waht time does Quake take place in

[Alexis Wasilla]

Cause from what I seen so far, We are in some sort of fortress that seems to have technology stuff, then theres like Castle-like articutacture to everything, and we have shotguns, grenade launchers and a machine gun, then there's like Knight guys? I don't know what's going on at all

[BadMojo]

You should read "the masters of doom", about halfway through the book it talks about the development of quake.. Basically during development of quakes engine, John Romero was too caught up in being a celebrity, and didnt give the artists much of a direction as to what to do, so they ended up creating a mixture of futuristic, medievil, gothic and so on themes.. by the time the engine was done, they just decided to slap doom style weapons in the game and call it a day.

It was originally supposed to be some kind of RPG with lots of features crammed in... Which is why the level design is all over the place... But in the end it made John Romero quit and form ION Storm, to then create Dai Katana.. which was a big flop.

As for trying to explain the story and whats going on in the game... Its the whole "The marines found a teleporter they call a "Slipgate", that goes to another dimention. You are the hero that has to go through and destroy all the evil within and defeat Shub Niggurath who supposedly wants to take over the world".. or something like that... At the end of the day, quake doesnt need a story or explination as it was of a time where that kind of thing didnt matter to anyone.

hope this answers your question :)

[ULTRA]

Well judging by the levels that precede every episode, where guys have laser guns, I assume it's sometime in the future. The dudes have medieval-looking armor because "style"

[elderstyx]

I always think the "idBase" levels in Quake take place in the near future. There are lasers and teleporters, sure, but they seem very rudimentary and the grunts still use shotgun shells.

The four dimensions take place in a land out of our time, and whoever the zombies and knights used to be built castles and fortresses to protect themselves in an obviously hostile world. They failed, and so they just got absorbed into Quake's army just like the grunts did.

Of course, this is all speculation, as the lore in Quake is all over the place like BadMojo pointed out.

[Smkn-G1]

It might as well exist outside of our concept of time.

The slipgates transport you to different locations, but could also teleport you to different times as well. Likewise, the bad guys might also be using the slipgates to transport their forces through not only space but also time. The slipgates have made a mish-mash of spacetime to the point where mind controlled ogres with grenade launchers that fire self replicating grenades stand beside primitive armored knights and their spell casting bretheren, mind controlled marines from today have been forcibly conscripted and find themselves alongside their laser weapon future selves, monstrosities from the far reaches of past and future distant worlds have been brought to heel...

Shub Niggurath itself is a timeless lovecraftian abomination existing through time, space and other dimensions,

But in less abstract terms, it takes place sometime in the future. And just because you use shotguns, doesn't make it any less the future. Firearms, in a general sense, are primitive technology that dates back centuries... for all the advancements made to them, they are still a mere chemical reaction to make an expanding gas launch a metal projectile/s out of a hollow tube. Primitive as they are, they are effective at what they do. Just because it's in the future doesn't mean technology advanced evenly across all spectrums of life. Perhaps weapons technology, and military applications as a whoe, regressed... while the need for the slipgates caused the techology to bring about their creation saw an increase. Mayhaps the creation of the slipgates ran into the perfect storm... and we encountered a foe perfectly poised to take advantage of our first steps into teleportation coupled with our declined military prowess... it would explain how they so easily and so quickly have every "earthside" military base under their control in such a seemingly short period of time, while the halls and locales of the other dimensions have been under their control for untold numbers of years, centuries or millenia even...

[jeff1989]

Never mind the story, Just kill stuff!

[Phoenix]

This is the take we took on the "unified Id story" for our Generations project. I'm kind of ad-libbing things as the original story got lost years ago, but it might help tie things together if you choose to accept it as a storyline. If not, hey, it's all fiction, right?

Chronologically, the events of Quake transpire after those of Doom but before those of Quake 2.

Earth was decimated after the demonic invasion. Rebuilding was difficult. It was a bit of a dark age. Though technologically progress was being made, it had more of a brutish, forced utilitarian aspect rather than the slick high-tech wizardry that existed on the Mars bases before the invasion from Hell. The teleportation tech from the UAC's initial experiments was salvaged, and the slipgates were the eventual culmination of those advancements. In order to avoid another invasion, explorers were sent through the slipgates to ascertain what, if any, threats might still be lurking out there. After all, Hell may have been defeated, but perhaps not forever. At first all seemed to be going well, but behind the scenes, Shub-Niggurath, one of the Great Old Ones of Lovecraftian lore, was plotting to use the slipgates to spearhead her own invasion of Earth. Once the invasion began, the enemy was codenamed "Quake" by the military command. Whether this "Quake" was indeed Shub-Niggurath or yet another mastermind pulling the strings behind the scenes we'll never truly know, though there may be a clue in the fate of those who fought in these great wars.

Regarding the disparity of environments... Each episode in Quake starts at a different military installation on Earth, which is why you see grunts, enforcers, and rottweilers roaming around. These were once your friends, your fellow marines, and guard dogs. Quake's minions turned them into something far less friendly. Once you deal with your former comrades and pass through a slipgate you find yourself in one of the "other" realms. You no longer see the soldiers and dogs, nor the high-tech environments, but rather older and more sinister realms of gothic dread populated by nightmarish fiends and sick parodies of earthly life. These are the children of Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat With a Thousand Young. The knights, ogres, fiends, shamblers, scrags, and zombies are all of her making. The weapons and armor of the evil knights hail from another dark age, as ever the Great Old Ones have been clawing at the boundaries of reality, consuming who they may, and recruiting those who would serve them. The grenades and chainsaws the ogres tote around hail from your own age, demonstrating the swiftness and thoroughness of Shub's invasion. Poor H.P. Lovecraft thought he was only writing works of fiction... not realising the irony that his strange imaginings and visions of cosmic horror were indeed dreamed to him by the great Cthulhu, and that far from being fiction, they were merely the broken shards of the coming madness that his poor earthy mind would never even begin to fathom.

At the end of it all, Ranger, the only surviving Slipgate Explorer and a hardened combat veteran prior, managed to save the earth from disaster just as Doom had, thus ending Shub's horrific plans and sealing the nightmare realm of Quake for good. The Earth prospered, mankind reached out into space and fortified the earth with increased military might... only to find yet another insurmountable foe at its door when the Strogg came to invade, and giving rise, once again, to yet another great hero that would bring mankind's mortal enemy to its knees.

Following the end of the Strogg war and humanity's narrow victory, we still do not know who else may lurk in the shadows, waiting for the next chance to claim the Earth, but we do know this much. Every great hero from each of these invasions has been claimed by the mysterious Vadrigar. Doom, Ranger, Bitterman, and several of their comrades became combatants in the Arenas Eternal. Could all of this have been engineered by the Vadrigar? Did they orchistrate the repeated invasions of Earth in an attempt to destroy humanity, or was it all just an elaborate endgame, sacrificing billions of lives just to fill their arenas with the mighty saviors that would inevitably rise up in the face of annihilation for the sake of their own infernal entertainment? Did they cause all of this through manipulation of the dark powers of hell, the Elder Worlds, and Stroggos, or were they simply opportunists, waiting in the shadows to snatch up the best of the best before they could make the ultimate sacrifice?

No one will ever truly know.

tl;dr: It's a narrative, fool! Go back and read it!

[spacerabbit]

It takes place in multiple time periods. If you're paying attention to the centerprinted text that pops up when you're in the selection room, it should give you some ideas as to what the slipgates do and where they take you.

[Phoenix]

If you count the mission packs, half of Dissolution of Eternity takes place in the distant past as well.

[BadMojo]

I think you should all read the original quake manual for the "official" storyline if you really want to put your minds at ease... But like one of the posters above said, back in the quake days, nobody cared about story, it was about the game play... You know, the whole fast action fps, 3d environment, multi-player game thing... Which was a fairly new thing back then... Unlike today's standards where every game is expected to have a reason to be.

[BondageSpider]

I think it was supposed to take place in the "present day" (when the game was released) with the slipgates and other futuristic technology being some secret government project, and the fantasy/horror themed stuff taking place in parallel dimensions. But as others have pointed out, the storyline for this game went through several versions before they pretty much just gave up.

Originally when the game was first announced, the description the devs gave in an interview made it sound like it was going to be some kind of online MMO RPG, and the features they described would have been flatly impossible with the PC technology of the time, so it was a classic early example of overambitious indie studio hype. The final game bears no resemblance to this, so they must have thrown out almost everything but the name between then and release.

This is probably my least favorite id franchise, because everything feels more like a tech demo than a finished game, but I can't deny it paved the way for big advances in PC gaming.