Video game

Quake engine

game engine developed by id Software

Released: —
Platforms: Windows
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Developers: —
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Series: id Tech

About

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. Since 1999, it has been licensed under the terms of GNU General Public License v2.0 or later.

After release, the Quake engine was immediately forked. Much of the engine remained in Quake II and Quake III Arena. The Quake engine, like the Doom engine, uses binary space partitioning (BSP) to optimize the world rendering. The Quake engine also uses Gouraud shading for moving objects, and a static lightmap for non-moving objects.

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Development

The Quake engine was developed from 1995 for the video game Quake, released on June 22, 1996. John Carmack did most of the programming of the engine, with help from Michael Abrash in algorithms and assembly optimization.

John Romero initially conceived of Quake as an action game taking place in a fully 3D polygon world, inspired by Sega AM2's 3D fighting game Virtua Fighter. Quake was also intended to feature Virtua Fighter-influenced third-person melee combat. However, id Software considered it to be risky, and it would have taken longer to develop the engine. Because the project was taking too long, the third-person melee was eventually dropped.