Older Siblings give their younger siblings all manner of things. Hand me downs, advice, music tastes, or areas of interest. My brother did just what an older sibling should, he shared his interests. As a younger sibling, however, I have to wrestle with the perception that all younger siblings do: Imitation versus appreciation.

My brother is a musician, playing music on his varied instruments, something I've attempted with mixed success. I'm not a master at music theory, and while I may be well-read, I cannot seem to bring my level of literal music literacy to bear. I listened to many of the songs he'd play, over and over, and while distracting at times, I did broaden my horizons as to the genres and bands that I've come to appreciate.

Some of our childhood past-times involved the generation and manipulation of audio; things that would form a foundation of sorts for things like my long-dormant podcasts.

Something else that we did share more in common, came in the form of gaming. You can check the footage of our old camcorder, and you'll find me, next to Devin, fixated on the small CRT screen alight with the 8-bit worlds of the NES at the tender age of three.

While our tastes in games has diverged over the years, it was thanks to him that I found one of my favorite games of all time.

As I reach my Thirty Third birthday, Quake, my second favorite game also reached it's Third Decade. To celebrate this occasion, Machine Games and ID (Bethesda) released a brand new expansion to experience.

I once again had the chance to hop back into one of my favorite games; but hopping back into an old favorite, inevitably stirs up memory lane, blowing the leaves of time clear from the dark recesses of my, frankly overstuffed, mind. Lets get comfortable, and peruse the stacks as I regale the tale of how ID came to be a part of my Ego.

My brother Devin found the game on a shared server at Guilford High School, at a time when school districts would put an unrestricted file share on the network, something that was still not rectified by the time of my own education at the selfsame establishment. He'd pulled down whatever looked interesting, and what his friends were playing. Quake came home with him in 02006, along with Unreal Tournament and the first emulator I'd ever heard of, all in a single afternoon.

As I said, we'd had been working with audio for a number of years. We had, and I still have a boombox which we used to record our own radio shows on. One Christmas later we were gifted a Wild Planet Radio DJ. It had a built-in tape deck, and a dedicated microphone attached. It made the process feel more professional, with a variety of "sound board" buttons to spice things up. It also had a low powered broadcasting function that allowed us to do a live show, if only for our household. Later we got Jam-Its, microphones that hooked up to our PC and could be paired with some bespoke software. Everything we used before the modem arrived in 02004 was something we'd made ourselves, recorded into the computer, or coaxed out of Microsoft Sam.

In the fall of 02004 we finally got our own dial-up modem to connect to the internet. Among the many cascading effects of getting access to the internet, there was a Geocities page called 500 Funny Sounds, and we'd pull things off it. The name of the site was selling it short, as there were far more than 500 sounds ranging from Film Quotes to Cartoon Clips. We would pipe them into Microsoft Sound Recorder to create stories, and it was a riot.

Eventually we ended up with Medal of Honor: Allied Assault on PC. That's when we had an idea. We replaced the German soldier voices with our own and with whatever we'd found online, so the enemies would sound sillier when you shot at them. In those days, many games would simply store the sound effects in file structures accessible to the user, and easily modified. Replace 'scream.wav' with a new WAV file with the same name, and bobs your uncle.

Allied Assault runs on id Tech 3, which is the Quake III Arena engine, by way of Ritual Entertainment's work on Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K.². The archive format used in the software is the .pk3, a version-numbered descendant of Quake's own .pak. The first game I ever took apart was built on Quake technology and storing its files the way Quake stored its files, and this was all before I'd ever laid eyes on Quake itself.

Devin didn't seem too interested in Quake, but curiosity got the best of me. I fired up the game and was met with a mess of greenish brownish purplish redish pixels that I'd come to hold as dear as I hold Kingdom Hearts. I'd played Doom, so I was familiar with the company's exceptional track record. The strange thing about Quake, was it's distinct lack of music.

Quake shipped its soundtrack as redbook audio, which means ordinary CD tracks on the game disc. A copied install was discless, which meant there was no audio to be played. This was a copy of WinQuake, the official Windows Source Port of the Quake Engine. I'd eventually discovere further source ports, and the same PAK files that had allowed me to experience the original form, eventually got spiced up with some high resolution textures. But Steam sold Quake without it's soundtrack for years and a great many people played this game in silence and assumed it was intentional.

Our PC we got in 02004 included a disc burner, and I'd learned a bit about how that worked. I burned a disc in 02007 and got the music back. Nightdive eventually restored it properly in the 02021 remaster, which is the version I eventually bought.

Nine Inch Nails did the score and every sound effect, in the years between The Downward Spiral and The Fragile. Trent Reznor voiced Ranger, meaty grunting jumps and all, and the NIN logo sits on the nail ammo boxes. The music is mostly full of ambient tracks, closer to Lustmord , Coil, or the Eraserhead soundtrack than to any record the NIN name on the sleeve.

Redbook audio is simply the process of reading the tracks and playing them based on track order, or specific flags in the software's code. Many early CD games had longer load times to pull these tracks out, but the wait was certainly worth it. Sonic CD, Snatcher, and others on the SegaCD proved how much better the audio could be, and Quake had fully taken advantage of this function.

The resulting soundtrack doesn't react to the action on screen, however. If you were playing a game like Doom 2016, or even Eternal, you'll be treated to some high action music that adapts to what is going on. Proper stings when an ambush occurs, double bass-pedal rapidity to drive you to rip and tear, and small tunes that signal the danger has passed.

These are all things that Quake lacks. When a song starts, it continues until you hit the exit flag. The track will restart on your death, but otherwise maintains it's droning ambience, unbothered by your skill or lackthereof.

Quake began as an action RPG, built out of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign the id staff had been running. Romero pitched the idea of playing as Quake, with his mighty hammer. Going so far as to include an Easter Egg in Commander Keen. Then Carmack's engine work took the schedule, the RPG fell apart, and four designers with very different instincts filled the gap: Romero, Sandy Petersen, American McGee, and Tim Willits.

Quake is a bit of a mess, a glorious one, but a mess nonetheless. You go from a military installation to a gothic keep to a dimension made of meat, and none of the transitions make sense. The Thunderbolt (the sick lightning gun) is what's left of Romero's hammer. Four runes gate the last door because underneath the whole lot of it there's still a quest. Beneath all that, and bubbling up to the surface in the latter episodes: Lovecraft.

Sandy Petersen wrote Call of Cthulhu for Chaosium in 01981. He designed all of Doom's third episode and seventeen of Doom II's levels, and then brought his tabletop bestiary with him to Quake. Shub-Niggurath and the Shambler come from illustrations in his own field guide to Mythos monsters. Shub-Niggurath looks like a Dark Young because a Dark Young was the picture on his desk at the time.

Lovecraft never described her. Her first appearance under his byline is a 01928 revision story, and nearly everything else came later from August Derleth, Bloch, and Ramsey Campbell. The Elder World, which titles Quake's fourth episode, is Derleth's coinage. Chthon most likely comes from Brian Lumley's Chthonians. Shantak and Yog-Sothoth are in the design documents and were cut for time.

The Lovecraftian lineage has passed through five sets of hands, and it works because none of them were trying to be too literary about it. There's no scholar going mad over a manuscript, or an early 20's setting. Instead of a traditional Lovecraftian tale we get a Vietnam Vet on a neverending quest through Slipgates and arcane dimensions fighting man, monster, and Machine alike.

Quake was the first mainstream game to put precomputed static lightmaps on true 3D geometry, and it did that with 256 colors and no colored lighting, which didn't arrive until Quake II. Rendering light falling off across a surface takes many shades of that surface, and if the palette spends its slots on those, there isn't much left for anything else.

The iconic brown is what smooth lighting created in 01996. Quake is desolate more than it is frightening. Very little is staged to startle you (but much like a Tonberry, if I see a Vor I turn tail and run.) The levels can be large, particularly in the recent expansions, with corridors and castles full of architecture whose purpose is left for the player to decide.

MachineGames has been adding to Quake for a decade. Dimension of the Past for the twentieth anniversary in 02016. Dimension of the Machine for the twenty-fifth in 02021, with the Nightdive remaster. Call of the Machine in 02023, alongside the Quake II remaster. Now this one.

Their creative team for Quake is affectionately call the Quake Club. Some of them have been making levels for this game since 01996, which goes to show how well the game still holds up these three decades on.

Dawn of the Machine drops the hub structure the last two episodes used and runs as a single continuous campaign. Nineteen maps: a difficulty select, a hub, two boss levels, six secret levels, and a deathmatch map. As always you begin on a map that allows you to choose what difficulty you'd like to undertake. This time around it is called "The Thirtieth Passing,"and its towers are shaped like a 3 and a 0. The hub is a round chapel, the Runic Nexus, with sunlight falling on an angel and a bloody altar underneath.

Ranger is trapped in a dimension of illusion. He has died there thousands of times. He hears rumor of a Nightmare Machine that keeps it running. The influences the team has cited are Lovecraft's "Nyarlathotep," Philip K. Dick, and Thomas Ligotti.

The episode finally gives Quake 1 colored light maps, which is a Quake II feature the original could never have had. Some fan mods have done their best to implement these in the past. Additionally, the team implemented some new level physics that are thematically appropriate. Ranger will find himself losing, and or slipping through time and dimensions right in the middle of the map. To accomplish this the team made identical copies of each room which occupy the space directly beneath the real room, and simply replace the textures, creatures, and objects that populate the room. I'm not joking when my jaw hit the floor when I encountered these situations.

I'm two levels in, so I'll leave the final verdict to someone who's finished. I can say at this moment, that I think I like it more than the previous expansions. This time around there are features/ restrictions that are both thematically relevant, and give players the opportunity to change up their play-style. Bringing together the last 30 years of Quakes lineage to the fore gives new players the opportunity to enjoy fresh modern game-design, and it lets those of us who've been playing the original for decades, the opportunity to see our beloved game evolve.

But, like the story of Quake's development, which saw a tragic end to the golden age of Id Software, another series of unfortunate events has occurred at Id this year.

In July, Microsoft's Xbox division eliminated 136 roles at id Software. The WARN notice filed with the Texas Workforce Commission accounted for 96 in Richardson and 40 remote. Reports put it at more than half the studio, with further cuts in Frankfurt, part of a restructuring that removed more than 3,200 jobs across the gaming division.

Id said the remaining team is about the size it was when they made Doom in 02016, that the flat studio structure stands, and that they looked forward to seeing everyone at QuakeCon.

John Carmack wrote that his earlier prediction about Microsoft being a good steward of the brand was not aging well, and that this would dampen the mood of the founder reunion. He said he couldn't summon much anger, and that he suspected id had always been a marginal business from Microsoft's view. A former id animator wrote: I hope our pain was worth it.

Video games occupy a space between Art and Entertainment, much like that of Cinema. Some of the greatest films were made on shoestring budgets, filmed guerilla style without permits. They embodied the craft and creativity that the human soul craves. The most profitable films have also seen the biggest returns on investment. In certain cases this has come true for games, but the larger the sample-size, the more that these runaway successes become outliers.

We're on the backside now, of a terribly dull trend of big-budget bloated messes that may initially satiate some audiences, they end up as empty calories. You may use Wagyu Beef and artisanal cheese, but when you overcook the meat, all you taste is charcoal. Expedition 33 is a perfect example of delicious "Cheese and Wine" snagged on sale at Aldi. The cost was what it needed to be, no more, no less. The game cost me less than two "AAA" titles, and has had a greater cultural impact than that of a Dozen "Foamstars."

The industry looks bleak, as layoffs abound; as Private Equity fucks everything up. I apologize for the sharp language, but that is the honest truth. Private Equity ruined a long-running restaurant franchise from my hometown, and it continues to do so across many industries. We're experiencing Doctorow's "Enshitification," in real time.

I've had Quake for twenty years and I've never stopped going back to it. It is timeless, endlessly replayable, no gatcha mechanics, or battle passes. We get free DLC every couple of years, and without spending another cent on it. You get to experience an incongruous, yet perfect blend of disparate genres to create something Eldritch, certainly, but magical in the whistful sense.

It came to me second-hand off a school network, without its music, on a computer in a family room in Illinois, and I spent an evening working out how to give it back the thing it was missing. That was 02007, then somebody at Nightdive did the same job properly in 02021. I bought their version, which is the one I play now.

Four designers who couldn't agree built it out of a cancelled RPG, using monsters copied out of a tabletop rulebook, in a palette that couldn't afford a bright color anywhere. It should have aged into a curiosity, yet a group of people at another studio have spent ten years making new levels for it and giving them away.

Quake is a curiosity worth all of the love it has received, and I will always count it as one of my favorites. That isn't my whole story with Ranger, however, but I'll save that tale for my upcoming redux of my own Hacker History. The timing of my first trip into the world of Quake, was just right, and it set me on a path I still walk today.