Historically, theQuake engine has been treated as a separate engine from its successor, theQuake II engine. Although the codebases forQuake andQuake II were separate GPL releases,[1][2] both engines are now considered variants of id Tech 2.[3]
John Romero initially conceived ofQuake as anaction game taking place in a fully3D polygon world, inspired bySega AM2's 3Dfighting gameVirtua Fighter.Quake was also intended to featureVirtua Fighter-influenced third-personmelee combat. However, id Software considered it to be risky, and it would've taken longer to develop the engine. Because the project was taking too long, the third-person melee was eventually dropped.[4][5]
Simplified process of reducing map complexity inQuake
Family tree illustrating derivations of Quake engines
On December 21, 1999, John Carmack of id Software released theQuake enginesource code on the Internet under the terms of GPL-2.0-or-later, allowing programmers to edit the engine and add new features. Programmers were soon releasing new versions of the engine on the net. Some of the most known engines are:
GoldSrc – The first engine to be created byValve. It was used in theHalf-Life series, and gave rise to theSource engine. The Xash3D projects, as well as the FreeHL and FreeCS ports,[6] useQuake source code in part to recreate this engine, even with a wrapper for running the game.[7][8]
DarkPlaces – A significantly modified engine used in several standalone games andQuake mods.[9][10] Although the last stable release was on May 13, 2014, it has received numerous updates through itsSVN repository since then.[11] Its home page was hosted onIcculus.org until 2021, when the engine switched to aGit repository hosted onGitHub.[12] The developers ofXonotic provide mirrors of DarkPlaces source code on various social coding platforms[13][14] since the game is built on and distributed with the development version of the engine.
QuakeForge - One of the earlier major community ports.[15]
NPRQuake - Fork ofQuake featuring non-photorealistic rendering giving it a pencil drawn look.[16][17]
Tenebrae - CustomQuake engine with real time lighting and bumpmapping among other features.[18][19][20][21]
TyrQuake - A conservative focused source port.[15]
Fisheye Quake - CustomQuake engine withfisheyedistortion by the author of PanQuake.[22]
Blinky - Fork of the fisheye view along with the TyrQuake software renderer.[23][24]
WinQuake
Engoo (Derivative ofWinQuake) - Graphically enhanced software renderer based port.[25]
^Edge, May 1997,My original idea was to do something likeVirtua Fighter in a 3D world, with full-contact fighting, but you'd also be able to run through a world, and do the same stuff you do inQuake, only when you got into these melees, the camera would pull out into a third-person perspective. It would've been great, but nobody else had faith in trying it. The project was taking too long, and everybody just wanted to fall back on the safe thing – the formula.
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