

How Quake (the videogame) changed my life forever. - aw3c2
http://derelict-compendium.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-quake-and-my-wife-changed-my-life.html

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gmurphy
Quake is also responsible for changing my life: after years of muddling around
in BASIC and LOGO I started writing mods in QuakeC, which required me to write
code, design a website, design and build models, and test and test and
continually tweak and iterate on the experience. For the first time I was
writing large code and doing serious graphics work, and I loved it deeply.

It lead me towards building websites and writing about games, and out of the
Quake community I met people who ran Unreal websites - they gave me a copy of
their CMS, and I ended up learning PHP/MySQL from it and building and
designing bigger and better websites.

I dropped out of my Mechatronics/CS degree to pursue programming for a living
- which lead to my first exposure to the then-revolting idea that programming
and design were different disciplines. I spent years bouncing back and forth
between the two, never quite fitting in, but learning a ridiculous amount
along the way.

Now I'm at Google, technically employed as a software engineer but leading the
design of a large product. I probably would have ended up somewhere in the
software industry anyway, but I believe that I'm in this exact position, the
best job I could possibly imagine, because of a chain of coincidences that
were kicked off by Quake and its modding tools.

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ambiate
The quake community and game changed my life. Of course, when I started, it
was mplayer. I had just traded my Playstation 1 for a 486DX, a huge mistake in
everyone's eyes. I used my rich friend's grandmother's AOL login to get
online. (This continued for 3-4 years, my mother still wonders what the "weird
noise" was on the phone lines past midnight).

The broken physics and quirks of Team Fortress in QuakeWorld is what really
caught my eye. I was hooked like a fiend. I was recruited by many guilds and
known for my 9600BP lagging , teleporting and fragging! Not to mention my 1MB
cirrus logic integrated video card, it chugged along at ~12FPS in 320x200(?).

I got interested in manipulating Quake. Living in MS, there were no mentors
for learning to program or script. I went in blind and came out with a few
mods.

Years later, I ported team fortress with quakeworld physics into Enemy
Territory, (Feb/Mar 2004?), but never found anyone interested in doing the
sound or graphics.

Obviously, my original endeavor into quakeC led to a whole new world of coding
and languages!

At this point, I had a few life changes. I made a handful of lifetime friends
from IRC and my old clans.

Now, looking back, it was Quake and my natural ability to tinker that led to
my pursuit of a degree in computer science/bioinformatics. I am currently in
my junior year.

I emailed John Carmack a few times asking for legal advice regarding using
shareware Quake 1 models in a development version of my port of QuakeWorld to
ET. He gave me good advice and has been a great influence.

Oh, and trying to figure out how to make VIS run faster on a BSP map was the
end of me. VIS took forever, and I mean forever, to run on my 100mhz computer.

------
emp_
IMO, his wife changed his life. Having dreams / passions is very common,
having the push to pursuit them, very rare.

~~~
kanamekun
The author definitely agrees!

<< At the end of all this, it wasn't just Quake that really changed my life,
my wife did. Quake gave me a direction to point in, and my wife picked me up
and pushed me forward when I thought the road was closed to me. >>

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Tycho
I like how he didn't even get started till he was about 24 and had no head
start from previous work. It seems rare to read a success story that doesn't
involve people getting obsessed with an activity in their mid-teens (often
building on a good academic performance in maths or something like that).

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harryh
I wouldn't say it changed my life, but the first pretty serious piece of
software I ever wrote was a game loader for Doom/Doom II/Heretic/Hexen. You
could select which game you wanted to play, and which WADs you wanted and if
the WADs were originally created for a different game it would run them
through a conversion script for the game you wanted.

Later on I added support for DeHackEd so you could modify the exe to change
things like weapon speed power. Pretty sure I had support for setting up
multiplayer games as well.

It was all written in Turbo Pascal and had a really nice GUI where I
programmed all the primitives (radio boxes/check boxes/scroll
boxes/buttons/etc) myself from scratch.

I really really wish I still had source code to the thing, but I lost it years
ago. I was really proud of it.

------
ronnier
Quake also changed my life. I bought my first computer to play Quake which got
me into scripting and making video game websites. That got me interested in
programming and lead me to getting a masters in CS and programming jobs while
in school. Now I'm at Amazon thanks to John Carmack!

~~~
akshaykarthik
My first foray into programming was actually a yearning to figure out someone
else's aimbot for Quake.

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angrycoder
Quake changed a lot of people's live. I don't think there is a single game out
there that created jobs for so many people as Quake, the two most largest
examples being Valve and Gamespy. Quake also pretty much single handedly got
the the 3d video card revolution started.

~~~
wlievens
Not to mention inspiring thousands to take up a carreer in various fields
tangentially related to game development.

It's a bit like the Apollo project :)

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rgbrgb
Pretty inspiring story but this really made me laugh:

"The kind of stuff that most people think is really cool now, but would
immediately relegate you to punching bag status, and honestly not very cool
with the chicks back then."

I think you probably just started spending a larger proportion of your time
with people who share your interests. Fantasy novels are still not cool in
high school. :)

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Maxious
<http://gamessavedmylife.com/> is a growing collection of stories about how
playing games has helped people emotionally, often in ways their creators
probably didn't envision.

But of course, games and game modding has had a profound impact on a lot of
technical folk. Many late nights bending BSP trees to my will in Valve
Worldcraft ;)

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gavanwoolery
I started out with tools like Deluxe Paint and Animation and QBASIC. I learned
3D modeling long before I touched a level editor, using tools like POVRAY and
some crappy Windows 3.1 3D rendering/modeling package. I think the first level
editor I used was Ken Silverman's for Duke Nukem 3D. But if I had to point out
a game that really changed my life, it was Ultima 7 - it inspired me to learn
art, programming, design, etc. It was so far ahead of its time and even was
more interactive than many games are today. It was the closest thing to a
"sandbox" game at that point in time, I think.

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skrebbel
Awesome wife. I'd say love, even more than Quake, changed the OP's life.

Great story.

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pnathan
I bought my first computer to play games. I thought I could do better, so I
started modding games (X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter). I got tired of fighting other
people's game ideas and wanted to make my own. And the path to that lay
through a BSCS. Then I realized that there were more interesting and
fulfilling aspects to programming besides games.

But my story isn't as awesome as the author of the article's.

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tintin
A rotating clown's head changed my life. I think it was 20 years ago. I would
love to see that animation again. I think it was a FLIC file. The beauty of
the lighting started the (3D) programmer / designer in me.

~~~
DanBC
Clown.zip listed here?
(<http://cd.textfiles.com/powerpakgold/FILES_RA/FILES.2>) and downloady here?
(<http://cd.textfiles.com/powerpakgold/ANIMAT/>)

~~~
tintin
Wow, that's it! I've been searching for this. Thank you.

Amazing that a simple 256 color animation from 1989 can change your life ;)

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i_c_b
Just have to chime in with one more "Quake changed my life", though perhaps
even more so than most - loving Doom to death, I was _utterly_ obsessed with
Quake modding and map making. Then I sensibly dropped out of college in 1997
and went to Raven Software to work as a programmer, where I got to work with
the Quake engine while its paint was still wet, and even more so with Quake 2
while it was being developed. The amount of brilliant co-workers I had who
came up through the mod community at that point is actually pretty
astonishing, in hindsight.

Thanks id.

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davidhollander
> _I think it was either Qed, or Qoole..._

Ah, Qoole was the first level editor I ever tried. What I vividly remember
about Quake 1 though was all the mods! I spent hours tying up the phone on a
14.4K modem hunting for new stuff to try.

Grappling hooks, bots, friendly attack dogs, Quake Rally which converted it
into a racing game, Air Quake which added pilotable helicopters and tanks... I
didn't get into coding until UnrealScript, but Quake 1 definitely got me into
the internet.

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simonw
For me it was Team Fortress Classic. I was in between A-Levels and University,
not entirely sure what I wanted to do with myself and working a boring job in
Office World (UK equivalent of Office Depot) - but in the evenings I was
running a TFC clan, then later running a TFC news website. I ended up being
hired by an online gaming dotcom which is where I realised that web
development was what I wanted to do.

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zerohp
Quake reignited my passion for computers after I spent several years off
focusing on automobile related hobbies.

I had been exposed to Linux before but Quake was what caused me to run it on
the desktop at first. The networking stack was significantly better than on
Windows. It also caused me to learn scripting in a unix environment to parse
logs on the server we placed at my brother's office.

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pornel
My story is similar. QuakeC was the first "C-family" language I've learned :)

I've been creating new weapons and battle modes on Amiga (in a tiny, tiny
window) and playing those on PCs at school.

I've learned a lot about game physics, geometry and program design.

Kudos for making Quake programming approachable, portable and so much fun.

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staunch
Count me as another. Quake was a huge part of why I loved computers. I also
created and published a number of maps and seriously considered trying to
become a pro level designer. Linux and web progrmming eventually became more
interesting but that inspiration was critical.

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joeyespo
Those who are against gaming are the ones who really need to read posts like
this. Mario Bros for NES changed my life forever and it's wonderful reading
about how others are affected. Even more interesting is how age is completely
irrelevant to these experiences.

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TeMPOraL
Computer games are what dragged me into programming in the first place. Later,
Quake II source code, Unreal Tournament headers for native development and
UnrealScript taught me lots of valuable lessons about game code design and
programming in general.

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yesimahuman
I believe Quake had a big impact on the growth of my technical ability at a
young age. Tweaking config files, creating maps, setting up game servers,
messing with skins and mods. I cherish those days.

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robryan
Similar story in a way, games like ff7,8 and 9 got me into RPG game making,
which then got me involved in community websites which then lead to me
learning PHP to help improve these websites.

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mambodog

        LEAK LEAK LEAK

Oh how I hated you.

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BasDirks
In quite a different way Quake(3) shaped my life (being the engine for Call of
Duty 4). I got paid to travel around Europe playing it for money.

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aw3c2
I (submitter) am not the author.

