Quake is 30 years old. I can't believe I'm still alive. I love this game so dearly. The mods were just incredible, KQP and Girobot in particular.
Those were the for real LAN party days which I'll never get back. As in I had friends bringing over their big ass CRT monitors and PCs for a single occasion and also had ludicrously long network cables. My parents didn't mind, they somehow understood, even with LAN wires running across the kitchen floor. Priceless.
Edit: typo: lab -> LAN
> Those were the for real LAN party days which I'll never get back
I still remember hours-long marathons of Doom2 deathmatch at my cousin's Novell cubicle farm after office hours, ca. 1994. Then Duke Nukem 3D (using Build to make custom maps [anybody here play NukeCity 1 and/or 2? That was me!]), then eventually Quake. Oh nostalgia, you rickety tower of mixed emotions.
3 weeks ago, John Romero did a play through while discussing the entire design and build process of the game.
It was actually pretty cool how they designed the first room to demonstrate almost every new feature of the engine and how the first level is made to walk you though most of the new gameplay features.
https://youtu.be/PU7HkttPfAo?si=LnD4vJeCiUojhojt&t=728
YOU CAN JUMP ACROSS
And as I typed that I can still hear the noise all these years later.
hell yeah, my first real LAN game experience on Windows was the Quake test/alpha that preceded the release of the game (IIRC?), when I was at a local tech school for a class. We weren't technically allowed to load the game on the uni PC's but like.. yeah... it happened. And we did zero work for that day (or days). (Prior LAN experience was Marathon and Bolo in the Mac lab which was insanely awesome too, and a year earlier lol)
There was a way that you could trim the files just right that you could fit the Quake executable and a single multiplayer map onto a floppy disk. Those things were treasured as you could easily just hide them wherever.
Definitely made high school much more fun.
You can go download it again here:
https://archive.org/details/q3DemoTEST
There were multiple test releases. You can find the older ones out on the web.
I remember the days where our data center PC had CDROM drive so someone installed Quake (can't remember II or III) and we would play while the overnight multi-hour batch jobs were running.
Honestly the best of times. I wouldn't be able to pay rent were it not for videogames which inspired me to work in the software industry.
I wish we could get those days back. Cars loaded with CRT monitors and big machines and bags of all sorts of stuff.
> lab -> LAN
Ah yes, those lab parties.
I to recall the days of all synthesising LSD and playing Quake too.