Quake (series)

Quake is a series of first-person shooter video games, starting with the game of the same name.

Overview

Setting

The Quake series is somewhat unusual in that its focus changes frequently; the story of Quake II has nothing to do with the original Quake. This is mostly because Quake II was originally intended to be a separate franchise (Quake II was initially only a tentative title), a plan that was thwarted when most of the other names id Software had tried to use were already taken. Quake III Arena has little to do with either of its predecessors, shedding the single-player missions in favor of deathmatch against the A.I. or online. One of the few unifying elements for the first three titles was the Quake logo-shaped rune for "quad damage" that made the player's weapons and attacks several times as powerful for a short duration. The first three titles pioneered id Software's next-generation graphics engine before it was licensed out.

Strogg

The Strogg are an alien race who serve as the primary antagonists in Quake II and Quake 4, with the Makron being their leader. In Quake II, Makron uses the battle-mech style vessel Jorg. They are a playable faction in Quake III: Team Arena and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. The Strogg are a warlike cybernetic race, infamous for the systematic replacement of their ranks with prisoners of war, "stroggified" and assimilated through the modification of their bodies with mechanical weaponry and prosthetics. They maintain a massive global military-industrial complex with mines, ore refineries, light production plants, and heavy industrial manufacturing facilities throughout Stroggos. Their heavy reliance on industry has created a toxic environment that has killed much of the native plant and animal life on Stroggos, and the remaining animals are subject to horrible mutation.

Games

Quake (1996)

Quake Mission Pack No. 1: Scourge of Armagon (1997)

Quake Mission Pack No. 2: Dissolution of Eternity (1997)

Quake II (1997)

Quake II Mission Pack: The Reckoning (1998)

Quake II Mission Pack: Ground Zero (1998)

Quake III Arena (1999)

Quake III: Team Arena (2000)

Quake 4 (2005)

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (2007)

Future

On June 17, 2011, John Carmack outlined his vision for the next game in the Quake series, saying, “We are at least tossing around the possibilities of going back to the bizarre, mixed up Cthulhu-ish Quake 1 world and rebooting that direction. We think that would be a more interesting direction than doing more Strogg stuff after Quake 4… But we could do something pretty grand like that, that still tweaks the memory right in all of those ways, but is actually cohesive and plays with all of the strengths of the level we’re at right now.”^[32]

References