Here at PCG towers, we’ve recently been sorting through some of our old treasure hoard of magazine issues, including interviews with many of the industry’s leading figures. One that recently jumped out to me was a 2008 interview with John Carmack, at which time he was still at id Software, around the launch of Quake Live: a browser-based remake of Quake III: Arena. And as Carmack makes clear, despite id’s lineage of genre-defining games, including the likes of Doom and Wolfenstein, Quake Arena was his baby.
“It was never really a secret that Quake Arena was my favourite id Software game,” says Carmack. “Of all the games that we’ve made, Quake Arena was always the one that I looked at as a pure game.
“While it had its noteworthy graphical advancements for the day, it really was about the gameplay. It was at a turning point in maturing for the gaming industry, where you had to start throwing in everything including the kitchen sink, and Quake Arena wasn’t our most successful title. But I do look back at it and think Quake Arena as a game stands the test of time.”
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“That’s one of the aspects of engineering that’s always appealed to me,” says Carmack. “Trying to do the right thing in the right place. You don’t try and push something where it no longer belongs. You look for opportunities in all the things that you have available.”
Quake Live was a pretty pioneering idea for the time, launching as essentially a free-to-play browser plugin that offered everything the original game had, plus more. But id struggled to make the game profitable and eventually launched subscriptions to support it before, much further down the line, making it a paid title on Steam and leaving the browser version behind.
Carmack has previously said that Quake Arena was probably his own swansong as a designer, adding that his skills “probably tapped out a decade ago. I don’t have anything to say about design beyond the Quake III level.” Which is a little bit like Michelangelo finishing up David, putting down his chisel, and saying I got nothing to tell you about sculpture. Even these days you can pick up Quake Arena, get the headphones on and, as Carmack says: “It’s pure play on it.”
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