down. Quake gets around this by having full cooperative play for you and a bunch of buddies, top-notch level variety, and level lengths are perfectly balanced for pick up and play sessions. You can play Quake for 10 minutes and have a blast, or you could play it for 10 hours and still have a blast.
1 Multiplayer Mayhem
Since the days of Doom, multiplayer in FPS games has become an almost mandatory inclusion. One day, John Romero himself decided to invent Deathmatch - possibly the greatest invention in all of gaming. It first appeared in Doom and reappeared in Doom 2, and even back then, Deathmatch was something special. You and a bunch of players hop into a map and kill each other. First to get X kills wins. It’s simple, it’s addictive, and gamers are still playing some variation of it decades later.
Quake was where it really started to kick off though. Full multiplayer suites were introduced, there were loads of options to customize your play, and, more importantly, the prevalence of mid-'90s internet usage opened the pool of potential victims wider than ever. Quake's impressively designed arenas were filled with strangers, all running around with shotguns, rocket launchers, and various levels of armor laying into each other in lightning-fast rounds of carnage and death. There’s a veritable mountain of maps to battle on, and even 20+ years later, Quake’s multiplayer offering is exceptionally good. Thanks to the 2021 remaster, it’s never been easier to hop in and play either.