Blame it on Big Lots.

It was during another one of my runs for cheap food, $3.00 DVDs, and marked-down PC games that I managed to find a copy of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars for only $6.00. I knew that it would look like ass on my PC, which was already going on four years since it's last major upgrade. But at six bucks, I was willing to bite the bullet and run it at low settings.

Playing it for a while made me decide to give Quake 4 another go, this time forgoing graphical brilliance for performance. After blowing up the giant brain, I decided to look up that old haunt Planet Quake to see if there were any goodies or the like from the community. But in all that browsing and blowing away bastard Strogg, I started thinking about the old days of Quake II.

It was 1998, and Id along with the Dallas developer scene were still kings. Quake had managed to create a new shooter culture that made the Doom multiplayer fanbase pale in comparison with mods and clans everywhere. Quake II just built on that foundation, and everyone embraced it. Every new patch was something to look forward to, I still remember how much of a big deal Visible Weapons was. It's taken for granted now, but back then the idea that a player's model would be rendered carrying the actual weapon they were currently using was huge.



I don't know how much time I spent playing that game, in either standard deathmatch, rounds of CTF (with the runes and the grapple), or the various mods that kept coming out. Sure, the Half-Life family are now the kings of mods, but Q2 is when the whole thing really, and I mean really got going. Weapons Factory (after the TF team got hired by Valve), Q Soccer, Action Quake (the direct ancestor of Counter Strike), Q-Pong (ever get crushed by a giant ball?), Jailbreak, Rocket Arena, Generations, and just so many more. And then you had the models. Oh God, the models.

When modders managed to get Quake to accept custom skins, Id took the hint and not only built Q2 with native support for custom skins, but they also allowed for custom models. I spent a lot of time on the old site Polycount for news and reviews of new user created models. Before they all got jobs in the industry, many up and coming modelers would prove their skills by releasing a wide range of player models on that old site. I loved those things, I still have CDROMs burned with well over a hundred different models and countless skins. And reading all those technical specifications... man, back then 1000 polygons was considered excessive. Hell, just the other day I was reading about a new Naruto game on the 360/PS3 and how the models had 30,000 polygons. I'm getting old.



Play style was a lot different back then too, tricks and control schemes that everyone uses now were just coming into their own at that time. I mean, there were still a lot of players who didn't even use the mouse, I didn't until I got into HLDM in my college computer lab. Hell, some were still using (pre-analog) gamepads. Fuck man, back then I even thought that using a crosshair was considered cheap. Even the addition of the duck command changed a lot. I'm sure there's a few of you who remember getting into a straight-up face-to-face firefight with someone who thought they could suddenly get the upper hand buy ducking right in front of you. Truth be told, this was effective against slower players who didn't know how to look down. You don't see this anymore since everyone has since learned how to play with the mouse. Oh, and this was when most people still used dial-up. Ping was holy back then.

Even after Half-Life was released on November 19th 1998, the Quake series and Id still had a good run. Quake III was strong, despite a lame single-player campaign. However, there just wasn't as much user created content as before. The Dallas scene was losing a lot of talent and its luster, and Valve worked closely with the modding community to push Half-Life and its decedents towards legendary status.

I miss those days at times, when I would check Planet Quake every day for updates and fire up GameSpy to look for a good server. When I would push my modem by downloading new mods, models, and Q2 movies. I even reinstalled Quake 2 and met up with my old friends the big boxy super shotgun, the camper-killing grenade launcher, and the dildo firing rocket launcher. I'm even looking for texture and graphic upgrades (back then, not everyone made their textures in nice clean square formats, that's why some games look so blurry on 3d cards). Hell, I might even dig out GameSpy to look for servers.

Long Live the Quad.