![]() Fools! I remember the Super Heroes mod for Quake 2 that let you customize your own hero by combining different powers, resulting in completely ludicrous gameplay. Nowadays, someone would complain about how imbalanced it was, or that casual gamers would be turned off by it monstrousness. Take the mod Painkeep for example, which among other crazy weapons featured a black hole “Gravity Well” generator that you could throw down and which would slowly suck everything nearby into its gaping maw, gibbing it to pieces. There were so many wild and inventive ideas floating around. Fantasy! Even earlier, I remember playing a Total Conversion (TC) mod for Doom based on Aliens - and it scared the crap out of me. Don’t even get me started on the Head Hunters mod or Future vs. There was also Threewave’s Capture the Flag mod, which gave players an off-hand grappling hook they could use to zip around the level. Team Fortress 2, Valve’s giant money-printing machine, was originally a Quake mod that introduced class-based capture the flag to the world. It’s incredible to see how so many of the big giants of the industry today connect directly back to modding. How could that possibly be?!ĭoom and Quake were, from my standpoint, the birth of the PC game mod (modification) community. But in reality it wasn’t much more than a year a fleeting moment. I swear that I was playing Quake for half-a-decade at least before Quake 2 was released. ![]() Now in my mid-thirties, it’s shocking to look back and see how slowly time seemed to progress then. It was a golden age before the heavy hand of corporate suits started stirring the pot a time where the vanguards of id Software were our underground heroes. It was a glorious and transformational time in gaming, unshackled and limitless feeling. Later on, we would sneak off to the nearby college campus computer labs to play Doom (and later Quake) over the university T1 networks. Once everything was connected, I recall crawling through the dark depths of Doom’s single player levels as my friends and I stalked one another, boomstick in hand. I remember playing Doom deathmatches over dial-up internet, as we juggled multiple phone-lines and waved our arms, evoking various incantations that would make the technology work our way. In less than 6 years we went from the above image to this:īut more important than the technological progress, id Software’s creations were a defining part of my early life. It is remarkable to see transformation in game technology between Doom and Quake 3. I was sixteen when the Quake launched, and I still remember an all-night LAN party my friends and I had after graduating high-school in 1999, the year Quake 3 was released. I didn’t start playing the Doom games until after Doom II was released, so in actually I was fourteen-ish when these games panned into my field of view. I was shocked, and I’m going to spill my age here, but I was 12 when Doom was released. I looked up the dates for when these games were first released: Doom (1993), Doom II (1994), Quake (1996), Quake 2 (1997), Quake 3: Arena (1999). Indeed, one might argue, they helped make the ooze in the first place. Among these were files for Doom and Quake, two legendary games from id Software, and which were among the first to crawl out of the primordial ooze of the person shooter (FPS) genre. Along the way I’ve unearthed various troves of lost treasure, scattered like leaves amidst small piles of portable drives and burned CDs. Over the past few weeks I’ve been going through various computer archives and backing up old decaying data onto a shiney new 2TB drive.
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