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Rudolph

Was there a Quake 1 killer?

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It is my understanding that Duke Nukem 3D, although it was released around the same time as Quake 1, was considered to be a "Doom killer", since it blew Doom out of the water technologically speaking and also had a cultural impact about as significant as the latter.

 

However, was there ever a Quake 1 killer - other than Quake II? 

Edited by Rudolph

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I would say Half-Life and Unreal could be considered Quake 1 killers. I mean if Duke 3D could be considered a Doom killer two years after Doom 2 came out, then HL and Unreal would fit the bill.

 

Both early 3D FPS games, but both expanded radically in what 3D shooters could be as far as depth, narrative, world-building and interactivity. Especially compared to Quake, which was still very simple. Very satisfying, but clearly still in the single level, kill stuff find key mindset.

 

Of course I still like Quake better, but they were very impressive nonetheless. And really Goldeneye on N64 also deserves some credit, the least of which being an actually good console FPS, but also introducing mission objectives outside of "shoot things, find key, shoot things".

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For me Duke Nukem was the Quake killer. I bought these games less than two weeks apart (Duke first) and after going through that, Quake felt lifeless and dull, despite being true 3D. So in retrospect, Duke and its gameplay advances forever ruined any positive impresssion I might have gotten from Quake.

 

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(Duke Nukem 3D) blew Doom out of the water technologically speaking and also had a cultural impact about as significant as the latter.

This is not accurate. Duke Nukem 3D of course retained a reasonably large fanbase (myself included), but in terms of "cultural waves" Doom was and is far more relevant than Duke ever was.

 

Maybe there was a brief period where gaming magazine reviews (which have always been largely worthless) were calling it the "Doom killer", in the same way New Coke was the Old Coke killer for a few months there according to ad campaigns. It's bullshit.

 

I distinctly remember in the early 00s that most school mates at least knew what Doom was/ "that it existed". Duke Nukem was a nobody to the pre-teen gaming masses from 2000 onward. I was lucky that a friend of my mom just happened to give us a Duke3D CD, or I may well have missed out too.

 

My first thought playing it as a kid was something to the effect of "wow, this is the most impressive Doom TC I've ever played, I'm not surprised it was sold in stores!"

 

There may have been a select few for whom Duke "killed" Doom, but it was not and is not the common opinion by a longshot.

 

The only games even "half" deserving of this title are the early polygonal FPS hits, Quake and Goldeneye, but even they slowly but surely waned to "sub-Doom" levels of popularity over the many years since.. Not to mention that, in my opinion, they're just generally less fun than Doom. Duke was at least pretty darn close to Doom on the fun-factor, I gotta give it that!

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Saying Duke Nukem 3D is as culturally significant as Doom is similar to saying Alex Kidd is as culturally significant as Super Mario.

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I would probably say Half-Life, not so much for its technological improvements, but its structural ones, post-HL1 I don't think there were any FPS games left that went for the old, multi-episode format where you spawn in place with very little explanation beyond the fact you have a gun and you have aliens or ninjas shooting at you. But it depends how you define a game being an X killer, even if Q3A's far more popular, Quake 1 does still have an active, dedicated fanbase, and you can play games online today without any problem, so Half-Life did not murder Quake so much as it forced it to resign from their affluent position and subsequently put it under house arrest.

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26 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

This is not accurate. Duke Nukem 3D of course retained a reasonably large fanbase (myself included), but in terms of "cultural waves" Doom was and is far more relevant than Duke ever was.

Yeah, I do not necessarily agree with that argument myself, as I also believe Doom has ultimately aged better than Duke Nukem 3D.

 

Anyway, the reason I hesitate to view Unreal and Half-Life as Quake 1 killers is that they came after Quake II. Maybe it is because the gap between the two Quake games was too short to allow for that many first-person shooters to stand out?

 

I know Daïkatana was originally meant to take on Quake 1, but then Quake II was unveiled around the same time, overshadowing it.

 

15 minutes ago, Sena said:

But it depends how you define a game being an X killer

I reckon the term is a bit vague and I am not quite sure I completely understand it myself. I do not see the qualifier being used all that often nowadays either, but I remember the days when Sony was desperately trying to find its "Halo killer" with games such as Resistance and Killzone, and I even remember reading about both Sonic The Hedgehog and Streets of Rage being designed specifically to be Sega's answer to both Nintendo's Super Mario Bros and Capcom's Final Fight, respectively.

 

Whether those "killers" managed to kill their competitors is of course a different matter; nobody talks about Resistance anymore, Guerilla Games has retired Killzone, Sonic is still around despite having "lost" to Mario and getting way too many bad games and Capcom seems to have given up on Final Fight besides adding some of its characters to the Street Fighter roster.

Edited by Rudolph

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2 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

This whole obsession with "X killer" is just silly on the face of it. It's meaningless marketing bullshit wearing a thin veil of legitimacy.

 

Sonic was not the "Mario killer", Spongebob was not the "Ren and Stimpy killer", Pepsi was not the "Coca-cola killer" and so on and so forth.

 

I will say though that Quake II was definitely the Quake II killer.

You’re right, Ren and Stimpy was the Ren and Stimpy killer.

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In Sonic's case, yeah, it was all marketing. I distinctively recall an ad where you have an ice cream truck with a screen displaying Super Mario Bros 3 losing to a Formula One that plays Sonic. You know, the whole "Sega Does What Nintendon't" thing.

 

I was just wondering if there were games that came close enough to overshadowing Quake 1 during the brief time when it was all the rage.

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7 minutes ago, Egg Boy said:

You’re right, Ren and Stimpy was the Ren and Stimpy killer.

I know we're getting pretty far afield at this point, but I only mentioned Ren and Stimpy because Spongebob often drew comparisons back when the first 3 seasons were still current. When it was still being marketed as more of an "all ages" show rather than targeting super small kids.

 

I pin it down to the semi-frequent use of detailed disgusting close-ups. I loved both cartoons as a kid and I remember being irritated that people were comparing the two lol

 

5 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

In Sonic's case, yeah, it was all marketing.

I don't just mean in Sonic's case, I mean in general. The whole concept of a newer game "killing" an older game is absurd because the older game's merit doesn't suddenly vanish.

 

It's as absurd as saying NFL was the "Rugby killer", or that Soda was the "water killer", or any other such statements.

 

I might be able to see this phrase of "X killing Y" as useful for tools - the pocket calculator was the abacus killer, fine, sure. But when it comes to art? It's just intrinsically silly.

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6 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

I will say though that Quake II was definitely the Quake II killer.

 

Aaaah, my poor heart strings..! Play your truth tunes gently, sweet Shazam Zappa...!

 

Spoiler

(ShaZappa?)

 

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34 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

Yeah, I do not necessarily agree with that argument myself, as I also believe Doom has ultimately aged better than Duke Nukem 3D.

 

Anyway, the reason I hesitate to view Unreal and Half-Life as Quake 1 killers is that they came after Quake II. Maybe it is because the gap between the two Quake games was too short to allow for that many first-person shooters to stand out?

 

I know Daïkatana was originally meant to take on Quake 1, but then Quake II was unveiled around the same time, overshadowing it.

 

I reckon the term is a bit vague and I am not quite sure I completely understand it myself. I do not see the qualifier being used all that often nowadays either, but I remember the days when Sony was desperately trying to find its "Halo killer" with games such as Resistance and Killzone, and I even remember reading about both Sonic The Hedgehog and Streets of Rage being designed specifically to be Sega's answer to both Nintendo's Super Mario Bros and Capcom's Final Fight, respectively.

 

Whether those "killers" managed to kill their competitors is of course a different matter; nobody talks about Resistance anymore, Guerilla Games has retired Killzone, Sonic is still around despite having "lost" to Mario and getting way too many bad games and Capcom seems to have given up on Final Fight besides adding some of its characters to the Street Fighter roster.

 

Killer apps are one thing, in modern parlance people just really like to say games are "dead" for the smallest of reasons, including no reason, but I'd probably say you can fairly call a game dead if a competitor comes along that is clearly better in all regards - why would I play Space Invaders when I can play Galaga or any of the other hundreds of shmups that have far more enemy types, and stages with moving backgrounds, and eventually even background music? Quake definitely had competition, but as evidenced by the fact it still has a fanbase and modding scene, people still agree that no game does Quake 1 better than Quake 1, so nobody really killed them.

think it was the English Puritan movement that killed the Quakers tho 

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There are no Quake 1 Killer, because it's still have their roots of the ideas and gameplay in many others games, even now.

Also WINQuake.exe killed Quake.exe

 

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I loved Quake - still do, particularly now because of the advent of Arcane Dimensions - but was there a 'Quake killer'? Not sure about that. Certainly there were technically superior games, but that is always going to be the case. Q2 is different, but not sure about 'superior'. I think Q1 stands on its own as it is quite unique in style and gameplay I think.

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Calling something “The X killer” would imply that there is no reason to go back to whatever X is killing, which is completely false. Just because there’s games that I enjoy more than Quake doesn’t mean that I automatically despise it and instinctively break every NIN CD in my house with a sledgehammer

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20 minutes ago, GuyMcBrofist said:

I would think of "X killer" as "Takes all the marketshare/mindshare from X"

That's definitely how it's being used here and in general, but I've just never understood this framing. Everything has a limited retail lifespan, usually of about a year or two. We could just sorta say "whatever game is popular this month was the KILLER of whatever kinda-similar game was popular last month" and it would be correct, technically speaking.

 

"<insert whatever game is popular right now> was the Cyberpunk 2077 killer!" (literally the only game from 2020 onward I'm aware of rofl but I think you get the idea).

 

I have a strong feeling the idea that the whole "X must be the KILLER of Y by taking away the market share" mindset was the brainchild of an economist or something. Most games are supplemental. Even if something becomes slightly more popular than the other, similar thing that came before it - framing that as something killing something else is just.. Shallow, I think is the closest descriptor I can find.

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All good points!

 

Although I suppose one could say Half-Life was the Quake II killer because it heralded a trend of more "realistic" story-driven shooters that even Id Software ended up following with titles such as Doom 3 (which is in many ways a darker, more horror-oriented remake of Half-Life) and RAGE as well as third-party collaborations such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Quake IV.

 

However, unless I am mistaken, Quake III was the one to start the trend of multiplayer-only shooters that we are still seeing today.

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Unreal was announced as the "Quake Killer" when the first screenshots was released, i remember 3D Realms talked about Prey in the same manner. For the  younger guys here at DW, Prey was 3D Realms first "DNF", and Unreal was impressive graphics wise, but arrived in stores in times when it could be more of a "Quake II Killer". But that was all about the graphics, at the time when Quake hit the shelves, no game could compete in this field. At least DN3D gave quake a good fight, it was huge back then. 

I loved both, DN3D for all the crazy stuff and Quake for the dark and gritty atmosphere.

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4 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

However, unless I am mistaken, Quake III was the one to start the trend of multiplayer-only shooters that we are still seeing today.

 

You should hope that the Unreal Tournament fans don't read that comment.

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I think talking about what games heralded new trends is generally a better approach to this sort of topic, because it offers more insight into "which games did what" for video games/development trends in general.

 

To just say one last thing about it before moving on forever, the phrase "X killed Y" doesn't really tell us anything about which game - the "killed" or the "killer" - actually contributed to general gaming/development knowledge. In other words, Doom heralded so many important things, whereas Duke didn't herald anything of note at all. It was just "a different take on Doom". The imitator, not the imitated.

 

(Not that imitation is bad! Duke3D is, imo, great because it took so many pages from Doom's book..)

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3 minutes ago, cybdmn said:

 

You should hope that the Unreal Tournament fans don't read that comment.


And the Quake fans will twist that into, we got the formula of Arena FPS in Quake 1.

Unreal Tournament holds the title for creating this style of game first.

 

Quote

To just say one last thing about it before moving on forever, the phrase "X killed Y" doesn't really tell us anything about which game - the "killed" or the "killer" - actually contributed to general gaming/development knowledge. In other words, Doom heralded so many important things, whereas Duke didn't herald anything of note at all. It was just "a different take on Doom". The imitator, not the imitated.

Just my trough for me too, Quake 1 it's not close to dead at least in terms of gameplay and level desings. 

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11 minutes ago, cybdmn said:

Unreal was announced as the "Quake Killer" when the first screenshots was released

Now that you mention it, you are right! Some years ago, I had to read Tristan Donovan's Replay: The History of Video Games, which quoted Cliff Bleszinki explicitly stating the intent to make Unreal the "anti-Quake".

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