It was the shape of things to come: real-time 3D visuals, mouselook gameplay, TCP/IP multiplayer - all industry wide standard now.
”We were watching a live online chat when the upload went live. When the first person got it, there was a great clamor for reports about what it looked like,” said id Software co-founder John Carmack, posting his memories on the Bethesda Blog.
”Unfortunately, one of the first things reported was “There is a turtle in the corner of the screen.” I had a check in the code to draw that icon as a sign that you were running at 10 frames a second or less, so you should reduce quality settings to get a more playable experience.” …and so it began, the relentless pursuit of higher framerate.
”We eventually removed the “turtle check” from our games, because some people felt that we were insulting their systems, but there was also an interesting effect that was a product of the times — we found that a lot of people would crank up the resolution until the frame rate dragged down to about 10 fps, regardless of their CPU speed.”
”Competitive gamers may disbelieve this, but for players that were more interested in the then-novel experience of exploring a modeled virtual world, getting the visual fidelity up above 320×200 resolution was important enough to make the game only barely-interactive.”
”Most people had to wait a bit longer for glQuake and the 3DFX Voodoo to start getting the best of both worlds,” added the Quake creator.
Those crazy guys over at id started a worldwide gaming revolution when they launched that little PC 3D title called Quake, and you just need to look at today’s first-person shooters to see the continuing aftershocks. We salute you QTest ,which can still be nabbed.
