Ah, Quake, I HATE that damn game, brown dull muddy look, uninspired level design and spawned all the mindless FPS games that we […]
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Ah, Quake, I HATE that damn game, brown dull muddy look, uninspired level design and spawned all the mindless FPS games that we are afflicted with today with the advent of it's 3D poly graphics in the FPS world.
It's weird, I am a huge fan of Lovecraft's work and the "Cthulhu mythos"that apparently inspired this game, but when I have played it, I see nothing of his influence beyond the names of some of the protagonists, none of the depth or feel is there at all of what is there of Lovecraft is horribly misused and butchered beyond all recognition in my eyes.
I recall being really interested in the game before release and then playing was a total disappointment, I honestly think this game is a joyless experience and only holds it's place today as a constant "benchmark" title because the FPS counting was built into the game so it's a quick easy way to show a PC's "POWAR".
I also think it's a tragedy that some of the most useful CPU's of the era, the Cyrix 6x86 and to a lesser extent the IDT Winchip & RiSE MP6 were blacklisted because of this game on websites, magazines and forum's of the era as being "inferior" because of Quake FPS scores in their benchmarks, it's was highly tuned Intel Pentium code and works poorly on any other platform, what do you expect?
I really do think it's a shame, those reports and reviews relied on quake as a "benchmark" and because of that it tainted the other CPU designs, this followed in a lack of sales and the eventual collapse of many of them. I believe we lost out on a lot of innovation and progress when we lost the likes of Cyrix and RiSE and Quake had a large hand in that along with press of the time using it as the "example" frankly because it was easy. Didn't matter that the Cyrix was faster at pretty much everything else(even the Winchip C6 was better that Pentium in business stuff of the time, and was half power, heat and cost plus worked on old socket 5 boards), just Quake, Quake, Quake....
I'd have loved to see what Cyrix and RiSE had coming next, competition is the driving force of innovation, you only have to look here https://web.archive.org/web/19970607201650/ht … bsr_6x86_3.html to see that Cyrix had easily beaten Intel in performance for 99% of what anyone really used a PC for at the time, and that with vastly lesser resources, funding and manufacturing ability. Imagine what Cyrix could have done if they had kept going long enough to make it to the size of AMD back in 1999...
So yeah, screw Quake, it was designed for the Pentium plain and simple, I don't think it's a decent game or worth playing, so it'll never be an influence on the retro PC's I build and enjoy.
