The “previews.ck1” file in the Commander Keen /base1 directory - have a look! Take this preview that was included with Commander Keen, released in 1990: And that wasn’t always something that was completely clear. The game had been in development since at least 1994, with lead designer John Romero posting on a BBS forum responding to speculation on what sort of game Quake would be. The release of Quake in June 1996 wasn’t a surprise to anyone. Doom was followed by games like Heretic, Hexen, Star Wars: Dark Forces, Duke Nukem 3D and Marathon, and while not strictly an FPS game, Descent was heavily influenced by the genre. This came with a degree of infamy as well - Doom was a blood-soaked, heavy-metal romp through Hell itself, and it terrified a society that still hadn’t grasped the future significance of the games industry’s meteoric rise.īy mid-1996, the FPS genre had fallen into a steady release pattern. Then in 1993, Doom sent the genre and themselves soaring into fame that transcended the industry, receiving wider media recognition not usually afforded to game developers.
id Software had practically invented the genre (at least as the market then recognised it) in 1992 with Wolfenstein 3D. With the names behind the game, it’s impossible to imagine the hype being anything less than immense. In a PC gaming era when the first-person shooter was king, Quake was set to push expectations beyond what anyone dreamed. While the industry in 1996 was only a fraction of the size of today’s indie sector alone, it seemed the hype for Quake had seeped into every corner, and rightly so. On June 22, 1996, id Software released Quake.