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I truly don't know how to explain this to anyone who wasn't around then.
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this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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Oh, man, I'm about to relitigate an almost 30 year old nerd argument. Here we go.
I thought Quake looked like crap.
It's brown, and blocky and chunky and in software mode at 320x200 it's barely putting together a readable, coherent picture at all. Compared to what the peak of legacy tech was at the time, which was probably Duke Nukem 3D, I thought it was a genuine step backwards.
Now, it played well, it was fast and they got a ton of mileage out of the real 3D geometry to make crazy and cool level designs. But visually? Hot garbage.
You're right that the game changer was actually 3D acceleration, and Quake did come to life when it started hitting HD resolutions of 480p or (gasp) 800p, comparable to what we were already getting in Build engine games and 2D PC games elsewhere, but the underlying assets are still very, VERY ugly. To me it all came together in Quake 2, which was clearly built for the hardware. That's when I went "well, I need one of these cards now" and went to get a Nvidia Riva.
I have no complaints about Quake's sound design, though. I can hear it in my head right now. No music, just sound effects. I don't know what that shotgun sound is taken from, but it's definitely not a shotgun and it sounds absolutely amazing.
Oh, and on the original point, I'm not super sure of "graphics can't get any better" beign a thing that I thought, but I do remember when somebody showed me a PS2 screenshot of Silent Hill 2 gameplay in a magazine I mocked them for clearly having mistaken a prerendered cutscene for real time graphics. Good times.
Fyi, quakes' music and sound effects were made by Trent Reznor (nine inche nails). There were definitely nin logos in Quake 2. He described the "music" not as music but ambient sounds to make things creepy but also contributed the sound effects, presumably for the shotgun also.
Really? I hadn't heard about that extremely prominent aspect of the game's development and marketing for thirty years. You don't happen to have any shocking news about the origins of Super Mario Bros. 2 by any chance, do you?
Alright, alright, I'll tone down the snark, it's just... yeah, that reads a certain way.
But also yeah, he kinda killed it. The Q2 soundtrack in particular has been in my music players longer than some European countries have existed.
I jest you not! I was a nin fan before ever playing the game so I was tuned in when I first saw the logos in game. I think if you go back and play even the first level of Q2 you'll see them. He did 1 also but I'm not sure there were logos in that. It's even listed on the Wikipedia site if that confirms that I'm not full of crap.
I will agree with you. Quake came out and really stretched the hardware of the time.
I can remember timedemos on a 486/80-- a slow machine for the time, but one that would not be absurd for an ordinary home user- and it was pulling less than 1 frame per second, on a machine where Heretic was playable and had a richer, more exciting world. I could see, yes, the enemies are actually made of polygons instead of scaling sprites, but you gave up so much else for it.
I wonder if multiplayer, even more than the "true 3D" is what gave it the sticking power. The lack of story and olive drab level design didn't matter there as much.
I think long term, absolutely. At the time, though, very few people were playing online, and a lot of the praise heaped on Quake was for the single player game and the visuals, which I never got.
I mean, I was on a Pentium 133, so I could play it pretty much as intended, I just thought it looked ugly. At that point in software mode I didn't find it looked any better than Magic Carpet, which had stuff like animated waves and water reflections, and you could make a 3D volcano come out of the ground in real time. It's pretty nuts how far the 3D characters took it.
Side note: Magic Carpet is a technological marvel and we don't talk about it enough. Peak non-accelerated 3D environments ever, right there.
I looked up magic carpet and dayum it has fire physics, even now not all AAA games have that
Large scale terrain deformation and morphing in real time, procedural fire and magma, gravity physics for objects on slopes and, again, animated, reflective 3D water. All running on software with support for a high resolution mode.
The year before the PlayStation 1 launched.
It is a miracle of dark magic and computer science and I don't understand how it can possibly exist. That game is the reason every time Peter Molyneux came up with some random, obviously impossible garbage everybody went "alright, but maybe?"
Absolutely this, half a hour ago I've seen this game for the first time in my life on YouTube and thinked for myself, is it real? I mean castle appearing out of nowhere is alright, it is possible with that time tech, but red faction like destruction and fire and magma physics and water looking like it was made with shaders, oh my god i was shocked, and without need for gpu on hardware of that time? They made impossible possible
Gamecube resident evil 2002 graphics outpace some AAA games even today
It doesn't, honestly, but man, at the time a CRT sure did wonders to blend the pre-rendered backgrounds and a lot of the places where stuff came up short. It really did look great.
That's what I'm talking about, small resolution of crt made it look great https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_-9Rw5CJNE
I appreciate what you're getting at, but I also think you forget how grey Duke 3d was.
I agree Quake was too brown and grey, but the idea it was 'visually hot garbage' is definitely an outside take. We finally had 3d models that weren't sprites, not to mention how impressive prerendered Lightmaps were for the time.
I will agree that GLQuake was when the graphics really were at their best.
Man, that's more like it, I was starting to get weirded out by how little pushback I was getting. And the two of you pushing back are being super civil, even. I guess this conversation has lost a lot of its edge now the games are 30 years old and we're no longer in school.
Anyway, it does feel like you're cherrypicking a little bit there. I mean, sure, there's plenty of grey textures in Dule Nukem, but even if you turn around from that spot you mention the entrance to the cinema is full of reds and yellows, the cop pigs are wearing bright blue and once you get inside the theatre it's all red curtains and colourful posters. There is surprisingly little in terms of good screenshots or video of software Quake as it was for a legit comparison, and even when I took one it got mushed and compressed to crap, but hey, that version is an extra on the GOG version of Quake, go check it out, it's an eye openener.
I don't disagree that Quake was done the "hard way", and the lighting effects and 3d models were technically impressive at the time, what I'm saying here is the picture they put together with it was not as appealing.
I totally disagree. I liked the design of quake a lot more than duke nukem. I liked the dark, dungeonesque aesthetic, and, even without GL particle physics, thought it was much better looking than it's predecessors. It was designed to look like huge temples to eldritch gods and it nailed that.
Quake2 was a big improvement in PvP, however I think it had a lot of the same blockiness, the gibb was less impressive, and it suffered a lot of the same issues with color, just instead of brown/black/green/red, it was grey/green/yellow/red. Sure the polygons were smaller, and more numerous, time, and tech, had advanced. However it wasn't a huge improvement. I also preferred the sound design of the first, and not just the musical sound track, Quake 1 was much more eerie. It really wasn't until Q3 Arena that the color palate really opened up.
Previous games looked like cardboard cut outs with higher quality pictures glued to them, in a world of plywood covered covered frames also with images glued to them. Quake was like mannequins passing though a brutalist architecture mock-up.
However, 1996 I had and ATI Rage GPU. In 1997 I upgraded to a pent2 mmx with a voodoo that had a secondary 2d card supporting it. So I may have had a different experience.
I don't think Q2 had nearly as many issues with color as a whole through the game. I mean, it wasn't the most colourful game either on any given screenshot, but it had more biomes and locations. At the very least they learned how to make outdoors look like outdoors, with the bright red skies contrasting with the grey interiors. Later on they even throw a bunch of green lights around when they're feeling frisky.
You're not wrong that Id only stopped making brown games in Quake 3, which if anything is a bit too garish sometimes. I also don't disagree about your description of early shooters, all I'm saying is that people had been getting good at using that cardboard cutout tech and people had gotten good at parsing it. Moving to full 3D required a few steps backwards to then push the tech back past that point, and Quake 1 was a big muddy mess of a game. If you were able to read brutalist eldrich temples as opposed to sand-colored legos that's fair, but even with all the flashy new tech it never read like that to me at the time.