After playing Half-Life I soon found out that it ran on the Quake engine, which led me to ask ‘What the hell is Quake?’ Other gamers assume that a new gamer knows everything and has already played the original games, this is becoming less and less likely as gamers seem younger each year. This is, in my opinion, due to the popularity of gaming-consoles. It takes less intelligence and experience to get a game to work and to link players together, than it did before the advent of consoles. And yes, in my opinion this will lead to a dumbing down of games.

The first Half-Life game ran on GoldSource, which was Valve’s modification of the QuakeWorld engine. QuakeWorld was written by John Carmack in 1996. Its most important feature was a rewritten networking code. The new code enabled online play by reducing the disorienting effects of latency. Best of all it preserved some of the most famous exploits of the Quake engine, such as strafe-jumping and wall-hugging.

Latter on I was to discover that one of the major differences in culture between Quake and Half-Life is attitude to ‘physics’.

What a Quake player regards as an exploit, a Half-Life player soon learns to call a cheat.

Back in the year 2000 as I was playing through Half-Life mods such as "Dark Star" and "Edge of Darkness" I tried to find web sites that would inform me about Quake. I wanted to go visit the games that started it all for me. But the sites I found were not helpful in any way!

To be honest I really didn’t get what they were on about.
What is it about gamers that make them unable to talk in normal English?

Eventually I found a report written by some guy who had, like me, started with Half-Life and then tried Quake. But he didn’t say much if anything about the background stories, the atmosphere, if the player saw it all from a first person point of view or what!

One Saturday I found Quake, 1 and 2 (with The Scourge of Armagon) for sale in our local game shop and it was with great hope and excitement I installed the games and entered the worlds that had spawned Half-Life.

At first I was vaguely horrified at the simplicity of Quake2...like where is the story? Where are the other friendly NPCs? The music was terrible. I installed Quake 1 and forgave what I then regarded as limited fun content, it because it was so old and had excellent music.

And then I tried Quake3Arena…I think by then I had started to play OP4 death match. Again, the music seemed intrusive, crass and ugly!

But seven years on and oh my how things have changed!

When I finally made the commitment to play Quake 2 I soon realised that the music carries the player at full tilt through the simplicity of the story; the polygons, the idiotic AI, the Quad, the whole damn thing soon add up to far more than the constituent parts.

Quake2 is immersive in a different way to Half Life, and soon I forgive it everything, I bow down before id and confess that I was a fool not to see straight away how much fun a Quake game is!

Now, with Steam offering an id package it is the right time for me to make some films showing you, rather than trying to tell you, about the origins of Half Life and to show you what id games are like.

The first film shows you my view of Vanilla Quake3Arena.

When I did the narration I was having considerable difficulties, I needed at least two pairs of arms because I was using two computers. I’ve now solved my long running problems with sound recording, so I will put more information into my next films and try not to keep telling you how beautiful the maps are, doh!