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Category: Quake

Mods and expansions about Quake and its sequels.

Looking at Soldier of Fortune Inc.’s Alpha Dogs, with a surprise Quake cameo!

In the many many years I’ve written about stuff for the blog, one of my biggest fascinations is the journey where TV and Video Games collide. Not just through the typical award show fare, but also sitcoms and police procedurals that feature a video game, either real or fictional into their plots. Stuff like the infamous “Urban Hellraisers” episode of CSI: Miami.

Yes, I know TV shows like these aren’t going to be perfectly accurate about video games. I want to say there was at least one instance of a writer for these TV shows spilling the beans and saying “yeah, we don’t write those to be accurate,” but I’m not having any luck in finding the source of that. (If you know of a source where someone said this, please feel free to leave a comment.)

Either way, I miss writing about them, and I figured now is a good time as any to come back to it, and sure enough, this one is a doozy.

you again…

I talked about Soldier of Fortune Inc. back in 2021 when I covered the level packs for Quake and Quake II. These were made to tie into the aforementioned TV series, and were made by Neil Manke, future designer of the critical darling Half-Life mod They Hunger, another thing I wrote about way back when. So I’ll give a quick summary of the show here:

Soldier of Fortune, Inc. is an action TV series produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. Aired for two seasons from 1997-1999, had a name change in season two (from Soldier of Fortune, Inc. to Special Ops Force), added athlete/actor Dennis Rodman to the cast, and then was mostly forgotten. Rag-tag group of mercenaries stop bad guys from doing bad things, akin to a Mission: Impossible or The A-Team kind of show but more your typical 90s action show. Definitely a show that would’ve aired at in the late night hours on your local independent or Fox station that didn’t have a local newscast and late night talk show.

We’re covering the fifth episode of season one, “Alpha Dogs.” Aired in most markets on October 25, 1997, this episode is significant as we feature a major video game as part of the plot. One that considering the future game tie-in I mentioned earlier, makes sense.

Apologies in advance for the low quality images. These came from an old VHS recording uploaded to YouTube in the early 2010s. This show never received a home video release outside of a TV movie that compiles the first two episodes together, which is common in many European markets. Also, this is not available on streaming services as of this writing. Not even Tubi, which tends to be the go-to place for deep cut movies and TV shows, has this. Here’s hoping that changes someday.

We start with soldiers in jungle environments being randomly shot by someone in first person, before cutting randomly away to badly played footage of Quake spliced in with the jungle footage. A super nerd named Jacob Fillmore (David Kaufman) is working for the Department of Defense on the hottest new game, “Alpha Dogs Quake,” before wrapping up the day, starting a “DOD Regional Combat Scenario” that would be the start of his major concerns.

Alpha Dogs Quake (left), compared to me recreating the shot in Navy Seals Quake (right)

Strangely, it does seem the producers went to some length in terms of getting proper Quake footage for this show. While the show does add in digital menus and scoreboards that aren’t in Quake proper, it does seem to use actual footage from Quake, at least in modded form. The models look different than vanilla Quake, the gun is modeled as if the player is left-handed, which is similar to what mods like Navy Seals Quake did. I wonder if Minh “Gooseman” Le had anything to do with this project, or the producers merely took the mod just to have B-roll footage for their dumb game plot.)

After grabbing his laptop, he heads out to his decked out Lamborghini – because of course our DOD game programmer would have enough cash to afford a Lambo – before luck would have him escaping a bomb trap activated by unlocking the door. We then cut to our mission briefing with Xavier Trout (David Selby) giving leader Matt Shepherd (Brad Johnson) a hard time while he’s fixing a car. It’s up to the SOF gang to protect Fillmore from this rival faction that wants to kill him. Cut to opening title sequence.

I didn’t talk much about it in the article for the game back in the day, but the title sequence for Soldier of Fortune Inc. is so cheesy. Shots of soldiers, the sun, American flags, sided with shots of the cast doing cool action-y things while their name appears in the title sequence. It’s kind of a lost art now that title sequences are required to be like a jaunty jingle that lasts 15 seconds. Fuck that, gimme those 1-2 minute title sequences, I wanna get pumped watching a show, damn it!
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July 18, 2026
Quake Brutalist Jam III: Quake levels are getting wild, y’all.

I love Quake. It’s undeniably one of my favorite games of all time. I love it because it’s the textbook definition of a surreal FPS to me: You’re fighting marines, ogres, knights and Lovecraftian horrors with shotguns, nailguns, and a lightning gun through marine bases and castles. If you think about it for more than five seconds, you realize how dumb it all is, that it shouldn’t work.

Yet somehow, in spite of all the turmoil going on internally at id Software – this would be John Romero’s last game with the studio before jumping ship to form Ion Storm and making the abysmal Daikatana, something I previously wrote about – everything fell into place perfectly and Quake became an absolute classic. There are very few games that I think nail this formula, and Quake nails it in spades. (I wonder if there’s any other surreal/absurdist first-person shooters that fit this example. Rise of the Triad is another example I can think of, but I’d love to hear your suggestions!)

I’ve written about countless Quake mods and expansions over the years, I still play it every now and then, I check out the mods made for it, and so on. This time around, there’s a new big Quake mod that was getting a lot of attention at the start of 2026, and naturally I had to check it out. Turns out it’s worth the hype.

An ominous start.

Quake Brutalist Jam III is a mod for Quake that’s inspired by Brutalist architecture introduced way back in the 1950s. Based on the existing Copper mod, this mod not only introduces a bunch of new textures for mappers to use, but a new rogue’s gallery of monsters and weapons to make it unique from vanilla Quake. Done as a map jam from October-November 2025 where members worked together to make maps for the mod using the aforementioned new weapons and enemies, the final collection was released in early January 2026.

The Jam is split between three sections: A section for new/inexperienced Quake mappers called “New Faces,” a set of remastered levels from the two previous Quake Brutalist Jams called “QBJ Resurfaced,” and the main set of levels made specifically for this collection.

Surely this is the only enemy here and more won’t spawn… right?

The maps are made by veterans and newbies from the Quake mapping community, alongside Twitch streamer/boomer shooter enthusiast DraQu, and Robert Yang, famous for Radiator 2 (NSFW), a series of small games with severe homoerotic overtones. And that’s just the ones I recognize. The rest seem to be a cavalcade of various mappers from the community, all with their own style.

A bunch of explosives and zombies to kill? It’s just like Christmas! …wait, that was last month.

Gameplay is similar in nature to classic Quake: kill monsters, hit switches, find keys to open doors, get to the exit. The big changes involve the arsenal and the monsters. A wrench replaces the axe, your starter shotgun is replaced with a Stechkin ApS pistol with infinite ammo (and a reload sequence!), the super shotgun is now the KS-23 Flak which allows the shots to bounce between walls (this became my favorite as I always loved the Flak Cannon in Unreal Tournament for that same ricochet properties), the nailguns are now akimbo, the super nailgun is now a rebar crossbow, the rocket launcher now fires a volley of eight rockets for four shots (wasn’t a big fan of this because it reminded me of Daikatana’s Shotcycler and how wasteful of a weapon that was), and the lightning gun is replaced by the powerful Invoker, which is the BFG-9000 equivalent in that it will kill any enemy in a single hit in a 3×3 grid pattern. Works great when you have to deal with several Shamblers at once.

Annoying little bastards.

The bestiary for QBJIII hasn’t been drastically changed. The main Quake rogues gallery is still here, just reskinned and renamed, using the Copper mod’s rebalancing as a base. There’s a few new grunt types like pistol grunts, a rocket launcher grunt who’s basically a glass cannon, often seen alongside the Grenadiers (reskinned Ogres) and Plasma Trenchknights (reskinned Enforcers).

There’s also more horror monsters, like the annoying Amalgams that drop caltrops that do damage to the player if stepped on, as well as the swarmers and blisters, small enemies that often appear in groups that can overwhelm you. I swear a good chunk of my deaths were because I got swarmed by a bunch of swarmers only to be blown up by a blister not long after.
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January 21, 2026
Quake II RTX: An old FPS gets an unnecessary coat of paint.

There seems to be a lot of hay going around about ray-tracing technology in video games. That stuff where lights reflect off of surfaces that makes it look more like real life. Probably the biggest technology arms race next to high dynamic range rendering and accurate water physics. For a modern video game, ray-tracing can be a valuable tool to make your game world feel more alive. But not so much if you’re trying to bolt on ray-tracing to an old shooter from 1997.

Official trailer. Source: NVIDIA Geforce’s YouTube.

Quake II RTX is a remaster of the 1997 shooter classic, but with the engine upgraded to support NVIDIA’s RTX ray-tracing technology. Released on June 6, 2019 for PC by NVIDIA’s in-house Lightspeed Studios, this game was made as a way to show off their fancy new RTX technology. Quoting from NVIDIA’s blog:

“We are giving Quake II back to gamers with a bold new look, as Quake II RTX,” said Matt Wuebbling, head of GeForce marketing at NVIDIA. “Ray tracing is the technology that is defining the next generation of PC games, and it’s fitting that Quake II is a part of that.”

Now, I personally have my doubts that a remaster of a shooter that’s nearly 30 years old truly defines the next generation of video gaming, but I don’t work at NVIDIA. It’s not like this kind of marginal upgrade hasn’t existed beforehand: Doom95 as a shell to play Doom and Doom II in Windows 95 without needing to run DOS, GLQuake being an OpenGL render for Quake back when graphics accelerator cards were still new to the PC market, that sort of thing. Usually if you wanna tout this technology you’d use a fairly recent game. But let’s see how Lightspeed took Quake II and made it look shiny and pretty for a modern PC audience.

Since there might be folks who are wondering: I had this article idea before Microsoft announced using their Copilot generative AI demo that trained off Quake II data as a base. This was merely a coincidence. In fact, what did inspire me to write about this was another RTX game that just came out: Half-Life 2 RTX, a version of Half-Life 2 that uses the RTX technology, just done by a group of modders rather than in-house at NVIDIA Lightspeed in the case of Quake II RTX and Portal with RTX.

Once more, into the breach…

Now, I’ve talked at length about Quake II several times over the years. Mostly the unofficial expansions like Juggernaut: The New Story for Quake II and maps made to advertise a mostly forgotten ‘90s TV show. But my opinion on the original Quake II hasn’t really changed much: It’s a solid shooter that feels kinda bland artistically. It’s the embodiment of the John Carmack era of id Software: Fancy technology over anything else. It’s a perfectly fine game, and the Nightdive remaster from 2023 rebalanced the game a bit to push it from being merely a solid game for its time, to standing with the id classics like Doom and Quake in a much better light.

At the time I did not have a computer that could really handle running Quake II RTX smoothly. My previous PC, which housed a GeForce GTX 1060, was not enough to hit the specifications to turn on the RTX features. Once I got my current computer, which has a GTX 3070 in it, I was able to run Q2RTX pretty smoothly at around 60 frames per second with not much trouble. Much like other tech demos, sometimes it’s worth upgrading the PC just to try it out. Provided it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to upgrade, that is.
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April 10, 2025
Juggernaut: The New Story for Quake II – A janky expansion.

After writing about Doom Eternal last month, I felt like I was kinda losing my touch when it came to offbeat, weird stuff. Struggling to think of something to write about, I thought of something. And it’s time to head back to the unofficial expansion mines once again.

I’ve been down this road countless times at this point, but this is one I had to come back to, since I mentioned it briefly before late last year. Since I covered one of the unofficial expansions — Zaero for Quake II — back in November 2021, I had to go back and look at another expansion for Quake II. And y’all, it’s a doozy.

“Headgames is in no way affiliated with id Software.” Gee, I never would’ve guessed. (Cover courtesy of Mobygames.)

Juggernaut: The New Story for Quake II – quite a mouthful – is an unofficial add-on for id Software’s space marine Strogg-killing shooter Quake II. The second of two unofficial add-ons, this came out around 1998 as a way to add more to your Quake II experience.

I became familiar of this thanks to Something Awful, back when they used to “review” video games of dubious quality. Much like a lot of internet writing of that era, it’s really hard to go back to reading, especially since its creator Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka was an absolute piece of shit. But I had been curious about this add-on, so I started looking for a copy. Turns out it was a bit tougher finding a complete copy than I thought it would be, thus I put it aside and wrote about Zaero instead. It wasn’t until after I published that did a friend come and help me find a copy.

Much like previous add-ons – official and unofficial – the game offers you to shoot and gib monsters, grab keys and have a fun time, right? I wish this was true, as this is not the case with Juggernaut. Problem number one is who published it.

Sadly not sponsored by Foreigner.

Head Games was a fairly infamous budget publisher through the late ‘90s, alongside some of the more infamous ones like Valu-Soft. While they dabbled in publishing unofficial expansions like the previously talked about Aftershock for Quake, their bread and butter was the “Extreme” line they published from 1999-2000, like Extreme Rock Climbing, Extreme Boards & Blades, and yes, the infamous Extreme Paintbrawl games. They’re not known for a high pedigree of quality, so buying a Head Games product meant you had to put your expectations real low. And this was before Activision acquired them.

That looks more like a dome than a canopy.

Though we can’t just blame the publisher: Developer Canopy Games has their own tale of making clunky games as well. For the most part, they were known mostly for budget-label driving games based on Harley Davidson, Hot Rod Magazine and oddly Initial D of all franchises; as well as Midnight Outlaw: Illegal Street Drag, a racing game clearly made to cash in on the Fast and the Furious franchise that Something Awful also covered back in the day. (This will be the last time I mention that site in this article, promise.)

They occasionally dabbled in other genres, including the then-lucrative market of hidden object games in the late-2000s, but from the research I did shooters were not really their thing. Juggernaut would end up being their only add-on for a commercially released game. So I don’t have high hopes for this.

These cutscenes are… interesting, to say the least.

According to what I gleamed through the cutscenes and the readme files, the story goes like this: In the far-flung future, a Juggernaut ship exported people from Earth to the two moons on Jupiter – Europa and Callisto, respectively. You’re a soldier named “The Defender” who lives on Europa, doing your usual mining business until you find out that settlers of Callisto are doing science experiments on people that turns them into mutated beings. The Defender must fly to Callisto and eliminate those mutated freaks before their demon stuff… spreads throughout the universe? It’s not really clear, the story is likely explained more in the manual or the intro cutscene than it is in-game.

Fun fact: In this intro demo, the player has god mode on. Already a bad sign.
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March 26, 2022
Zaero for Quake II: Back to the land of unofficial expansion packs.

(Updated 8/10/2023: Updated a few URLs, and some minor grammatical changes.)

When I wrote about the previous Mods and Maps article about Soldier of Fortune, Inc., I honestly wasn’t expecting it to go beyond Quake. When I found it that there were new tie-in levels made for Quake II, it made me replay through Quake II and its expansions, something I hadn’t done in years. I was originally not so hot on it, and I thought maybe a replay would give me a fresh perspective on the game. Sadly, it didn’t.

Wouldn’t be an id software game without some classic monster infighting.

Quake II is… fine as a game, I guess. A solid shooter with lots of colored lighting, a derivative story, and a killer soundtrack by Sonic Mayhem – with contributions by Bill Brown, Jeremiah Sypult and Rob freakin’ Zombie of all people – that just lacked the sort of bizarre mish-mash that Quake did the year prior that I enjoyed thoroughly. It just felt rather derivative as a game. Considering how id software was in turmoil at the time, I’m not surprised it feels kinda boilerplate, because they knew anything with an id logo on it would sell gangbusters.

While playing those Quake II themed levels for that Soldier of Fortune, Inc article, it dawned on me that despite having written about all kinds of retro FPS stuff for Doom, Quake and Half-Life, I hadn’t written about anything related to Quake II. That changes today, as I look into one of the more deeper cuts of Quake II, released during that wild west period of the early-to-late ‘90s: unofficial expansion packs to games.

Good to know it’s not supported by id Software, I guess. Cover courtesy of Mobygames.

Zaero for Quake II is one of the aforementioned unofficial expansion packs. Developed by a group named Team Evolve, this expansion added new levels and weapons to the main Quake II arsenal. But how did this expansion come about? For those who weren’t really around when this was big – and admittedly, I was only tangentially aware of it back then – let’s give a quick refresher course on the shovelware compilation boom.

I get to use this cover again! It’s just as ridiculous as it was the first time.

For a period of time, a fair share of shovelware budget publishers such as Softkey, WizardWorks and others found a new way to make some easy cash: capitalizing on some of the biggest game franchises by releasing compilations of levels for these game, often downloaded off the still fresh-to-the-world internet, for $20-30 a pop. It was interesting to go to a store and find a compilation of new levels for Doom, which was becoming one of the biggest video game cultural touchstones of the 1990s.

Unfortunately this practice raised the ire of some developers, feeling that those publishers were profiting off the backs of independent hobbyists and budding game designers. At one point id Software themselves decided to respond with The Master Levels for Doom II, a small set of levels made by a handful of the notable members of the Doom community, which came with its own compilation of Doom levels compiled from the web called Maximum Doom.

The simple boxy shapes of Aftershock for Quake, one of these unofficial expansion packs.

By the time Quake came out, these publishers pivoted from outright taking levels off the web to contracting people to make more original levels as unofficial expansion packs. These would often come with a few levels or in some cases full episodes of content, for the same budget price. I’ve talked about one of these at length before: Aftershock for Quake, which you can read here.

Naturally with Quake II being the Next Big Thing from id software, people capitalized by selling unofficial expansions for that game as well, which competed against both of the official expansions – The Reckoning and Ground Zero, respectively. While none of these were more popular than the official expansions, they did carve a small niche for those who were jonesin’ for more Quake II stuff but didn’t have good enough internet.

Zaero was one of a few unofficial expansions for Quake II, with Juggernaut being the other notable one. I nearly wrote about Juggernaut instead, but the ~~version I seemed to find online was not the final version of the game.~~ Meanwhile the version I found of Zaero seemed content complete, so I opted to write about that one instead.
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November 26, 2021
Mods and Maps: Soldier of Fortune, Inc. for Quake — Not *that* Soldier of Fortune.

A few months back, to celebrate its 25th anniversary, Bethesda re-released the id Software classic Quake on modern systems and the PC. Ported to the versatile KEX Engine by Nightdive Studios, it added the base game, the two official Mission Packs, the MachineGames developed Dimension of the Past made for the 20th anniversary in 2016, and a newly made expansion, Dimension of the Machine, also by MachineGames.

Going back through Quake was a nice nostalgia trip, and while I had already played through the game countless times in the past – most recently in June to test out the fan-made Copper rebalance mod – It felt good going through the tech bases and castles with nailguns and the Thunderbolt once again.

The official port has licensed mod support, similar to the Unity-powered Doom remasters on these same platforms from a year or two back, with Midway’s port of Quake to the Nintendo 64 being the first supported mod. Though it does also support some older Quake mods if they were just simple levels and not involving complex scripting from recent source ports, which means stuff like the oft-praised Arcane Dimensions don’t work in the remaster yet.

Colored lighting on Quake 64, at the cost of more boxier level geometry. A fair trade, honestly.

It made me think of many old custom levels from the early days of modding, and one that I thought of was during that wild west period, when map makers would offer to make stuff based on licensed properties as free promotion. One of which was based on a TV show that most of you probably don’t remember.

Kinda hard to watch this show nowadays, but okay.

Soldier of Fortune, Inc. for Quake is not what you think it is. It has nothing to do with the later 2000 game by Raven Software. Rather, this three-level pack existed as a promotion for a television show, back in those days when people could just make custom levels and have them officially sponsored by those companies, akin to stuff like Chronic for Quake III Arena made to promote The Marshall Mathers LP.

But what is Soldier of Fortune, Inc.? SOF was a TV series created by Dan Gordon, an ex-Israel Defense Force soldier turned screenwriter, produced by Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Productions and Rysher Entertainment. Named after the magazine of the same name, SOF was an action series involving a rag-tag group of soldiers trying to stop various people doing the bad things. In essence, it was a modern-day Mission: Impossible. It often aired in late-evening time slots alongside shows like Baywatch, which meant it was made to be one of those shows that tried to capture some of the Baywatch audience by also being an action-packed romp.

The show did get renamed for the second season, losing the Soldier of Fortune branding. Now called SOF: Special Ops Force, the show had a few notable cast changes, including basketball player Dennis Rodman playing a supporting character and Peter Graves doing an introductory narration, further leaning into the Mission: Impossible trappings. The show ended in 1999 after that second season, being mostly forgotten by the general populace.

I was reminded of this show’s existence thanks to a podcast. It Was a Thing on TV – a TV obscurities podcast hosted by a few of my game show colleagues – had recently done an episode on Thunder in Paradise, another short-lived action show starring Hulk Hogan and Chris Lemmon stopping evil villains on beachfronts. Much like Soldier of Fortune, Inc., Thunder in Paradise was trying to capture the Baywatch crowd, but wasn’t successful at it either, only having one sole 22-episode season.

Thunder in Paradise would get a video game adaptation for the Philips CD-i and DOS that was during the peak of full motion video, using an episode from the TV series but with more footage shot for the game. It made me think of similar action shows from the ’90s that got video game adaptations, and suddenly I started thinking about how a similar action show somehow got a custom level pack for Quake, back when that was a thing that could happen. Nowadays those same entertainment companies just cut a check to Activision to put John Rambo in Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War for $25, complete with low-quality sound bites from the movies.
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October 20, 2021
Ghosts I-IV for Quake: A different kind of soundtrack.

If there’s one thing I need to improve on in my life, it’s to write something in the moment. I’ve bought plenty of games, played a bevy of mods, grabbed other assorted things for potential blog fodder…

Then I do nothing with it. This has happened more often than not, but only because I get the problem of being an ideas person and rarely act upon them. I’ve been slowly improving on this front, at least more than I was years ago.

Which brings me to this post about a game mod. I played this on a whim back in 2018, and thought it was pretty neat. While I’m currently wrapped in a few other things right now, I thought I’d write something quick for this month.

A few years back, I wrote an article praising the wonders of Red Book CD audio. CD audio tracks that would play in certain games, from PC classics like Half-Life, to even Sega CD games like Sonic CD. Unfortunately, modern technology is not too kind to the concept, as it often struggles to work properly on modern devices. In some cases, digital re-releases of games like Starsiege: Tribes didn’t even come with the CD music, removing part of the ambience.

There have been solutions thanks to source ports and game updates. For instance, playing Half-Life on Steam has all its music files as MP3s, so if the game (or a related mod) calls for that CD track, it’ll play it without needing the CD.

Looks just as good as it did in ’96.

Which brings me to a classic in Red Book audio: Quake. One of the earliest PC games to use it, popping in the CD would fill your ears with weird ambient music by Trent Reznor and his band Nine Inch Nails. Modern source ports such as Quakespasm actually support playable CD tracks in MP3/OGG formats, which means one can rip the soundtrack from their copy of Quake – or just find it on the internet, I doubt id and Zenimax care these days – and play it easily, proper looping and all.

There’s a handful of Quake map packs that come with custom soundtracks tailor-made for the level pack, such as Travail. Others outright replace the Nine Inch Nails soundtrack with different ambient tracks, like EpiQuake or Quake Epsilon. But what if I told you someone replaced Nine Inch Nails music with Nine Inch Nails music?

Ha! Now I won’t be burned by hot slag. Take that!
(Oh wait, now I can’t get out…)

“Ghosts I-IV for Quake” is an interesting mod. Replacing the original 1996 soundtrack with the entirety of Ghosts I-IV, an album by Nine Inch Nails with nothing but ambient instrumentals seems like a good fit. In a sense, Ghosts I-IV is a spiritual successor to the original Quake soundtrack, even if there’s little similarities in style.

The album itself is interesting: Frustrated by their record label, Trent Reznor severs his contract with Interscope Records and decides to go independent – for a while anyway – and released this under a Creative Commons license. This license is how the mod exists without lawyers getting involved, as it’s a free mod for a commercial video game.

Shooting switches with the power of magic pellets!

There is one other feature of this mod: There’s no monsters or weapons. Now there’s mostly empty levels with switches, lifts and other assorted things, but nothing to shoot. With god mode turned on. In a sense, this changes the perspective of the game entirely. No longer a straight explosive romp, it’s strictly an exploration-based affair.
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February 23, 2019
Aftershock for Quake: The most terrible pun name ever?

PC gaming in the ’90s was a real wild west affair. When games like Doom took off, everybody started making shovelware compilations of anywhere from hundreds to thousands of levels. Most of them were downloaded off BBSes without crediting people, which is pretty scummy in itself. But if you had no internet connection, this was a way to get levels with ease.

“Direct from the Internet.” Kinda rude to take those without permission, you know?

After a few years of this, companies like WizardWorks started making their own unofficial expansions for games like Quake, Descent and Warcraft II. While this was an improvement – level designers could actually license their stuff for commercial use – the internet was really starting to bloom in the late ’90s, making these unofficial “expansions” obsolete.

Today, I’m gonna look at one of these unofficial expansions for a little game called Quake…

This looks like something I’d see on some pick up artist’s vlog channel.

Forgiving the groan-worthy punny title, Aftershock for Quake is one of several expansions made to capitalize on Quake‘s success. Published by Head Games, this featured “advanced levels”, adding three episodes and a bevy of deathmatch maps.

Unlike the official expansions – Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity – these have no new monsters, powerups or weapons. These are vanilla Quake levels, designed to run with a registered copy of the original Quake. The episodes are drastically shorter than vanilla Quake, only having five levels for each episode.

Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t get the installer to work on my PC running Windows 7 64-bit since it’s a 16-bit application. Thankfully, all I had to do was to copy the /AS/ folder from the CD into my Quake folder and I was off to the races.

The blood on the logo looks rather ominous.

There isn’t much of a story to these maps. Considering Quake‘s story was already bare-bones to begin with, this is relatively par for the course. With the exception of episode three, there aren’t any credits to who made this. It’s unfortunate, because I was hoping to see someone who would go on to later claims to fame in game development, as a “before they were stars” moment. Kinda like how Viktor Antonov worked on the infamous Redneck Rampage as an art designer before crafting out the styles of Half-Life 2 and Dishonored.

By the way, there’s no new music in this. All of it is recycled from Quake, with the exception of one level having no music whatsoever. It would’ve been nice for them to go all out, but I’m glad they even bothered to even assign music tracks. Makes me want to put in a music CD to get a different feel to it, like when I wrote about Red Book CD Audio a couple years back.

Wonder why they put both a knight and an ogre as if they’re equal threats? One has a grenade launcher, for chrissakes.

Episode 1 has some interesting design. E1M1 starts you with an ogre, a knight, and a pool with armor in it as a secret. A later level has you hit a hard to see switch to move a boat across to grab the gold key, otherwise you die in hot slag.

Better get that quick save key ready. I shudder to imagine trying to do this with keyboard only.

A lot of the level design for Aftershock feels very amateur. Lots of precarious platforming over death pits, unclear instructions, and rather plain-looking level design. A lot of the levels are simple, poorly lit, boxy, and have no sense of balance. One level starts you near a rocket launcher, but then drops you into a trap room with two shamblers, a few fiends, and a couple of pentagrams and megahealth to aid your fight. A lot of these levels have several “kill all the enemies to progress” rooms, and it’s a bit frustrating.

I dub this image “myfirstquakemap.map.”

Granted, this was around 1996-97, and people were still trying to figure out this fancy new 3D engine, but if you’re selling this level set for money, you gotta make sure it can hang with the big boys of the official product and its expansions. And the first episode gives a rather less-than-stellar impression.

On the bright side, the makers of the mod didn’t seem to know how to strip the player of their weapons upon completing an episode, so if you’re playing the episodes in order, the later episodes can be a breeze because of a full arsenal.

I’m sorry but what the hell is this

Out of all three episodes, episode 3 is the one that feels more fleshed out. With more custom textures, and even proper credits — the whole episode’s made by one Greg MacMartin, who’s still in the biz today working on Consortium and the Homeworld games — this is the best of the stuff on display. Though he did have a fascination with putting the gold key in death trap areas…

This is rather cruel enemy placement for a key.

While I didn’t have any strange bugs while playing, I did experience a rare game crash. When I finished E3M5, Quakespasm, the source port I use, crashed with an unusual pushwall error. I was worried that this was an issue with the source port, but surprisingly I could not recreate the error after that. If there’s anyone reading who’s Quake-savvy who could explain what a pushwall error means, let me know in the comments.

That’s about it on the single player front. Aftershock for Quake also comes with about 13 deathmatch levels also made for the expansion, but most of them are simple box levels or have gimmicks, such as the two LAVABOX levels.

Since Quake multiplayer was in its infancy, a lot of these were likely made for 1v1 skirmishes. None of these maps are anywhere near levels of DM3, but when you just wanted to frag your buddies, you were happy to get whatever maps you could get your hands on.

Now who the heck would want a pool full of hot slag?

You think that’s it, right? There’s enough there to give you something to play around with. Remember when I said that these were made when shovelware compilations were extremely common? Hidden on the disc is a level creator, called Thred, and a bunch of levels that come with it separate from the main Aftershock campaign. Though, the back of the box calls it the “Aftershock 3D Level Editor,” which sounds like a fake program I’d hear on a TV show.

There isn’t anything outstanding in this collection – no Iikka Kiranen levels or anything cool like that – and some of these levels are merely tutorials for how to do things in the Quake engine. Most of these levels are freely available online through places like Quaddicted, but you’re probably not missing out.

Dare you walk down the ramps of death?

Aftershock for Quake is not an amazing expansion. Episode 3 and the various DM levels are the only reason to check this out, the rest of it is shovelware fodder that was prevalent during this time. I only spent a few bucks on this, so I don’t feel cheated out of this, but I got at least an hour or so of fun playing what Quake‘s community maps were like in 1996, so there’s that.

As far as I know, this is abandonware. Head Games no longer exists, and there’s probably no penalty for pirating an unofficial Quake expansion over twenty years after its original release. While not as outstanding as some of the other expansions, it’s a cool curiosity from years past. These kind of shovelware expansions should be documented more, there’s probably some interesting stuff about them we’re missing out on.

Demon Gate cover courtesy of Mobygames. Aftershock for Quake cover courtesy of the Quake Wiki.

Updated 8/1/2020 for paragraph changes and some updates.

February 22, 2016
A Tribute to Red Book CD audio.

When it comes to video games, CDs were a god damn revelation back in the day. Before then, people were developing games on cartridges that barely held a few megabytes. CDs, on the other hand, held up to a much bigger size of 700MB, and as a result, developers found out they could use that extra size for things they couldn’t have before on cartridges. This had the side effect of giving us a lot of crappy full motion video games around the mid-’90s, but they also brought us something amazing: CD quality audio.

So shiny, but holds a lot of stuff.

No longer were developers constrained by the YM2612 and SPC700 sound chips — the sound chips for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive and the Super Nintendo, respectively. Musicians could now make the music as it was intended to be heard: with live instrumentation (or a close approximation).

A fair share of CD-based systems like the Sega CD, the Turbografx-CD, the PlayStation, and Sega Saturn had CD audio support. While playing these games, the rich CD audio played through your television, giving you music that you’d never heard before in video games. This was known as the Red Book CD audio standard. Introduced in 1980, it set the standard for audio in video games throughout most of the 1990s.

I remember the PC version of Sonic CD being one of the earliest examples of this. It was pretty neat to listen to most of the game’s music outside of the game.

Not only could you hear the awesome music in game, you could listen to it outside of the game. In most cases, you could put the game CD in a CD player and start listening to the music without having to play the game itself. To me, this is what made CD audio awesome: Being able to listen to the soundtrack outside of the game.

Previously, if you wanted to listen to the game music, you had to hope for a soundtrack CD, or in the case of PC gaming, dig through files and play them on media players that could support MIDI or MOD Tracker files. The Red Book audio standard changed that to something more simple: putting in the CD in a CD-ROM drive and pressing play. Be careful though, since Red Book audio CDs are mixed mode CDs, you need to tune to track 2 to hear the game music, unless you want to hear a lot of unlistenable static that could damage your speakers or the disc itself.
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April 2, 2014
Mods and maps: Navy Seals Quake and Special Forces Quake: A tactical Quake bonanza!

As much as I love the mod scene for old PC games, I realized I haven’t looked much at Quake‘s mod scene compared to others. The last mods I played for Quake was stuff like Quake Done Quick with a Vengeance, which was made more as a demo of the game rather than something actually playable.

So for today, we’re gonna tackle some Quake mods that tried their best to be a bit more tactical in their approach. Both of these were released around the same time, and share a few similarities but both have their own unique quirks.

Sadly, Michael Biehn and Charlie Sheen don’t appear in this.

First on our list is a mod called Navy Seals Quake. This mod features a bevvy of new weapons such as the Mark 23 SOCOM pistol, the MP5 (and its silenced variant), a Mossberg tactical shotgun, even an M16 assault rifle with grenade launcher. While those seem like fairly common things now, for when this came out in 1998, that was considered pretty impressive.

There are three unique levels made for Navy Seals Quake, though selecting New Game oddly takes you to the default Quake start level. The levels all feature you going in and killing everything while completing objectives like destroying a jet and disarming “RADEK” bombs. You can also play through regular Quake with these new weapons, giving you a different taste of the game, but only a handful of characters were replaced, leaving you with custom marine models mixed in with default Quake enemies like Ogres and Scrags.

In a unique twist, Navy Seals Quake features weapons that reload, realistic ammo management where partial-ammo reloads remove the bullets inside, the option to use flashbang grenades, even allowing you to headshot enemies and gib their heads. This was pretty advanced for its time, and it’s quite impressive.

Sometimes the only solution is to rip everything to shreds, Rambo style. It’s like they know me.

There is one interesting thing about Navy Seals Quake – it was made by a guy named Minh “Gooseman” Le. He would later go on to help make Action Quake II and a little fun multiplayer FPS you might’ve heard of called Counter-Strike. Le was one of the co-creators of Counter-Strike, who later worked with Valve up until Counter-Strike: Source. Le would later go on to make a CS successor called Tactical Intervention, which had some of the same features as Counter-Strike but with some new twists. While it wasn’t particularly outstanding, it did leave for some dumb moments.
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August 20, 2012