Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters

[Spectere]

Shack News published a fantastic article about Quake and old school first-person shooters, available here.

Actually, calling it an article is a gross understatement. This sucker is massive. The first few sections are available for free, but you have to subscribe ($5/month, cancel any time) to view the rest of it. I guess you could call it shareware, which seems appropriate given the subject matter! It's well worth the entry fee, though I kinda wish they would make it available as a $20 eBook or something. There's a ton of content there.

Basically, it has a detailed history built from first-hand accounts of people involved in those games, as well as a ton of quotes from people who were absolutely huge in the industry (so far it's mostly been the id team and the founder of Apogee, Scott Miller, but given that the topics include games like Dark Forces I'm sure some ex-LucasArts employees will have their time in the spotlight).

Fantastic read. I highly recommend it!

[Zephlar]

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll check it out. You ain't kidding that's a hella read lol. Try to remember when I get home from work tonight.

[Bobbias]

I had some bigass 6 (?, maybe more...) CD box set with a bunch of lucasarts starwars games on it, and dark forces was on there. I played the shit out of that. Happy to see it mentioned since it's often one of the doom clones that tends to not to get mentioned so much.

[Spectere]

Yeah, Dark Forces was one of my favorites growing up! It was kind of neat how they ended up combining 3D models with the traditional 2.5D setup in order to give the ships more life without severely impacting performance on a 486.

Relevant: Dark Forces SGDQ2016 speedrun. Good stuff, that.

[Bobbias]

Yeah I was seriously stoked for that run. I remember spending ages running all over those levels lost as shit and constantly confused lol.