Someone Re-Made The Quake Engine, And Its Mighty Impressive

The Quake engine is the game engine developed by id Software to power their 1996 video game Quake. It featured true 3D real-time rendering and is now licensed under the terms of GNU General Public License v2.0 or later.

After release, it immediately forked, as did the level design. Much of the engine remained in Quake II and Quake III Arena and varied barely in the lifespan of the series. The Quake engine was also a sort of derivative of the Doom engine.

The Quake engine has been treated as a separate engine from its successor, the Quake II engine. Even if both of these shared similarities, they still had their own thing going, so uniqueness was key.

The quake engine was the first true-3D game engine to use a special map design system that preprocessed and pre-rendered some elements of the 3D environment and showed them through a visualized plane. Today, a great feat was uncovered, and a fully working Quake engine was finally made.

According to ZX-Retro Gaming,

This is a fully playable Quake engine with moving enemies running at impressive speed on a standard 3,5 MHz ZX Spectrum 128k. The engine also has support for 7 and 14 MHz, whereas the 14 Mhz version also has a second floor. You play with W, A, S, D, and cursor keys. Tap and Scl files are available in the download.”

They continue,

In this video, it is the 7 MHz version that has been played on an original 3,5 MHz machine, and it runs fine, but if you have a machine with 7 or 14 MHz it will run faster. If that wasn’t enough to surprise you, this engine, even running at 3,5 MHz, totally beats the old Freescape engine that was used in the 80s games.”

A person by the name of ‘Silent GameRZX‘, a well-known demoscener, has published something unheard of, something that is yet another milestone in the ZX Spectrum history. He successfully created a fully functional 3D engine that resembles the Quake game. It feels so similar that it may be viewed as a sequel by some players.

If you think about it, this somewhat masks what happens in the Doom community, with its countless platforms ranging from consoles to Notepad to being able to play Doom inside of Doom effectively creating a scene out of inception, very intriguing indeed,

Something like this is unskippable if you have the necessary equipment. If you feel like playing on this engine is something you have to do, this should suffice as an Installation Guide.

Indie developers always surprise the community, they continue to push on projects that no one can think can even be possible, but here we are, with something truly beautiful, even if it is only 8 bits.