Here is the v1.1 patch: http://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/zer11.html

Pure classic, far ahead of its time to boot. Absolute 10/10, one of the most famous project ever.

kickass! ! ! thank you

It doesn't get much better than this.

NOTE: The end cutscene doesn't play all the way through on some modern source ports. Here is a quick hotfix (simply extract the file into your Zer folder).
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/single_player/maps/zerend_fix.zip

cool. im just installing to learn how to mod.

and to see if i know when quake was released.

Can anyone tell me where the gold key is in Map "Among the Dead" Thanks in advance

after you go through the silver key door, it is in a grave that needs hacked open.

yes, yes, yessssssss! so evil. so delicious. this is an indispensable part of the full quake experience.

If Quake wasn't brutal enough

It's a classic. Challenging, but not really difficult gameplay, good level design, creepy atmosphere. Also remarkable due to its surprising (somewhat anticlimactic) ending. Belongs into anybody's collection!

3/5

1- good level, quite short nothing exceptional 2- cutscene 3- simple architect, very 2d gameplay 4- wtf? alotsa textures been used and simple design 5 - classic 6 - classic 7 - classic 8 - wtf cutscene

should've been a 2 episode adventure

so basically the most beautiful levels came from kandyman with a manzer addition

Did I do something wrong when I played the game? Are there multiple endings? If not that was the shittiest ending I have ever witnessed. No one kills Quakeman, he's too tough.

This exchange inspired me to replay Zerstörer. Plenty here that is innovative and memorable; some things that are not so great.

Firstly, the biggest drawback to this episode, both when I first played it a few years back and now: the cutscenes. I appreciate that they pushed the boundaries of what could be done with the Quake engine at the time, but as when I played this before, I found them to be distracting and cheesy. In my opinion, the story of a Quake map/episode should play out within the maps themselves, or not at all. Without the cutscenes, though, this episode largely loses its overarching sense of narrative (even though some of the individual maps manage to tell their own stories), which highlights another major weakness -- namely that it is ultimately a set of mostly nice but disjointed maps, with very little real connection between them.

zer1m6 is the definite highlight for me. I have since played far better-looking maps, but it still stands out in due its fantastic sense of tension, narrative and location.

zer1m1, zer1m3, zer1m5 and the start map are all pretty good, with zer1m3 being a little finicky and confusing to complete, yet wonderfully atmospheric in a B-horror movie kind of way.

zer1m7 is very immersive, but I also found it confusing and hence frustrating to complete, perhaps due to the samey visuals everywhere. Plus, I still have no idea how to use that strange weapon you get at the very end. I tried firing it a few times, but just ended up injuring and/or killing myself in the process, finally gave up and went back to rest of my arsenal to complete the map. A weapon like that (as opposed to e.g. the souped-up shotgun and nail-chaingun, which anyone who has used the regular Quake weapons will instinctively know how to use) should be introduced a lot earlier, so as to give the player a chance to learn how to use it.

I agree with spy that zer1m4 is the weakest map of the bunch. Whereas the other maps all brought back memories from when I played Zerstörer previously, I had no memory of having played this one at all.

In case this all sounds overly negative, let me stress that there are more things I like than dislike about this episode/pack. The maps are mostly fun, as are the new additions (monsters, weapons, etc.), and there is no denying that it is impressive for its time. I do, however, think that it's far from perfect.

"zer1m6 ... stands out due to its fantastic sense of tension, narrative and location"

D'oh.

BTW., according to the Quaddicted maps database, Kandyman never made any other maps than his superb Zerstorer contribution, True Love Waits. Can this be true? Or was Kandyman a one-off alias for an established mapper?

One can find out quite a lot from just reading the included documentation. :-)

Kandyman is Marin Gazzari and is credited with the start map/"Another Perfect Day", zer1m5/"Blutsturz" (along with Cole Savage a.k.a. Manzer), zer1m6/"True Love Waits", zer1m7/"Bunker" and zerdm4/"Brutalizer", according to the Zerstörer readme -- so that's the majority of the playable SP maps in this pack and a fair bit more than just zer1m6.

A quick internet search suggests that Marin Gazzari/Kandyman has made a few Doom and Quake2 maps in addition to his Zerstörer maps.

But no other Q1SP maps outside of Zerstorer, unfortunately.

Still, I guess that's more incentive to have another go at the whole package.

(I don't play Deathmatch.)

You could certainly do worse. :-) A word of warning, though, MikeTaylor: if I recall correctly, you once wrote that you use DarkPlaces on Linux, which means that you may encounter a bug in zer1m3, where one of the keys (the silver key, as I recall) drops right through the platform where you're supposed to find it. Perhaps the latest version of DP fixes this or perhaps there is a way to fix it manually -- or you could just cheat at that point. Or use a different engine to play this, like Quakespasm (also runs on Linux).

Just thought I'd let you know so that you don't lose time looking for a key that is not where it's supposed to be.

Actually, what I wrote about zer1m4 above is not entirely true: certain sequences did bring back memories, such as the three doors that you open and close with the single multi-sided switch. It's not as good as the other maps, but especially for 1997, it's not too bad either.

Thanks a lot for the tip on that gold key, I was running in circles for a while there. Anyway, I think the TEAMShambler description above is overstated. It's not really scary, only very dark (you might want to set gamma to 0 because some areas are almost pitch-black). It's only difficult because it forces Nightmare mode on every map, but it's not terribly hard either. Nevertheless, this wasn't bad at all. I honestly wasn't expecting much given its age but it turned out surprisingly good, especially the new weapons (loved the Chain-Lightning gun). The ending was kind of a bummer (for the protagonist anyway), but at least there was an ending. Nearly all the maps that exist don't even have a text screen at the end, what can be worse than that?

By the way, I thought that guy in the HUD looked like Quentin Tarantino.

In these instructions...

Unzip into a directory beneath the Quake directory. (Ex: c:\quake\zer)

Start by typing: quake -winmem 12 -game zer

** The '-winmem 12' is needed to force some versions of Quake to ** allocate enough memory for the massive levels in Zerstˆrer. ** You can substitute bigger numbers for the '12' if you have ** lots of RAM.

WHAT DOES START BY TYPING MEAN????? TYPE IT WHERE>>?????

In these instructions...

Unzip into a directory beneath the Quake directory. (Ex: c:\quake\zer)

Start by typing: quake -winmem 12 -game zer

** The '-winmem 12' is needed to force some versions of Quake to ** allocate enough memory for the massive levels in Zerstˆrer. ** You can substitute bigger numbers for the '12' if you have ** lots of RAM.

WHAT DOES START BY TYPING MEAN????? TYPE IT WHERE>>?????

In these instructions...

Unzip into a directory beneath the Quake directory. (Ex: c:\quake\zer)

Start by typing: quake -winmem 12 -game zer

** The '-winmem 12' is needed to force some versions of Quake to ** allocate enough memory for the massive levels in Zerstˆrer. ** You can substitute bigger numbers for the '12' if you have ** lots of RAM.

WHAT DOES START BY TYPING MEAN????? TYPE IT WHERE>>?????

That was written for ancient computers. Are you sure you do not want to use the Quake Injector?

See https://www.quaddicted.com/help/command_line

What you need to put in there depends on your engine. Nowadays just "-game zer" should be enough.

Clickable: How to specify commandline parameters

I ended up playing this rather by accident actually: I downloaded the Zerstörer mapjam and started at the start map, only to realize it was the start of Zerstörer itself. A happy accident indeed, as this has become one of my all-time favorite releases.

First of all, I love the very dark, death-metal aesthetic of a lot of these maps, the whole Zerstörer theme, which is used to great effect in the mapjam (and seems to have been influenced by Doom, and possibly influenced the visual styles Tronyn and necros in turn, two of the best mappers in Quake). Furthermore, the proper levels all have a truly immersive sense of progression, giving them a "sense of place" that imo many of the hyper-detailed map of recent years don't match. This is more than enough to make up for the fact that, as Icantthinkofanickname pointed out, the progression between maps is a bit disjointed.

The gameplay also stands out to me as some of the best in Quake. It is tough, but not overly so, with some fiendish monster spawns and cool custom monsters, my favorite being the floating chanting demon with an attack I thought was similar to the Archvile's from Doom II. The guns were nice as well. The chaingun was a neat addition, but the new shotgun instantly became a favorite ended up being my mainstay throughout the episode—if I start mapping myself I will have to make it a Zerstörer map just to include it. The other weapons I can't comment on: I never used the alternate rocket launcher, and I'm not sure what "chain-lightning gun" refers to so I either missed it or forgot about it. (I didn't find the secret weapon near the end either.)

The cutscenes were neat for what they are: cutscenes in a game that was not intended to have cutscenes. Like Icantthinkofanickname, I didn't think they or the "story" were necessary, but it also doesn't seem fair to hold them against the mod when they're really a minor issue, compared to how great the mod is otherwise.

Certainly an episode I'll return to. By the way, since I obtained this mod with the Zerstörer mapjam, I had no idea at the time when Zerstörer was originally released. I assumed it was sometime in the early 2000s. 1997 though! Wow.

Reading my old comment, I seem to have implied Tronyn and necros influenced this episode, heh. Faulty parallelism.

Just wanted to say that the zer shotgun has become one of my all-time favorite video game shotguns, right up there with Doom II's SSG and Unreal's flak cannon. The burst shots make it feel like a shotgun version of the battle rifle or DMR from the Halo games. So satisfying and powerful, it's hard to return to the regular double shotty after playing a round of zer. Every mapper should use it.

Very good episode, dark, creepy and frighting, although the ending is very disapointing and awful, i mean, you drown in blood, wake up in a grave, go through a temple to find a powerful artifact, the Sanguinoch, kill everything in your path, only to meet the Zerstörer and be destroyed by him, what kind of ending is that? Seriously, if anything you should be able to fight him, since he looks like he would make a formidable boss, i really wanted to kill that bastard for that blood drowning. Maybe someday someone will make some sort of sequel or something where you fight him and kill him.

Probably years ahead of its time, this episode now feels a bit dated due to the cinematics and simple architecture, yet it still stands the test of time surprisingly well and it's hard to believe it came out only one year after the original game. It's still very fun to play and uses a couple clever tricks I haven't seen anywhere else. The new weapons could use better looking and less intrusive models and the last one could've been ditched altogether - it comes too late in the game to be of any significant use and it's not that great to begin with (it might have been better to give the chain-lightning some extra screen time). I'm also unsure of the benefits of replacing the good ol' nailgun with a regular chain gun, even though some effort has obviously been put into its design.

I replayed this. As I remember from last time, True Love Waits is definitely the highlight, and I would recommend that map to anyone. I don't want to say anything more about it, though, for fear of spoilers :-)

Taken along, TLW would be a five-star map for me. But the other levels bring the average down, some of them feeling relatively undistinguished. Four stars in total, then, but with a nod to how influential it's been.

True Love Waits is also a nice Radiohead ballad. ;)

Indeed; but I think the title is more likely a pun on the Buddy Holly song True Love Ways!

The first addon pack for Quake I ever played, 18 years ago(!). Still the undisputable top, in my humble opinion. Scary, malevolent, keeps you constantly uncomfortable. Mandatory play.

True Love Waits (TLW) is an international Christian group that promotes sexual abstinence outside of marriage for teenagers and college students. TLW was created in April, 1993 by the Southern Baptists,[1] and is sponsored by LifeWay Christian Resources. It is based on conservative Christian views of human sexuality that require one to be faithful to one's husband or wife.

Ahhh, Christians! Always the pranksters of the party... These guys know how to have fun.

One of my favourite episodes and the very first custom Q1 content I've played: This gem was included inside a cd-rom attached with PC gamer when it was available in Italy and when I was 10 this scared me to death but at the same time I loved it and played a lot of times, after almost 20 years I still love it, and aged very well. Long live Zerstorer!

An instant classic, with a thick atmosphere of fear and inevitability. These maps jive really well with the Quake 64 soundtrack, so I recommend giving that a shot if you're fatigued with the ol' NIN tracks.

5/5

Great stuff if it had been released this year but this is 20(!) years old now. Awesome stuff.

Dripping in atmosphere and challenge. A genuine classic.

Bummer... doesn't work in quakespasm 0.93 on Linux. It "starts" but just drops you in the regular quake skill hall. Tried a few things but no joy. Ah well.

Zerstörer on The Quake Grave

I streamed this earlier and had a ball with it! It's really impressive to see what the community did 21 years ago with all of the crazy stuff that went into this mod. Cut scenes, custom models, custom programming and more which adds up to a fun and crazy adventure that still holds up all this time later.

My only real problem with the whole campaign was the map right before the final map/cut scene. It's a large and very maze-like base map that is hard to navigate as the level is really boxy and most of the corridors look the same. On top of that, there are a ton of alcoves that hide important areas that can be easily missed. This can get frustrating when you're trying to progress and run around for 10 minutes only to turn around and see that behind a wall there was another little hidden corridor. The rest of the maps were a lot of fun but this map just doesn't fit in with the rest of this mod.

Other than that map, I definitely recommend this!

IMPORTANT: Be sure to install the zerend hotfix linked in the map description above (alongside the 1.1 patch)! Otherwise the end cutscene may break on newer source ports and ruin one of the most iconic moments in Q1SP history (like it happened in the Quake Grave video).

You need to rename all the files so they use only lowercase letters to make this one work.

I'm playing on QuakeSpasm, with the patch and the hotfix installed, and the silver key doesn't show up on the third map (the cemetery one) after the death knight comes to life. Am I doing something wrong?

It should rise out of the grave on a red platform after the hell knight has jumped off. It works on QS, but have you possibly set a different host_maxfps (>72) which causes trouble? If the key hasn't fallen out of the level entirely, you can noclip into the lava and pick it up there.

I should have read the instructions before asking. I had used the "restart" command to change the skill level. Apparently that causes the key to not show up properly. I should have used map "zer1m3" instead.

Thanks for the reply, and sorry for the inconvenience.

Great episode - my favourite being zer1m3, a fantastic gritty Gothic level. In spite of this whole episode being epic I'm still only going to give it a 4 because of the confusing zer1m7 which I found bewildering and extremely frustrating - it's fine for a map to be big, but this was too hard to navigate.

Playing Tronyn's "In a Forest of Flesh" map from Jam 3 made me want to play it again -- and this mod too in HD. Unfortunately the main link on quakeone ( https://www.dropbox.com/s/s7d5euy8wr43q93/Zerstorer-HDTextures-v1.0.pk3?dl=0 ) has expired ... anyone still has this somewhere?

Looks some obsolete, but gameplay still amazing!

@Gioyo3aa: Zerstörer Episode & func_mapjam3 (zerstorer theme) hd textures here (apart from Tronyn's map): http://www.nextgenquake.com/topic/hd-textures-for-sp-maps/

Having all HD texturepacks Tronyn's map covered about 80% hd textures.

This seems like a cool mod/map pack; however, the lighting in the graveyard is horrible. I can't see a damn thing. Someone posted above to crank down the gamma, but I think that being forced to do so stinks. I really think some 'oh-so-subtle' lighting is needed. Maybe the creator didn't have the means to do so back then.

As it stands, I am gonna finish it after I jack with my settings, because I can tell a lot of work was put into this sucker, but this aspect is kind of a bummer. Again, I'm not saying it sucks and I am used to dark maps ... but this is ridiculous.

Update: I watched the Quake Grave's review of this level. He mentioned that some of the older maps look quite a bit darker. Probably an engine thing(?). Anyway, I changed the brightness, using the start map as a gauge. Holy cow! What a difference. I can actually play it now. It is REALLY cool! I am digging it. It's amazing, considering its age.

Its historical significance is obvious, and it plays remarkably well for how old it is... but man Zerstorer can be a pain in the ass sometimes. Like the part in zer1m2 where you have to use a chainsaw on an unremarkable piece of the ground to continue?

Haven't seen this mentioned yet, so here's a couple of fun facts:

The lead designer, Brandon James, was hired by id a couple months before Zer was released. He contributed to Q2 (most notably the research lab map, containing his initials in a secret message) and Q3A, including that one map The Longest Yard.

The lead coder, Darin McNeil, has been working at id for 15 years now, and has been credited as the Lead Tools Programmer in DOOM and DOOM Eternal.

Their paths briefly crossed in 2005, during the development on Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil. :)

There is some seriously creative demon powering the first six maps.

i can't take the silver key in "among the dead".... i use quoth and darkplaces engine... if i use noclip the key disappear.... what i can do? what engine i must use?

So... It was released 23 years ago and it did aged well!! It has some unexpected gameplay twists (flying head artifact), wonderful chainsaw weapon, though - so many years later... it fails at horror, by today's standards. Anyway, it's historical piece of fanmade art! Only complaint..... Id-family shooter games DON'T NEED endings like this. Hero dies, boss lives? WtF.

Can overestimate this. Quite simply, the very best addon pack ever. I still remember the feeling of unease of playing Among the living during the winter of 1997, this thing truly scared the shit out of me. True Love Waits must be my favorite Quake experience ever. Bunker kept me busy for hours. Majestic experience. Perennial must play.

(Still waiting for a sequel with a fightable Zer monster, though...)

The "can" in the first sentence is obviously a "can't". Damn.

I enjoyed the hell out of this, a few parts i didn't like being forced to take damage but thats about the only nitpick I have. That shotgun is badass looking and sounding!!

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Decided to play this along with Lull's "Cold Summer" album, fuck this has that 90's edge. Ahead of its time in terms of mapmaking, though I am spoiled by arcane dimensions you can see where many of today's tricks come from!

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Four stars for the shotgun alone.

I don't get it. I'm in the dark because I jumped into giblets, and I'm going nowhere. I literally just started quake mods last week so it's not an older engine. I didn't download something from 1997.

I jump into giblet fountain, then what do I do?

I haven't played Zerstorer in eons but I had no problems using quakespasm.

When you jump into the giblets (if I understand what you are saying) you should go down the hole, get some cut scene's and carry on to the next level.

I never tried zer with darkplaces but I think it would work there just as well, but I recommend quakespasm.

I'm stuck in the graveyard level. I need a silver key for the door. There's a knight statue that doesn't do anything . Is it bugged? Using Quakespasm and I installed both zer patches.

Did you read the comments above and tried the proposed workarounds?

Sorry, but no. This could be fun back in the day, but now it's just bad design. Making small corridors with ogres (or any other ranged monster) at the end is just lame. If you create a level where the player will be hit no matter what, you are beginning with the wrong food. If you expect the player to have at least 10hp in order for him to survive, that is bad.

Also, this mod is too dark. I don't mind playing low light levels, but this one is awful.

Ok, thanks for your Input eldarion. I Hope you get to enjoy quake in the end.

Any tips for getting this to work with the remastered edition? I remember it having an effect on me twenty years ago haha, and want to try it again.

Nvm, you just need to put zer folder in the rerelease folder in your quake directory, not the root directory. Happy fragging.

I also had to use "map zer1m3" to fix the silver key bug, but I'm glad I did because I ended up liking that map the most of them all... really atmospheric. The maps did feel a little disjointed somehow, like 4 was easier than 3 and the end of 5 felt more final than the finale. I liked it.

Having a bug where the game doesn't load my Quakespasm settings properly (most notably it always turns viewbob and viewroll back on) and trying to use my Autoexec causes the game to basically restart and put me back on the level difficulty select level. Any ideas?

sucks. full of bugs. the combat is more often than not a slog. the new enemies are poorly balanced. the new weapons feel totally unnecessary and aren't enjoyable to use. the writing is pretentious, boring, and riddled with typos, which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't forced down your throat with unskippable cutscenes.

worst of all, the levels are terrible. they have little to no atmosphere (although there are some cool bits), are laid out unintuitively, poorly lit, and some feature traps that feel taken straight out of Gygax's Tomb of Horrors - unfair and unavoidable unless you know they're coming.

overall, Zerstörer feels very much like it comes from the "unfair design == challenge == fun" school of thought that was somewhat prevalent when it was released. this is further evidenced by the fact that the game kills you if you try to select easy mode.

skip this one.