Genre: First-Person Shooter
Developer: Nightdive Studios
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

As this reviewer wrote in his expansive retrospective, Quake was so out-of-this-world that it'd be like seeing a holographic game today. As is their way, Nightdive Studios has gone to the ends of hell and back to deliver every feature in this port anyone could want, all toggleable: stencil shadows, dynamic lighting, animation interpolation, colored lighting, texture filtering, multiple resolution modes, and so much more. The player colors and cursor can be customized, ala the original game. Unlike "Doom" which starts to lose its personality as resolutions increase, Quake's gothic architecture scales to 16:9 beautifully. There may be a frame drop or two, but performance is extremely solid, even in split-screen mode.

Trent Reznor and Chris Vrenna were commissioned to do the Red Book soundtrack, which wound up being a combination of ambient whispers, distorted screaming, mechanical-sounding guitar, thumping drum samples, and all sorts of other 90s "industrial"-style experimental music. Even this reviewer, a huge Bobby Prince fan, had to admit that the "Nine Inch Nails" style fit the game's universe to a tee. What makes Quake stand out aurally though isn't the music: it's the sound effects, which are some of the best to ever grace a video game. The ammo crate pickups, the "taking damage in lava" yelp, the elevator sound, the quad damage noise, the "chink chink" armor pickup sound... all of it explodes out the speakers, and serves functional "what are the other players doing" recognitional purposes during deathmatch as well.

As the first-ever game in the genre which allowed for true, completely undistorted and uncompromised movement and free looking around fully true 3D environments-- even underwater!-- Quake was positively awe-inspiring on its "QTest" release in 1995. The level designs are some of the best to ever grace a video game, being equally playable and wonderfully balanced in single player or in deathmatch. The Switch control scheme involves a "hold R" weapon wheel and gyro aiming, with jump mapped to LR. The game has the full single player campaign, both official expansion packs, two brand new packs, full co-op support, and a complete botmatch implementation as well, along with all eight of the "DM" maps.

Because of how much Quake meant and means to this reviewer and his troubled teenage years, it wasn't until this re-release that he revisited the game for the first time since 1998. As it turns out, the title hasn't aged a day: running around its Lovecraftian levels controlling the rocket launcher and armor is as fun now as it was then. Its earnest simplicity is refreshing in this day of "way too complicated" genre entries-- if anything, the single player is more refreshing in today's industry than it was when the game was new! Enough can't be said about Nightdive Studios going above and beyond the call of duty: they even implemented post-match chatter with the bots-- "gg", "nice", "gtg", and so forth. This is an unbelievable package.