Based on id Software's open stance towards game modifications, their Quake series became a popular subject for player mods beginning with Quake in 1996. Spurred by user-created hacked content on their previous games and the company's desire to encourage the hacker ethic, Id included dedicated modification tools into Quake, including the QuakeC programming language and a level editor. As a game that popularized online first-person shooter multiplayer, early games were team- and strategy-based and led to prominent mods like Team Fortress , whose developers were later hired by Valve 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 as machinima.
Player modifications, or mods, change a game's art or gameplay to create alternative or entirely new games. [1] From the age of Atari through the 1990s, video game developers were known vigilantly protect their intellectual property through copyrights, patents, and general secrecy. [2] Id Software founders John Carmack and John Romero were instead excited when their Wolfenstein 3D was hacked to swap content into the game, and decided to help rather than hinder the hacker ethic of those who would modify their later games, including Doom and Quake . [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 under OpenGL technology, and its dedicated developer tools encouraged users to create their own modifications, spawning a "healthy mod scene". [4] [5] [6] Around the time of Quake's release, these user modifications became known as just "mods". [7]
Modding was made easy for Quake players, who could download level editors and the QuakeC 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 were Capture the Flag and Team 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 the Quake modding community, as the Team Fortress team was invited to create its sequel for Valve's first game, Half-Life, itself built on modifications of the Quake II game engine. [2] [11]
In 1997, a "total conversion" Quake mod named "Alien Quake" replaced characters, levels, and sounds with replacements from the Alien film franchise. Its developers received a takedown notice from 20th 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 with Quake 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 of AAA developers. [13]
There have been two attempts to create free content game data for Quake similar to OpenArena or Freedoom . The first, Open Quartz, was started in 2000 and the second LibreQuake, 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 as machinima. Players of Quake and Quake 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. The Quake 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 popular Quake II mods was Chaos 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 is Qoole.
In 2000, Id transferred maintenance control of the Quake III Arena level editor tools (Q3Radiant) to community programmers, who added new features and released the result as the Windows- and Linux-compatible GtkRadiant. A public beta test ran in January 2001. [21] It became one of Quake's most used level editors [22] and was later released under the GNU General Public License. [23]
Qoole, short for Quake Object Oriented Level Editor, [24] is a level editor for video games based on the Quake engine, and was developed by Lithium Software. [25] Among the supported games are the original Quake I and Quake II , Hexen II and Half-Life . It uses a brush-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 a CD-ROM, [26] but the source code was eventually released under the GPL v2. [28]
QuArK is a free and open-source program for Quake 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.
Machinima is the use of real-time computer graphics engines to create a cinematic production. The word "machinima" is a portmanteau of the words machine and cinema. According to Guinness World Records, machinima is the art of making animated narrative films from computer graphics, most commonly using the same engines used by video games.
QuakeC is a compiled language developed in 1996 by John Carmack of id Software to program parts of the video game Quake. Using QuakeC, a programmer is able to customize Quake to great extents by adding weapons, changing game logic and physics, and programming complex scenarios. It can be used to control many aspects of the game itself, such as parts of the AI, triggers, or changes in the level. The Quake engine was the only game engine to use QuakeC. Following engines used DLL game modules for customization written in C, and C++ from id Tech 4 on.
Quake is a first-person shooter game developed by id Software and published by GT Interactive. The first game in the Quake series, it was originally released for MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, and Linux in 1996, followed by Mac OS and Sega Saturn in 1997 and Nintendo 64 in 1998.
Video game modding is the process of alteration by players or fans of one or more aspects of a video game, such as how it looks or behaves, and is a sub-discipline of general modding. Mods may range from small changes and tweaks to complete overhauls, and can extend the replay value and interest of the game.
A source port is a software project based on the source code of a game engine that allows the game to be played on operating systems or computing platforms with which the game was not originally compatible.
Doom WAD is the default format of package files for the video game Doom and its sequel Doom II: Hell on Earth, that contain sprites, levels, and game data. WAD stands for Where's All the Data?. Immediately after its release in 1993, Doom attracted a sizeable following of players who created their own mods for WAD files—packages containing new levels or graphics—and played a vital part in spawning the mod-making culture which is now commonplace for first-person shooter games. Thousands of WADs have been created for Doom, ranging from single custom levels to full original games; most of these can be freely downloaded over the Internet. Several WADs have also been released commercially, and for some people the WAD-making hobby became a gateway to a professional career as a level designer.
The Quake engine is the game engine developed by id Software to power their 1996 video game Quake. It featured true 3D real-time rendering. Since 1999, it has been licensed under the terms of GNU General Public License v2.0 or later.
The Quake II engine is a game engine developed by id Software for use in their 1997 first-person shooter Quake II. It is the successor to the Quake engine. Since its release, the Quake II engine has been licensed for use in several other games.
Mod DB is a website that focuses on general video game modding. It was founded in 2002 by Scott "INtense!" Reismanis. As of September 2015, the Mod DB site has received over 604 million views, has more than 12,500 modifications registered, and has hosted more than 108 million downloads. A spin-off website, Indie DB, was launched in 2010 and focuses on indie games and news.
Tremulous is a free and open source asymmetric team-based first-person shooter with real-time strategy elements. Being a cross-platform development project the game is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
Diary of a Camper is an American short film released in October 1996 that was made using id Software's first-person shooter video game Quake. The film was created by the Rangers, a clan or group of video game players, and first released over the Internet as a non-interactive game demo file. The minute and a half-long video is commonly considered the first example of machinima—the art of using real-time, virtual 3D environments, often game engines, to create animated films. The story centers on five members of the Rangers clan fighting against a lone camper in a multiplayer deathmatch.
Jailbreak: Source is a multiplayer team-based first-person action video game, developed as a total conversion modification on the Valve's proprietary Source engine. The game was in beta development stages before it was abandoned, with its first public release on 14 February 2007. 0.2 followed a week later as a patch. The third major public version was released two months later on April 21, 2007. The next release was made available just over a year later, on May 3, 2008 with the latest version (0.6) being released on 15 January 2010.
Micro Star v. FormGen Inc. 154 F.3d 1107 is a legal case applying copyright law to video games, stopping the sales of a compilation of user-generated levels that infringed the copyright of Duke Nukem 3D. Micro Star downloaded the Duke Nukem 3D levels and re-packaged them as Nuke It, after seeing their popularity on the internet. Micro Star filed suit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of California, asking for declaratory judgment that they had not infringed any copyright. Game publisher FormGen counter-sued, claiming that Micro Star created a derivative work based on Duke Nukem 3D and infringed their copyright.
MultiEx Commander was a game resource archive manager for Windows published by the Xentax Foundation. Some features include a built-in MexScript interpreter, file extractor and importer, stand alone mod creator EasyMod.
Nexus Mods is a website that hosts computer game mods and other user-created content related to video game modding. It is one of the largest gaming mod sites on the web, with 30 million registered members and 3146 supported games as of October 2024, with a single forum and a wiki for site- and mod-related topics.
User modification, or modding, of video games in the open world sandbox Grand Theft Auto series is a popular trend in the PC gaming community. These unofficial modifications are made by altering gameplay logic and asset files within a user's game installation, and can change the player's experience to varying degrees. Frequently created by anonymous modders, modifications are presented in the form of downloadable files or archives. Third-party software has been indispensable for building Grand Theft Auto mods, due to the lack of official editing tools from the developer, Rockstar Games. Mods for Grand Theft Auto are generally developed for use on the PC versions of the games, since the platform does not prevent modifications to installed software; however, similar content for console and mobile phone versions does exist to an extent.
A Minecraft mod is a mod that changes aspects of the sandbox game Minecraft. Minecraft mods can add additional content to the game, make tweaks to specific features, and optimize performance. Thousands of mods for the game have been created, with some mods even generating an income for their authors. While Mojang Studios does not provide an API for modding, community tools exist to help developers create and distribute mods. The popularity of Minecraft mods has been credited for helping Minecraft become one of the best-selling video games of all time.
Playbour is a hybrid form of play and labour, specifically in the digital games industry.
Wrath: Aeon of Ruin is a 2024 first-person shooter developed by KillPixel Games and Slipgate Ironworks and published by 3D Realms and Fulqrum Publishing. It is built on a modified version of the Quake engine, making it the first major game release on that engine in nearly 20 years. The first episode was released on Steam Early Access on November 22, 2019, and was fully released on February 27, 2024.
Bloom is a modification for the video game Doom II, originally developed by id Software. The mod, created by the Spanish indie studio Bloom Team, was released via Mod DB on October 31, 2021. Bloom combines elements from Doom II and Monolith Productions' Blood, merging enemies, weapons, and environments from both games into a crossover experience.
