During the mid 1990s there was a strange war that transpired in one sliver of the videogame culture. The contest was between two dominant parts of PC Gaming culture, best crystallised as the war between Quake and Duke Nukem 3d.
Now this is not going to be an exhaustive history, just a little strange thought, because if you looked at FPS culture, which helps to define videogame culture, in the mid 2010s, you’d probably assume everything went the completely opposite direction.
First things first, I want to put it out there that both Quake and Duke Nukem are following in the footsteps of Doom, but in distinct ways. See, when you bore down into Doom, it’s on one hand a massively indulgent testament to aesthetics and cultural touchstones that make the creators of the game happy, and on the other hand, a technical exercise in squeezing relatively recent technology to make a fast, smooth-moving arcade-style game where immersion isn’t really that important but the speed and flow of play is. If you look at Doom’s levels you’d notice the way they start out trying to convey some sort of coherent, sensible space, but then, slowly start to lose it. I mean, early levels of Doom have names like ‘The Refinery’ and ‘Armory’ which have no setpieces or contextual pieces around them to even hint at those spaces’ purposes.
Quake was an evolution of this style of game, full of fight arenas, a new technical push (holy shit, we can do real-3d in real time and it’s fast and fluid holy shit!), and no real aesthetic central core. Quake, for all that it was given hugely positive reviews, in hindsight, is sort of a disorganised, incoherent mess, the technical elements more impressive than the game experience itself. Oh, Quake is great, and Quake is as great now as it was then, but for the most part, it’s a game that’s more about weaving a path through linear levels and jousting and avoiding damage from comparatively spongey opponents.
On the other hand, Duke Nukem was an evolution of this kind of product, where the gameplay wasn’t honestly terribly evolved, but the interaction with the world, the application of aesthetic, was much, much deeper. Doom included its aesthetic origins in the form of monster design, the heavy-metal music aesthetic, the blood-and-sacrifices excess and a gloomy, brooding lighting and hyperviolent style. Doom didn’t need to interact with its world because violence was literally the only thing that mattered in its concept space. Duke was full of kitsch and stuff, stuff that was ultimately about its violence and excess, but were also given room to explore and talk about the ridiculous over-the-topness of its early-90s, late-80s bullshit macho aesthetic.
Duke Nukem was the game which presented character foremost, while Quake was the game that presented gameplay foremost.
3D Realms, the company that made Duke Nukem went on to create a bevy of games in the same vein, games that reused the Duke’s Build Engine endlessly, and filled them with aesthetically strong games. Blood was Duke Nukem doing gothic 1920s horror movies. Redneck Rampage was Duke Nukem doing … well, rednecks. Tekwar was – no lies, this game exists – Tekwar was Duke Nukem doing William Shatner’s series of Tekwar cyberpunk books and no really this actually exists stop laughing.
id, on the other hand, went on to make Quake 2 and 3, games which continued a focus on ludic systems and dismissed the concept space so hard that by Quake 3, they had dispensed with all pretense of any connecting tissue for gameplay and literally just made combat arenas designed for players to deathmatch into. The game was so wound around its design that they wound up shedding people who liked designing and writing story.
Hell, they’d already shed their most Duke Nukemy of parts, John Romero, who went on to found Ion Storm, a company that made nothing, nothing, nothing, a bit more nothing, and then went on to make Deus Ex, a game that largely gets held up as the greatest game of its generation by rhapsodic weirdos like me. And Deus Ex was built on an engine that was basically composed of soggy cardboard boxes, fell apart when you glanced at it hard, and was full of ridiculous design decisions like being a superagent enhanced with nanomachines who couldn’t shoot straight at the start of the game.
We spent a lot of our time in those days wondering over who’d win the fight.
Nowadays, the most successful first-person shooter is a multiplayer deathmatch game which reuses engines, has one fairly well-defined and tightly wound set of ludic structures, but also an aesthetic that it rides so hard into the ground.
It’s funny to look back at the history of it. The more I see, the more I think the thing that really made Quake excel was its modding. Eventually, someone made, from Quake’s engines, Half Life… which was a linear shooter with loose relation to systems but a tight focus on linear, cinematic experience.