Quake (PC)

Quake is a story about a homicidal man who likes to kill Lovecraft-inspired monsters through barely-connected level sets. He also likes to murder his friends (who respawn as soon as they are killed) in castles that have a large Jesus crucified in them for some reason.

The main game doesn't have a lot of unused stuff, but there's a load of it in the prototypes floating around.

Development Info Prototype Info Prerelease Info ExpansionsUnused content found in the official expansions.

Unused Graphics#

Unused "Sell" Screen#

A poorly-made screen that was supposed to urge you to purchase the final version can be found hidden in the game's graphics. There is no way to bring it up in the game.

This message appears in the Beta3 prototype and is unused there as well.

Sell Screen

I really think you should be buying Quake right about now, or else, uhhh hrmmm...

you won't.

Unused Skin Scraps#

Some of the textures for the game's characters have unused sections.

Grunt#

There's two early faces at the bottom-right, and an unused set of eyes at the right of the face.

Knight#

The Knight had darker skin and a different helmet design that was recycled for the Death Knight. Furthermore, much of the upper-left edges of the texture go unused due to a UV size disrepancy at model compile time.

Ogre#

At the far right are two triangle-shaped pieces of flesh. Pre-release images show the Ogre having horns, so this may be a remnant of that.

Death Knight#

A lone clean spaulder is placed in the space between the front and back.

Fiend#

An early upper jaw is placed in the middle.

Unused Particle Effect#

Each entity is given an .effects field to control entity-specific lighting. As spotted in defs.qc, an unused flag EF_BRIGHTFIELD appears, but is never used elsewhere in the QuakeC sourcecode.

If set, it creates yellow glowing dots surrounding a given entity in question. This effect is also used in Half-Life if an enemy is spawned in a wall.

Unused Lighting Effect#

defs.qc also defines EF_BRIGHTLIGHT. This causes an entity or object to emit a bright light.

Aside from illuminating a wider area, it is otherwise identical to EF_DIMLIGHT (which is the standard glow for Quad Damage or Pentagram of Protection).

Unused Sounds#

boss2/idle.wav

An unused "omnomnom" idle sound for Shub. Internal timestamp is June 20, 1996.

boss2/sight.wav

An unused whispery sight sound for Shub. Internal timestamp is June 20, 1996.

hknight/grunt.wav

An unused grunt sound for the Death Knight.

Unused Code#

The QuakeC source code contains T_BeamDamge. This is a variation of T_RadiusDamage, without parameters for the inflictor or entity to ignore.

Unused Text#

Satan's power deflects <player>'s telefrag

Intended to appear when someone tries telefragging an invincible player, but it never appears in normal play. This is fixed in QuakeWorld, as well as a community mod.

<player> was fried by a Dragon

A client obituary for a Dragon, not implemented in the original game. The text is replaced in the expansion pack Dissolution of Eternity, where the Dragon is actually implemented.

<player> became one with Shub-Niggurath

While this boss appears, it has no attack. The only way to be harmed by it is to approach it, and it is credited to a generic trigger rather than Shub-Niggurath.

<player> was vomited on by a Vomitus

This monster only appeared in the Qtest1 prototype and was never fully implemented. Only this and a reference to its removed wake-up sound remain.

Other Unused Content#

• The console provides "+use" as a command. The game doesn't use it (with the player shooting or touching items instead), and modders were unable to exploit it until the source code was fixed.

Map-Specific Content#

To do: Add screenshots of these

• When playing E2M3 as a deathmatch level, an item at coordinates (-1200,208,-106) falls out of the level, and is then removed from the map. It's a Super Nailgun, and is already close to another Super Nailgun that doesn't fall out.
  • Also in E2M3, when playing in deathmatch, there is an untextured button that appears by the Super Nailgun.
• E2M4 has a few monsters that will not teleport into the active map area.
• E4M3 has a fiend that is spawned in Easy, but not the corresponding teleport.

False Positives#

A bug in the Quake-C script causes Rotfish to be counted twice in the number of monsters in a level, but only once when they are killed. This causes the game to incorrectly claim that there are unreachable monsters in a level, when they don't actually exist.

Ogre Marksman#

An unused monster, monster_ogre_marksman, is present in the QuakeC code and can be placed in levels. It is functionally identical to the standard Ogre outside of not making a sound upon seeing the player, not having a proper obituary (it simply prints the killed player's name with no descriptor) and being capable of infighting with standard Ogres (since they are technically a different monster species).

Revisional Differences#

v1.06#

Starting with v1.06, there are two copies of progs.dat in pak0.pak. The old version (CRC 51103; used in v1.01) is found at 0x580358, is 410616 bytes long, and is not indexed. The version in use (CRC 24778) is found at offset 0x116DF17 and continues to the end of the file. The index entry for the newer progs.dat file also contains semi-random characters to prevent triggering the anti-modding mechanism in the Shareware version.

v1.07#

Version 1.07 (first included with Scourge of Armagon) and all subsequent versions removes the brown fade effect in the menu. The reason is for performance, as reading pixels from video memory is very slow and it's much faster to write a black dither pattern instead, especially for high resolutions.

The only trace left of the fadescreen code left in the released GPL source was recently discovered as a dummied out "gelmap" table that was going to be used as a feature to color models to a single range of colors, but was scrapped.

v1.08#

Version 1.08 for DOS (Dissolution of Eternity) crashes if you don't have a sound card, or otherwise configure the BLASTER environment variable incorrectly. Earlier versions only display a message telling you to set your environment variable.