Wanton Hubris

Remember Quake? I mean the original. The one that ran in 640×480 if you had a kick ass machine? The one that had real time lighting on the rockets and we thought that was jaw droppingly bad ass? Yeah, that one.

I got to thinking about it the other day and thought I’d see if anyone had ported it to the Mac since id Software released the source code all those years ago. Sure enough, someone had! OK, so I had the executables. I needed data. I installed it on my PC (I still have my original CD, natch) and copied the data from there to my Mac. Bingo! Quake running on my Mac.

Now my curiosity was truly tingling. Are there any level editing tools on the Mac? I started looking around and while they were tough to find, I did manage to score a ported set of compiling tools here. These aren’t perfect in that they munge path names pretty badly and you have to put WAD files and things in directories that you don’t really want to but, hey, at least they work.

Then I went hunting for a MAP file to compile. Much to my surprise, John Romero released them all! Yes, every MAP file from the original Quake.

With that in hand, I still needed a decent WAD file to compile the MAPs against. I found what I believe to be the last one in existence here (scroll down to the “quake.wad” download).

And it all works! There are a few missing textures here and there and the tools aren’t the current versions so, yes, there are a few maps that compile into states that Quake won’t load but fuck it - it works!

I’ve been playing the game over the weekend and really enjoying being back in that place. Quake was where I really got started doing level design and it’s where the seeds of my professional career were planted. I’m going to stay in this world for a bit. I like it here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 30th, 2007 at 5:49 pm and is filed under Misc, Quake. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.