Historical Development Environments for Quake: From NeXT to Windows NT
By
birdculture
A baker's-dozen of insight crammed into one ring.
Summary
The article details the historical compilation and development environments used for the classic video game Quake in the late 1990s. It explains that the initial Quake executables (quake.exe and vquake.exe) were programmed on HP 712-60 hardware running NeXT and cross-compiled with DJGPP on a DEC Alpha server. After shipping Quake in 1996, id Software switched from their NeXT-based development stack to Intergraph hardware running Windows NT due to concerns about NeXT stagnation. Later versions including winquake.exe, glquake.exe, and QuakeWorld executables were all developed and compiled on Windows platforms.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledThe first batches of Quake executables, quake.exe and vquake.exe were programmed on HP 712-60 running NeXT and cross-compiled with DJGPP running on a DEC Alpha server 2100A.
In June of 1996, having shipped their title but concerned with NeXT stagnation, id Software switched their development stack.
We moved to Intergraph hardware running Windows NT right after shipping Quake. - John Carmack
The next versions of Quake, winquake.exe, glquake.exe, and QuakeWorld (qwcl.exe and qwsv.exe) were all developed and compiled on Windows.
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