History of Computers - Quake Engine

Introduction

The Quake Engine was one of the first engines that had fully 3D rendering capabilities, used in its namesake game, Quake. The Quake engine has had a considerable influence on the development of many modern game engines and the way. Many engines have used copied code or heavily derived from the Quake Engine.

Overview

The Quake engine was developed in 1996 by id Software, the makers of the Wolfenstein 3D (the first first-person shooter) and the DOOM franchise. Developers John Carmack, Michael Abrash, and John Cash are mainly responsible for its creation. The engine was originally intended for the game of the same name, Quake. Quake was released in 1996. Quake became a legendary game for its time for two reasons: it was the first shooter to have true 3D rendering, and it was the first game that allowed for multiplayer via the internet. These two aspects largely defined what a first person shooter was for years to come. The Quake engine was made open source very soon after the release of Quake, which also make it very moddable and open to the community. This also allowed for others to completely rewrite parts of the code to improve it for their needs, which started the Quake offshoot family tree.

Significance

The Quake engine is significant because it was the first game engine to use fully 3D graphics, and it was open source. This means that parts of it are found in many modern game engines such as Valve's Source engine, or the heavily modified id Tech 3 engine used in many of the Call of Duty games. The Quake engine is certainly the most influential game engine ever created.