This year marks the
20th anniversary of the first DOS release of
Quake. The granddaddy of first person shooters, the game that popularized first iterations of e-sports and
LAN parties, one of the major contributors to gaming industry and the quintessential PC game that inspired generations upon generations, critically acclaimed as the
Machinima pioneer and so forth.
Philip Buuck announced a project in early December of the previous year, he is going to tackle compiling and re-writing Quake 1 from scratch starting with a completely blank page. It's a series that will include step-by-step development from the ground up. You can read more about it on his
blog or jump straight into the YouTube playlist section and kick it off from there. Mind you, the first two videos have shabby sound quality - it gets better from the third on.
Playlist part 0.1-0.6
Playlist part 0.7-1.3
"[..]named Handmade Quake thanks to the inspiration of the Handmade Dev community, and following the spirit of their manifesto, we will be starting with a blank Visual Studio project, nothing pre-written at all, and file by file, will turn it into the source code that id Software released to the world in late 1999.
The main goal for this project is to show you how full video games are actually built. As I was working towards my master’s degree in video game technology, I was surprised at the lack of high-quality materials, either in book form or online. Books tended to be light on info, usually teaching a language at the same time as discussing games, so they weren’t able to go into detail in either topic. Others talk exclusively about game development, but either provide no source code or basic demos that just don’t get into much depth at all, and are not intended to be played as games themselves. Basically – I want to learn about games, so show me a game!"
So if you were ever interested in the programming aspect of old-school first person shooters, or would just like to see a glimpse of what went "behind the scenes" at id studio roughly 20 years ago, here's a chance to follow this project and learn something from it.
Links: Official Announcement,
Philip Buuck,
YouTube