Have you played Quake? If you have you’ll, like me, probably have wondered why Episodes 2 and 3 don’t end with a boss fight. This week, former Id designer Sandy Petersen explained some of the hacks he and American McGee tried bashing together to fill those boss-shaped holes, from a tower-block sized rotter to a giant grotesque spiderthing wot would’ve chased you around the entire map.
As spotted by our mates at RPS fanzine PC Gamer, Petersen – one of the four level designers on the original Quake – has been tweeting out some interesting tidbits regarding that game’s development lately. It’s no secret that Quake had a somewhat tortured production, and the pair attempted to fill some gaps with their own monstrosities.
McGee, for his part, had been working on an object scaler, and decided to test it out with a colossal undead bloke. The level would’ve had you nipping around its body, poking and prodding it like a heavily armed ant.
McGee made a Quake level with a 300-foot zombie. It barely fit into its half of the level. You fought it by using lifts and staircases on a scaffold by the zombie. McGee’s goal: see if 3-d scaling was useful. It was a near level but the art team vetoed it.
— Sandy Petersen (@SandyofCthulhu) October 11, 2020
Petersen’s, on the other hand, involved a scaled-up Vore that would’ve chased you throughout the level, a la the Alien in Alien: Isolation. Instead, the final chapter of Episode 2 features just one of these, regular-sized and all. Bit rubbish, that.
After McGee’s giant zombie: I made a giant vore whose homing darts chased you all through the level. You ran through tunnels and caverns evading darts & seeking a vantage to shoot back. Also canned by the art team. Because scaled-up critters look bad. pic.twitter.com/lRO6BlaBDt
— Sandy Petersen (@SandyofCthulhu) October 11, 2020
As Petersen explains, these were cheaper workarounds to try and fit some interesting endings into Quake’s middle episodes. “Fans of old Quake may note that episodes 2 & 3 lack boss monsters,” Petersen later mentioned. “McGee’s giant zombie and my own super-vore were tries to fill the gap”.
Both seem to have been scrapped for similar reasons, too, in that giant scaled-up versions of smaller enemy models actually looked a bit rubbish. Oh, well. Quake might still be an all-timer of an FPS, but we’ll just have to imagine the alternate universe where QuakeGuy becomes the lead in a bloody reboot of The Borrowers.
Besides. If Id won’t let us take on giant undead men, at least the modding community will let me fight a massive dog with a shotgun.