edit: Holy crap, Google indexed this post 2 minutes after I posted.
I think I found it on Amazon. Sounds wonderfully crappy.

There is a video from the QuakeWorld Launch Event in 1996

Video taken from the QuakeWorld launch event circa 1996, featuring a rare John Carmack Q&A.

And John Carmack says:

I could write an awful lot about Quake, but since we are in the final crunch for Rage right now, I’ll have to settle for just a few random thoughts.

I have a bit more subdued memory of Quake than many of our other projects, because the development was so tough. It was the first project where I really had to grapple with my personal limitations; I had bitten off a little more than I could chew with all the big steps at once – full 3D world, 3D characters, light maps, PVS calculations, game scripting, client / server networking, etc. No matter how hard I worked, things just weren’t getting done when we wanted them to.

My defining memory of the game was fairly early in development, when I no-clipped up into a ceiling corner and looked down as a Shambler walked through the world with its feet firmly planted on the ground. This looked like nothing I had ever seen before; it really did seem like I had a window into another world. Of course, as soon as he had to turn, the feet started to slide around because we didn’t have pivot points and individual joint modifications back then, but it was still pretty magical.

It seems silly now, but at the time we were very concerned that people wouldn’t be able to deal with free look mouse control, and we had lots of options to restrict pitch changes and auto-center when you started moving.

The internet gaming aspect was almost an accident. I had moved from Doom’s peer-to-peer networking to client/server primarily to allow late game entry, and UDP was supported because I was still doing a lot of the development on NEXTSEP unix workstations. The idea of playing over the internet was always there, but I didn’t think it would be practical for many people due to the long latencies and variable performance of typical connections. When it turned out that people were doing it despite the low quality, it gave me the incentive to develop the alternative QuakeWorld executable with the various latency reduction mechanisms.

The other important alternative executable was glQuake, which played a significant role in the early days of 3D accelerators. 3DFX was the gold standard back then – Nvidia’s RIVA128 had poor subpixel precision and didn’t handle all the blend modes properly. In fact, almost everyone was under the incorrect assumption that blending was only good for alpha transparency, even companies like 3DLabs that should have known better.

Competitive deathmatch had gotten started with Doom, but the Red Annihilation Quake tournament was a high point, where I gave my first turbo Ferrari away to Thresh for his dominating tournament win.

I look back at Quake as the golden age of game modding, before the standards rose so high that it required almost a full time commitment to do something relevant. I am very proud that many of today’s industry greats trace their start back to working with Quake.

The most important thing about quake for me was that I met my wife when she organized the first all-female Quake tournament. She still thinks Quake was the seminal achievement of Id, and she glowers at me whenever I bemoan how random the design was. :)

But if you are cool like me, you download it with rtmpdump instead (careful, stupid WordPress changed normal quotes to something fancy and two dashes to a long dash, stupid piece of crap):

rtmpdump –rtmp “rtmp://fms.digitallyspeaking.com:1935/cfx/st/ondemand?ovpfv=1.1″ –playpath “video/gdc/sf11/12391_1299192356062UTTA_video” -swfUrl “http://events.digitallyspeaking.com/gdc/sf11/GDC2011SanFranciso.swf” –pageUrl “http://events.digitallyspeaking.com/gdc/sf11/player.html?xmlURL=xml/12391_1299192356062UTTA.xml&token=3c6c000ab0766078310c” –flv video.flv

rtmpdump –rtmp “rtmp://fms.digitallyspeaking.com:1935/cfx/st/ondemand?ovpfv=1.1″ –playpath “video/gdc/sf11/12391_1299192356062UTTA_slides” -swfUrl “http://events.digitallyspeaking.com/gdc/sf11/GDC2011SanFranciso.swf” –pageUrl “http://events.digitallyspeaking.com/gdc/sf11/player.html?xmlURL=xml/12391_1299192356062UTTA.xml&token=3c6c000ab0766078310c” –flv slides.flv

It’s 90 megabytes for the talk and 150 for the slides. Enjoy!

Also, can somebody tell me why there are so many different versions of the ukcldm maps?

Also, I was brainstorming adding mods but the filename issues, compression non-standards and requirement to specify some categorisation fields turned me off.

Also, Quakeworldlers are (re-) creating a map download site, but they are doing it all wrong: BSP downloading, screenshots using some “retexture” pack. So I got motivation to make a proper deathmatch archive again.

Also, I should really study for my exams.

+----------------------------------------+
| Quake PRE-RELEASE |
| Tuesday, June 11th, 1996 |
| Copyright (C) 1996 id Software, inc. |
+----------------------------------------+
| Operating Instructions |
| by John Romero |
+----------------------------------------+

This is our first severely limited pre-release, not intended for the
general public. If you received this game from a member of id Software,
then you are supposed to have it, otherwise, you are in possession of
something which is not yours. You Are Bad.

I found this beta version of Quake floating around. This should be a much longer and detailed post but there are other things to do. There are many little and some big differences. There also is a slighty older version around, differences might only be cosmetic (the readme differs a tiny bit).

Anyways, for your enjoyment (ok, mostly mine) I played through this and recorded it. http://www.archive.org/details/QuakeBetaPlaythrough

Update
Instead of the ZIP with proprietary formats there are now two PDF files available:
Tronyn-QuakeTalk.pdf
Tronyn-QuakeSlides.pdf

• @toksin Sega’s Quake has xtra track on it that isn’t on the PC’s. By chance is that yours? Gracenote says it’s NIN’s but I’m skeptical.
  7:22 PM Dec 31st, 2009 from web
• @_Catalyst I think it was one of the left over tracks they used but i’m not sure myself!
  8:28 PM Jan 1st from TweetDeck
• @toksin TY 4 the response, was hoping to clarify, “End” sounds more like you, what I’d call a preface to q2 soundtrack imo. Not ambient NIN.
  8:44 PM Jan 1st from web in reply to toksin
• @toksin Sega credits you 4 ‘additional music’ , “B7″ from MOD and original music as Reznor’s. “End” is a track not on PC soundtrack, end=b7?
  8:47 PM Jan 1st from web in reply to toksin
• @_Catalyst b7 is the one. Rest was by nin of course! That track was only on the sega version!
  9:11 PM Jan 1st from TweetDeck
• @toksin so the 3 min track entitled as End is indeed b7? Yeah it freaked me out the PC/Sega soundtracks were diff. I felt robbed…lol
  9:15 PM Jan 1st from web in reply to toksin

Quake for the Sega Saturn has an additional CD audio track, namely the track B7 from Sonic Mayhem’s Methods of Destruction. Well, I set out to get it and what I got was ugly. First of all, the track is only on the US release. And then comes something really ugly. They shrunk all the originals tracks. Not only on the US release to make room for the track. But also on the PAL/EU one where it would not be needed. Well, lazy porting after licensing issues I guess.

Take a look at this if you want a glimpse. The first one is always the full PC soundtrack. Long story short, I decided to host a copy of the track until further notice. You could also get a used copy of Quake for the Sega Saturn (the US version!) very cheaply (just wait if there is no decent offer anywhere).

• Quake (USA) (DW0576)-12.flac
• Quake (USA) (DW0576)-12.ogg

Supposedly only twenty of these prototypes were manufactured. When the game was first introduced, Lazer-Tron was bought out and due to problems with the contracted programmer, the game was never further developed.

Just recently I understood what MAME is all about and eventually I knew how to get nearer to this thing. And yes, to my gratitude there actually is a harddisk image of this machine floating around in torrents. The file is named quakeat.chd (225 Megabytes) and you might find it in some huge romsets (CHD/LD are terms you will want to look for).

That quakeat.chd is the image of the harddisk from the arcade machine. You cannot run it through MAME at the time of writing because at least the BIOS image is missing. But you can mount the disk image and take a peek inside. Following is how I managed to do that (on Linux, have fun on Windows…) and some of what I found.

Extraction

$ file quakeat.chd
quakeat.chd: MAME CHD compressed hard disk image, version 4

So let’s uncompress that image. MAME comes with a tool for that job, chdman (do get the latest official binaries, if you get an error about a wrong format, that’s what you did not do). I used Wine below because I could not be arsed to hunt for a Linux binary.

$ wine chdman.exe -extract quakeat.chd quakeat.img
[Output stripped]
$ file quakeat.img
quakeat.img: x86 boot sector, Microsoft Windows XP mbr,Serial 0x31f533a1; partition 1: ID=0xb, active, starthead 1, startsector 63, 4225473 sectors, code offset 0x33

Now you cannot simply mount that image, it contains a mbr. Checking the file with fdisk shows where the actual data partition starts.

$ fdisk -l -u quakeat.img
You must set cylinders.
You can do this from the extra functions menu.

Disk quakeat.img: 0 MB, 0 bytes
128 heads, 63 sectors/track, 0 cylinders, total 0 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x31f533a1

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
quakeat.img1 * 63 4225535 2112736+ b W95 FAT32

So the size of a sector is 512 bytes and the partition we want starts at sector 63. 63*512 = 32256. Thankfully you can tell mount where to start.

$ mount -o loop,offset=32256 quakeat.img /where/ever/you/want/

Examination

Now, what’s inside and can you run it? It looks like a (almost) normal Quake installation. The pak files in id1 are extracted. There is a glquake.exe but sadly it will tell you “E020C — Security key not found”. Seems like one would need a dongle. The engine also seems to have been modified to display AVI movies. There is a directory with movies inside that are referenced in quake.rc alternating with normal demos. They show instructions, credits and company logos.

There are some files related to accounting and prizes. 6 progs (progs.dat, progshipnotic.dat, Progsreaper.dat, progsqtv.dat (clanring something), progsrogue.dat, progszeus.dat). I could not figure out how to run the “Arcade Tournament” game though. Maybe someone more into QC and hacking will shed more light onto it.

The default.cfg says Quake – Arcade Tournament Edition 1.30 r3, it also contains a password (could that be related to the engine?) and suggests that opus.exe is related to the Joystick. There are many variables prefixed with a_ which suggests “arcade_”.

It seems like the two official missionpacks are included. Also a ctf1.bsp and qdqstart.bsp (which is quite a weird modified start map, most probably not related to Quake done Quick). There are also modified player models showing the current weapon (like vweps in some QW configurations nowadays).

Well, that’s it. Hooray for nostalgia. I can cross this one off my list now. :)

Make sure you read them wholly before you start contributing. It is not as easy as one might wish. :(

After years of quality free hosting for gaming sites, we have decided to discontinue our free hosting services.

-> The Hosting Services will end on 11.59 PM, August 31st, 2009.
-> No backups or snapshots will be maintained after that date (download everything you wish to keep). You will no longer have access to your site or any aspects of it (content, assets, files etc.) after that date and we will remove/delete all such files from our servers.

Files currently hosted at Fileplanet will stay but all the websites will be wiped off the face of the Planets.

Ok, so let’s just mirror all the websites, eh? Well, thanks to the idiotic random-url-gamespy-domain-screw-up this is next to impossible to automate:
http://www.planetquake.com/polycount/ became http://hosted.planetquake.gamespy.com/polycount/
http://www.planetquake.com/underworld became http://underworld.planetquake.gamespy.com/
And some sites redirect from http://www.planetquake.com/website/ to http://planetquake.gamespy.com/website/ just to show some generic hosting page.

Oh well, I’ll see what I (and others) can do to preserve those.

Update: Actually http://hosted.planetquake.gamespy.com/website seems to work consistently. But all the non-relative links on sites are broken.