Quake 2 - On this day

The original 1996 Quake introduced verticality to the first-person shooter genre, allowing the development studio id Software to experiment with new games. However, many employees had already left the team at the time, including John Romero, and their new projects with working titles such as Strogg or Load ended up as a sequel to Quake, which came out exactly 24 years ago.

It was a happy outcome for the players as Quake 2 was a great game in its day. The series focused on sci-fi themes and motifs, introducing us to an enemy race called Strogg. Stroggs are a cybernetic race whose members modify bodies with different machinery and weapons, which, among other things, cause various mutations.

Quake 2 has expanded its gameplay by introducing squats, or the ability to bend the player. At the time, this ability was not common in first-person shooters. The structure of the game was set by missions and tasks within them, and we followed the story through CGI animations between missions.

Although the environments in the game were extremely "cube", Quake 2 was one of the first games in the genre in 1997 to take place in open spaces, and the levels themselves were much higher. The technology that powered the game at the time was extremely popular, and many FPS games were based on it including Soldier of Fortune, Daikatana, Anachronox, Heretic II, and others. 

Quake 2 was initially exclusive to the PC for a good year and a half, after which it appeared on Nintendo 64 and PlayStation consoles. Versions for consoles were graphically inferior, and they lacked a whole range of options and functionalities from the PC version. 

The PlayStation release even used a different driver, and the Nintendo 64 version had completely different levels. Nevertheless, the manufacturers managed to perform local multiplayer on the consoles in a split-screen for four players, which resulted in the success of the game on the consoles as well.

By 2002, Quake 2 had sold more than a million copies worldwide. It got three expansions on the PC, two with new single-player missions and one with new multiplayer modes and maps. The game was popular among the modding community which created numerous add-ons for it.

The first form of the Quake 2 remaster was given on the Xbox 360 console, where it appeared as a bonus along with the Quake 4 port.

The second remaster in 2019 experienced a PC release, but not all players could experience it. Namely, Quake 2 has become an example of how and how much older games can be beautified with raytracing effects. Quake 2 RTX was free to all owners of the original game but asked you to have a little more expensive Nvidia RTX series cards. It is possible to run the RTX version on GTX cards, but not in a very playable state.