Which Quake?

Quake II was never meant to be a Quake game. In the wake of Quake, a groundbreaking first-person shooter that suffered from a tumultuous development, id software viewed the final product as haphazard and schizophrenic. Its mix of Lovecraftian horror, the arcane and the occult, alongside the techno-futuristic, all wrapped in the mechanical devices of a shooter was seen not as a unique property to be celebrated, but rather a disjointed collection of ideas that needed to be tamed in order to better conform to expectations. Was Quake fantasy or science-fiction? Was it heavy metal or gothic horror? Of course id had been down this route before. Wolfenstein 3D combined the occult with more modern firearms to create an alt-historical take on the Third Reich. Doom more clearly juxtaposed elements with its admixture of an Alien-inspired used-future alongside the ancient horrors spilling out from Hell. But Quake was different. It wasn't simply fusing two different elements: it wasn't simply a peanut-butter and chocolate combination. It's elements were more varied and drawn with a looser brush. The cohesion between elements became subtler, and the abstractness of the elements themselves grew to fill the void. Quake was not merely different, it was odd.

For their next game, id software wanted to once again push the technology, but this time with a tighter focus. Gone was the high ambition that had accompanied the early days of Quake and had to be subsequently abandoned. Gone too was the unlikely fusion of genres. The next game would be clear and identifiable from the outset, with the kind of all-too-obvious identity that would easily read from halfway across the store on a sales stand. Space marines vs. space cyborgs. Sci-fi by way of Aliens, by way of its imitators. This would be a new intellectual property for id, neither a Doom game nor a Quake game (and certainly not Wolfenstein or say Commander Keen). But as development continued id struggled to come up with a name. Plot being of the most minor consideration, a name based around the skeletal narrative was hardly appropriate. id software also needed to live up to their namesake. They were id. They made games for that part of your brain. Their titles needed to evoke the feeling of playing their games. An id game was not a Pathways into Darkness or even a System Shock (clearly id's games had little to do with those actual titles and their titles alone are used for comparison). An id game was monosyllabic and evocative. Yet post-Doom, and especially post-Quake, the market had become inundated with such similarly named shooters. Coming up with a suitable name that was not taken (even if such registered names never saw the light of day as finished products) proved an annoying distraction to the team at id. On the technology side they had always been working on 'Quake II', and finally, the name stuck.

That Quake II is so named forever taints and confuses the legacy of Quake. Perhaps if id had been more persistent in their search, they would have come across a suitable name. One that would communicate what Quake II was about with immediacy, a word familiar and yet novel in its employ as a title. Already the name is on the tip of my tongue, I can feel it, tacky, sweet and unpleasant like Quake II itself. They should have called it what it was - TRASH.

References

id software (1996). Quake [Video game]. GT Interactive.

id software (1997). Quake II [Video game]. Activision.

id software (1993). Doom [Video game]. GT Interactive.

id software (1992). Wolfenstein 3D [Video game]. Apogee Software.

Aliens. (1986) Directed by James Cameron [Film]. Los Angeles, Calif.: 20th Century Fox.

id software (1990). Commander Keen [Video games]. Apogee Software.

Bungie Software Products Corporation (1993). Pathways into Darkness [Video game]. Bungie Software Products Corporation.

Looking Glass Studios (1994). System Shock [Video game]. Origin Systems.