QUAKE MINI FAQ - 15 Jan 96 |
Table of Contents. (Changed sections prefixed with '|')
The purpose of this document is to inform people about the game QUAKE and to reduce the amount of frequently asked questions to the relevant Usenet newsgroups.
Behold that this FAQ will probably raise more questions than it answers. id Software, the makers of QUAKE, have been a bit quiet about updates on QUAKE's status. Nevertheless, the interest in QUAKE is enormous, as QUAKE is expected to be a quantum leap in computer gaming.
This FAQ may be distributed freely, provided it remains unaltered, and the original author is mentioned. It is forbidden to redistribute this FAQ commercially in the form of magazines, books, CDs or other pay services without prior permission of the author, Tom Wheeley (tomw@tsys.demon.co.uk).
I would appreciate not being flooded with QUAKE questions at this point. Should further information on QUAKE be available, they will be added to future versions of this mini FAQ, quaketalk (see section 7) or possibly full featured QUAKE FAQ (see section 8).
This mini FAQ will be reposted weekly to relevant gaming usenet news groups and it's latest version can be retrieved from
Thank you to Joost Schuur (jschuur@globalnews.com), who originally wrote this mini FAQ.
QUAKE is a 3D 'point of view' action orientated game with certain role playing elements from id Software. It is the successor to DOOM and features an engine with many enhancements, such as:
No. There will not be a product called 'DOOM 3'. QUAKE is id Software's next own project after DOOM 2. A special port of DOOM to Nintendo's new U64 console system is being done, which will feature some enhancements to the PC version, but this is also not 'DOOM 3'.
For more info on this, check:
id has been very persistant in insisting QUAKE will come out 'when it's ready'. For quite a while it looked like they were aiming for christmas '95. Well, this did not happen and it is considered likely that it will take another few months. An exact release date cannot be made yet, since the game is still in a developmental phase. It is always hard to predict when a piece of software will be ready for a release.
4 - What will the hardware requirements be?
This is probably the question that's going through everyone's minds the most. 'How will QUAKE perform on my system?' and 'Will I need a pentium system?'.
Based on the information I have onhand, it is my educated guess that QUAKE will perform slightly worse than DOOM on a comparable system. The targeted machine should be a 486 DX2/66 or slightly better. Having a pentium will certainly not hurt, but QUAKE will not be a pentium only game and is still likely to be very playable on a 486 based system.
As far as RAM is concerned, indications are that 8 megs will probably be the minimum will require 8 megs, but 8 or 16 megs will certainly help make playing QUAKE much more enjoyable.
Quake will support the new 3D accelerator cards, but no concrete information is available at the moment regarding which ones. id have said that it will be easy for manufacturers of any product to write drivers for Quake. John Carmack has expressed a preference for cards using the Verite chipset.
5 - Are the screenshots for the game?
Yes. As of August 4th, 1995, id released a first series of screenshots, revealing some of the level building capabilities of QUAKE and one of the monsters, a red dragon. They can be obtained from their ftp site at
or at a mirror such as
A picture of id's QUAKE editor called ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgames/idstuff/quake/qe_dev.gif can be found there too. Additionally, further screenshots depicting two of the monsters in QUAKE with more detail (the ogre and the knight) in ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgames/idstuff/quake/qpix.zip are also available.
A list of mirrors can be found in the 'QUAKE: FTP and WWW Sites' article periodically posted to rec.games.computer.quake.announce.
The screenshots can also be viewed via World Wide Web at id's web site described in section 11 of this minifaq.
6 - Is there a playable demo/beta out?
No. There is no alpha/beta/demo/preview of any sort available to the public currently. Based on remarks made by id, it is highly unlikely that anyone outside of the company will get involved in the beta testing of QUAKE. All of you who thought they were elite enough to get an alpha off of questionable FTP sites got a fake.
A friendly warning: Any fake Quake Beta is likely to be a 'Trojan Horse', meaning that it could quite easily contain a virus, or cause damage typical of a virus itself. ie *it could trash your system*.
7 - Where can I get more info on QUAKE?
For the past year now, Joost Schuur has published Quaketalk, a newsletter on QUAKE. He has attempted to gather any QUAKE related bits of information from the net and elsewhere. The current version is 400 and is available at
In the future, the filename may change to reflect the new version number. An HTML version of quaketalk can be viewed from Josh Micheal's web site at
8 - When will there be a real FAQ to the game?
Hank Leukart and joost schuur plan on bringing out a real, full length FAQ to QUAKE as soon as they've gathered enough information and have ensured id's cooperation on this. For now this mini FAQ should cover the most common questions on QUAKE. As soon a full FAQ is available, it will be announced in the appropriate Usenet newsgroups mentioned in section 9.
9 - Where can I discuss QUAKE?
A new rec.games.computer.quake newsgroup hierarchy consisting of three groups (rgcq.announce, rcgq.editing, rgcq.misc) successfully passed the Usenet Call for Votes procedure on 16th November 1995.
These newsgroups were finally created on January 8th 1996, despite uncertainty regarding the final name of Quake.
Should your newsserver not carry these groups, ask your newsadmin to add them. Until then, QUAKE can also be discussed on alt.games.quake, comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action, and rec.games.computers.doom.misc.
The main groups for Quake discussion are now the 'rec groups':
...Quake will not be called Quake.
This is probably true. id have stated that they have had trouble getting a trademark on 'Quake'. Also, a German company grabbed the name 'Quake' in the hope that id would buy it off of them. This company has not been named (to my knowledge)
There are already a couple of World Wide Web sites dedicated to QUAKE. Most of them carry identical contents, but who knows, this might change.
Here they are:
Please send suggestions regarding this FAQ to the maintainer, tomw@tsys.demon.co.uk