American McGee visited us; we worked with him on Quake sounds and combat “feel” for internet multiplay. We were under contract with Id Software, so a computer was brought into our workspace for McGee to correct the inevitable bugs and gameplay stoppages. Here’s some direct video of American McGee playing pre-release versions of Quake during level-editing sessions at my Game Design Atelier ‘way back when Quake and Doom and Duke Nukem first started!!!
Some of the footage reflects a Death-Match he and I did to test his weapons, notably the latest version of the legendary Nail Gun. He needlessly pointed out that he had the clear advantage of designing the levels, so he knew every secret passage and weapon, and of course, he knew the secret of the timing of the QUAD!!! Everyone knows these things now, but at that time, the game hadn’t even been released in ALPHA!!! You’ll perhaps notice some features in the video that were ultimately left out of the final release of Quake and Quake II, mostly because most computer systems weren’t able to cope with the advanced graphics quite yet, especially the MD-2 models, and speed was an intense issue; wild graphics and sound meant slowdown to 4 frames a second, if you were lucky! There were no video cards to speak of, and audio enhancement??? Forget it!!! So here are some Quake 1 TF 1 layouts that we wrote for the Team Fortress crowd back in 1996 and 1997. They aren’t playable on today’s machines, so it’s fortunate that we videotaped the original events when they happened! Here’s SUNSET, my top-rated TF1 map:
Sunset was very popular and received many tens of thousands of downloads and lots of gameplay in the early days of Team Fortress 1.1 Quake Version. I used World-Craft to construct it. There are twists and turns and all sorts of power-ups and such, and a very nice sniper deck which is just high enough for the rocket jumpers if they’re very good at it.
Sniper Jungle was by far our most successful and popular map besides Sunset and Da Docks, and was my personal favorite when teams were small, as in 2 on 2 or 3 on 3. It has been available as a free download from several sites. check on google to locate download websites that have gorebag or gorebagg tf1 maps.
Da Docks was a very popular download, played by several early TF1 clans. We liked the fact that it didn’t have a sniper deck. Snipers dominated the 2fort4 and 2fort5 scenarios just a bit too much for our liking. We preferred “in yer face” kinda combat.
This intriguing Early Quake TF1 map, T3F Zone 1, was made by XxaxX and was the favorite of many gaming clans, and espeically by Clan LoL members. It had tens of thousands of downloads over a period of about five years — for an early TF map, that’s a lot of downloads!!! By today’s standards, of course, it’s just the first few minutes after release, but there were only a few thousand computers out there between 1994 and 1997 that could handle Quake, let alone internet gaming connections! We were at the cutting edge, and here we are again, with our 3-D Game Web App!!!