My email to John Carmack in 1998 about his Quake 3 .plan

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FlyingPenguin
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My email to John Carmack in 1998 about his Quake 3 .plan

Post by FlyingPenguin »

Heh. Went down a rabbit hole this morning, reading my old rant posts on The Quake Coop. This was the most recent one.
6/17/98 - An e-mail to John Carmack Concerning His Announcement of Quake Arena

Hi,

I rarely write to a developer because I know you guys are busy (likely you have your e-mail filtered by a secretary and may never see this, but at least you'll get a tally from your staff on yea and nay responses to you .plan), but I had to write concerning your Quake Arena announcement.

One word: OK!

Online multiplayer is where it's happening, and Quake and Quake 2 are the best online multiplayer games in existence. It'll be great to see the team that brought us these gems focus their full attention on a multiplayer-specific game. You're absolutely right in your .plan - coding a game for both solo and multiplayer just invites sacrifices in the quality of one for the other.

There were a few first-person action games that begged for replay: Doom, System Shock and Duke Nukem 3D are the only ones I can think of real quick. Today, most of us, go through the solo game once, and never play it again. Sometimes we never even finish if the deathmatch game is good enough to lure us away (and if it's working right!). I've yet to finish Quake, although I actually did finish Q2, and I'm in that boat now with Unreal. I'm playing solo Unreal just to bide my time until (hopefully) they get the Internet play working. Jedi Knight was a disappointment to me. The solo game was great, but the multiplayer aspect just doesn't work for me. Quake and Quake 2 have been MORE than worth their original purchase price considering the thousands of hours of multiplayer gaming I've gotten out of them.

It's a different world since Doom and Duke came out, when we played them over and over again looking for every little secret that we missed the first time around, and being happy enough with that. However, multiplayer is THE thing now - I play 2-3 hours a day. I personally know people that own computers ONLY for playing Quake online and don't use them for anything else.

We, as your happy consumers, would like nothing better than (for once!) to have a first-person shooter that works fabulously in multiplayer right out of the box. And hell yes, we DO want more than just deathmatch. CTF is very important to me and many others.

I know you're going to hear some grumbles from some quarters about your decision, but I think you're on the right track. I think the first-person shooter genre has now reached a stage where perhaps there SHOULD be two different products: one designed specifically for solo play, and one designed for multiplayer. There's enough of a market for it now. It's only appropriate that the company that has been at the forefront of taking radical approaches toward new gaming releases should be the one to break this new ground.

Bravo!
"Turns out I’m 'woke.' All along, I thought I was just compassionate, kind, and good at history. "

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