Hacker Cinema
The Quake
Skjelvet
2018 · Film · 106 min
Part of Wave / Quake Collection
Directed by John Andreas Andersen
A geologist races against time to save his estranged wife and two children when a devastating earthquake strikes Oslo, Norway.
1 positive3 negative8 neutralfrom 12 commenters
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12 comments on Hacker News
> I don't want to go back and replay the games I spent hundreds of hours in mid two thousands, like say NVN or Icewind Dale (never played BG 2). It's just not the same feeling now that I've played games with incomparable graphics, polished mechanics and movie level voice acting/mocap cutscenes. I even picked up Mass Effect recently out of nostalgia but gave up fast because it just isn't as captivating as it was back when it was peak graphics.
And yet many more have no such issue doing exactly this. Despite having a machine capable of the best graphics at the best resolution, I have exactly zero issues going back and playing older games.
Just in the past month alone with some time off for surgery I played and completed Quake, Heretic and Blood. All easily as good, fun and as compelling as modern titles, if not in some ways better.
The soundtrack of Quake is famously by Nine Inch Nails, a "band" which basically consists of Trent Reznor who these days is probably as famous for movie soundtracks like "The Social Network" or "Soul" or for TV soundtracks like the "Watchmen" series but at the time would have been called the "front man" of NiN.
I disagree that the later levels are filler. Episode 4 is my favorite, because it's the episode that best shows off Quake's excellent movement. It's less cramped than the others, and has better "flow", letting you bunny hop all over the maps with minimal waiting. I agree with the common consensus that it's the ugliest of the episodes, but I think this suits the weird otherworldly theme that Sandy Petersen was going for (influenced by the works of H. P. Lovecraft).
The only real complaint I have is the use of the Spawn enemy, which is generally considered the worst designed enemy in the game. But the enemy placement in episode 4 has the advantage that it makes relatively little use of the Ogre, which I consider the second worst enemy, because it has too much HP for something so common, and is too predictable on Nightmare difficulty (to the point that some people say Hard difficulty is actually more difficult than Nightmare).
"You can even tell that from the quality of Quake's levels which start with beautifully crafted and intricate levels, and as you approach the end, progress into "whatever, let's just ship it, this is gonna sell" kind of levels that were mostly just boring repetitive filler to pad the play time."
IIRC (this is well-documented if you want to double check), Tim Willits made most of the Episode 1 maps, John Romero made most of the episode 2 maps, American McGee made most of the Episode 3 maps, Sandy Peterson made most of the episode 4 maps, and John Romero made most of the level 1, military base themed maps in each episode.
The episode 4 maps are often barren, lacking in details, and missing much of the beautiful interconnections of earlier maps... but this is also true of Peterson's maps from Doom (he did a lot of episode 3 in the original Doom, IIRC). So I think it's more of "this guy might be a strong game designer in a lot of other contexts, but the specific needs of making cutting edge Doom/Quake style maps isn't a great fit for him".
I was at Raven Software at the transition from the Doom engine and other 2.5D engines to Quake (and then Quake 2, and then Quake 3, and then Doom 3), and there were a number of existing designers who were fine game designers in earlier, 2d contexts who found their skills severely out of sync with the changing demands of 3d map making, and most of them eventually had to transition to other roles or leave the industry.
Quake remastered. The new episodes are pretty good.
> The 90s to early 2000s was the golden age of everything because of context. The substance is almost irrelevant.
It is worth considering that this viewpoint is age-dependent.
I feel this way instead about the mid-eighties to the early 90s, and I personally believe that games went rapidly downhill just after Quake, until the mid-2000s casual gaming boom. Everything went 3D and the fun was beaten out of every game concept.
Speaking from a British position, I think your problem with "entertainment" generally is very specifically the manifold outcomes of the US television network syndication model.
US TV companies make too many episodes of everything, because of that model, and that feeds inevitably into a particular story development concept that involves teams of people growing and feeding an addiction.
Not so long ago, a British Prime Minister (David Cameron) told Tina Fey that he wanted a more American model in British TV -- more episodes.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-48021899
"Come and convince our showrunners that they can't just make six episodes of things. Like you guys, they should make 200 episodes," she recalled him saying.
Fey rejected the request, however, explaining that US writers were, in fact, jealous of the less-is-more British approach.
The way this works -- that everything has to have a spinoff, everything has to have a multi-episode story arc, everything has to have a universe -- is also why cinema is screwed, because it is now a feeder for this system.
So my suggestion is: watch things that don't have more than ten episodes ever. Watch films that don't have sequels. Reject syndication culture.
+1 on renting films with some level of purpose. A lot of people I know refuse to pay for movie rentals.
I've seen this too many times: endless scrolling to try to find that one decent movie that comes free with the subscription.
But movie studios aren't stupid. They don't just give away their best movies for free. So those who simply aren't willing to pay are left watching Hitman or The Quake (fine Hulu content).
The price of movie rentals might seem high, but life is far too short to waste it watching things you don't even like that much.
Also: iTunes in particular happens to have very decent staff recommendations (i.e., actual human curation). I wouldn't be surprised if movie rental services like iTunes understand that their customers are looking for quality and not quantity, otherwise those customers would be on the streaming services.
It's an old Carmack quote:
> Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important.
It's why DooM was such an incredible novelty of fast paced 3d shooter, and Quake... Well.. Its devoid of character.
It's why HL & Fallout are so beloved.
I'm 100% with you
I guess you're not old enough to remember the original Quake, released with a shareware license where the first episode was free. Someone will probably come along and shake their fist at me, but if Quake isn't old-school, I don't know what is.
From their talks and interviews, I've gathered that both John Carmack and Palmer Luckey have always been in favor of standing experiences.
But...the early investor of Oculus is also the CEO, and he apparently has the weakest stomach for VR of anyone at the company. The hard line seems to have been set entirely by him.
Doom and Quake both made many people nauseous. So do rollercoasters, 3D movies, and Telsa Roadsters. There's no reason to eliminate experiences that most people can thoroughly enjoy. Fortunately, the fun camp seems to have won finally.
I've had this discussion with many people. I enjoyed the movie for it's technical merits, not the plot.
I saw both versions.
I don't get hte "3d headache" - but I definitely enjoyed the 2d version more. THere was more detail to focus on, and in tha tmovie, detail was everything. With the 3d version, I found myself trying to look at things in the foreground/background, and I just couldn't - not becuuse of any defect in my ability to manipulate my eyes, but because (I think...) they actually used differnet depth of field settings when rendering the 2 versions.. there were things in the 3d version you literally COULDNT focus on - they wanted your eyes on the action only. That buged me.
- I remember playing 3d Quake (the original) on my crappy home monitor, with LCD shutter glasses - and it was AWESOME FUN. SCARY.
So I think all the points in the article are valid, 3d is hard, for more reasons than joe average might know, I certainly learned some stuff - but it's definitely a aprt of the future, if only because our current equipment makes it technically easy to play back.
Technologically it looked very well for its time, but mostly it stand out as a game with "character" (art design, levels, weapons, sound effects, voice acting, writing).
It was so cheesy and over the top that it became masterpiece (like Tarantino / Rodriguez movies, or recent Old Spice commercials).
id soft may have had technologically superior games (Quake is about the same age and had full 3d models instead of just sprites) but they were incomparably bland compared to Duke Nukem.
Also, gameplay was really fun. There were some very inspired gameplay elements: shrink and freeze guns, laser traps, remote triggered pipe-bombs, jetpacks. I still fondly remember multiplayer Duke sessions late in the night at lab in my university.