One of the four Quake level designers, Sandy Petersen, recently took to Twitter to do a bit of reminiscing over the 1996 classic shooter. In the process, Petersen revealed some interesting tidbits about the game, including some ideas that he and fellow level designer American McGee had involving giant bosses for the later episodes.
In case you’re not familiar with Quake‘s development, due to the game’s turbulent development, Episodes 2 and 3 don’t have boss monsters, due to time constraints around making more monsters. McGee and Petersen’s solution in those cases were to scale up some of the existing monsters to giant proportions. Unfortunately, in doing so, the art team found that the monsters looked terrible (and not in a good way), so the idea was axed.
McGee made a Quake level with a 300-foot zombie. It barely fit into its half of the level. You fought it by using lifts and staircases on a scaffold by the zombie. McGee’s goal: see if 3-d scaling was useful. It was a near level but the art team vetoed it.
— Sandy Petersen (@SandyofCthulhu) October 11, 2020
For example, McGee wanted to make a level based around a giant, 300-foot zombie that would require players to scale various scaffolds, stairs and the like to eventually get at the vulnerable parts. “It was a neat level,” said Petersen, “but the art team vetoed it.” Likewise, Petersen wanted a huge Vore that involved players having to evade seeking projectiles through caverns. However, what ended up happening was the player facing off against two Vore after descending an elevator.
After McGee’s giant zombie: I made a giant vore whose homing darts chased you all through the level. You ran through tunnels and caverns evading darts & seeking a vantage to shoot back. Also canned by the art team. Because scaled-up critters look bad. pic.twitter.com/lRO6BlaBDt
— Sandy Petersen (@SandyofCthulhu) October 11, 2020
It’s a neat bit of gaming history for a game that originally started out with Norse mythology in mind, but eventually morphed into incorporating Cthulhu mythos. Of course, what really set Quake off was its multiplayer and the use of 3D accelerator cards, kicking off a revolution that’s even seen today with Nvidia’s RTX cards and the upcoming ray-tracing capabilities of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.