Based onid Software's open stance towards game modifications, theirQuake series became a popular subject for playermods beginning withQuake in 1996. Spurred by user-created hacked content on their previous games and the company's desire to encourage thehacker ethic, Id included dedicated modification tools intoQuake, including the QuakeC programming language and alevel editor. As a game that popularized onlinefirst-person shooter multiplayer, early games were team- and strategy-based and led to prominent mods likeTeam Fortress, whose developers were later hired byValve to create a dedicated version for the company. Id's openness and modding tools led to a "Quake movie" community, which altered gameplay data to add camera angles in post-production, a practice that became known asmachinima.
Player modifications, or mods, change a game's art or gameplay to create alternative or entirely new games.[1] From the age ofAtari through the 1990s, video game developers were known vigilantly protect their intellectual property through copyrights, patents, and general secrecy.[2]Id Software foundersJohn Carmack andJohn Romero were instead excited when theirWolfenstein 3D was hacked to swap content into the game, and decided to help rather than hinder thehacker ethic of those who would modify their later games, includingDoom andQuake.[3]Doom added new graphical detail to its first-person shooter predecessors (wall textures, varied environments) and local, networked multiplayer, but in 1996,Quake too added better graphics in a fully 3D world but became known for its Internet-based, long-distance multiplayer. It popularized consumer graphics cards with its implementation of 3D rendering underOpenGL technology, and its dedicated developer tools encouraged users to create their own modifications, spawning a "healthy mod scene".[4][5][6] Around the time ofQuake's release, these user modifications became known as just "mods".[7]
Modding was made easy forQuake players, who could downloadlevel editors and theQuakeC programming language to make their own mods and content.[8] The accessibility of QuakeC led to a new paradigm of mod creations.[9] Most player creations were team-based games, as players appreciated their strategic and cooperative elements. Among the first successful mods wereCapture the Flag andTeam Fortress.[10] The mod community and their websites, such as PlanetQuake Featured Mods, became a place for aspiring game programmers and artists to train.[1]Valve recruited its first employees from theQuake modding community, as theTeam Fortress team was invited to create its sequel for Valve's first game,Half-Life, itself built on modifications of theQuake II game engine.[2][11]
In 1997, a "total conversion"Quake mod named "Alien Quake" replaced characters, levels, and sounds with replacements from theAlien film franchise. Its developers received a takedown notice from20th Century Fox, which they posted on their website. The producer's forceful response to a fan effort coined the term "Foxed".[1]
Id's choice to create and share an editor and scripting language withQuake spurred its modding community and led to unforeseen innovations, such as animated movies performed by players during gameplay.[12]Rock, Paper, Shotgun referred to this time as the "Silver Age of FPS modding" for the modder attention to hyper-realistic and polished detail in creating game assets that bordered the production quality ofAAA developers.[13]
There have been two attempts to createfree content game data forQuake similar toOpenArena orFreedoom. The first,Open Quartz, was started in 2000 and the secondLibreQuake, was established in 2019.[14][15]
The art of using video games to create narrative videos rather than gameplay rose from the "Quake movie" community and became known asmachinima. Players ofQuake andQuake II created programs to alter the game's demo files, which contained records of the game's user input and events. The actors would control their characters live—creating the demo file—and editors would "re-cam" by revisiting the scene from a new point of view or swapping between pre-selected camera angles. TheQuake tools created for these purposes led to dedicated machinima post-production utilities, such as David "CRT" Wright's Keygrip and Keygrip2.[16] The rise of machinima was enabled by the choice of developers such as Id to release easily accessible code and tools to alter it. Even as more advanced tools were produced, players opted to their own homegrown tools and retain the "Quake movie"-style production as their own user-generated process.[17]
Among the most popularQuake II mods wasChaos Deathmatch by Chaotic Dream Group.[18]Quetoo is a free software reimplementation of the game's deathmatch.[19]
Multiple shareware level editors were created for the game. A programmer frustrated with the game's QuakeEd level editor released his own version for free and was later offered a job by Id's John Carmack.[20] Robert Duffy modified the game's editing tool into a package called QeRadiant.[21] Another example isQoole.
In 2000, Id transferred maintenance control of theQuake III Arena level editor tools (Q3Radiant) to community programmers, who added new features and released the result as the Windows- and Linux-compatibleGtkRadiant. A public beta test ran in January 2001.[21] It became one ofQuake's most used level editors[22] and was later released under theGNU General Public License.[23]
Qoole, short forQuakeObjectOrientedLevelEditor,[24] is alevel editor forvideo games based on theQuake engine, and was developed by Lithium Software in 1996.[25] Among the supported games are the originalQuake I andQuake II,Hexen II andHalf-Life. It uses abrush-based method to construct new maps, in which monsters, items and lights can be placed,[26][27] or any of the on-board prefabs. It was originally sold on aCD-ROM,[26] but the source code was eventually released under theGPL v2.[28]
QuArK is a free and open-source program forQuake engine-based games. It has the ability to edit maps, and can import, export, manipulate and convert models, sounds, textures and various other game assets.
