Quake 4 is kinda the forgotten sibling of the Quake family, so much so that just over two decades after its initial release, casual gamers might be forgiven for not realizing the series didn’t end with Quake III: Arena. Each of the series’ first three entries were, after all, both great games and landmarks for one reason or another: the original game was a flat-out masterpiece of low-poly Lovecraftian weirdness; its sequel was a milestone in the development of hardware-accelerated graphics; and Arena broke new ground with its focus on multiplayer action. Quake 4, though? It… um, well, it came out on Xbox?
Quake 4’s poor-relation status may or may not explain why it remains to date the last numbered entry in the series, and why a planned expansion—entitled Quake 4: The Awakening, and developed externally by a company called Ritual Entertainment—was cancelled. The Awakening was buried so comprehensively, in fact, that basically no-one knew of its (non-)existence until 2017, when artist Vitaliy Naymushin released several images of models that would have appeared in the game. The models are interesting in and of themselves, and have been picked over in the decade since—this one, in particular, bears more than a passing resemblance to the Carcass monster from 2020’s Doom Eternal.
Anyway, that would probably have been it for the story of The Awakening had a veteran game developer by the name of Justin Marshall not gotten divorced. As per his Github, at some point during his divorce, Marshall bought a vintage computer from Amazon. What he found on that computer, he writes, “essentially saved my life.”
So what did he find? Almost unbelievably, Marshall says that the machine’s hard drive contained a functioning alpha copy of Quake 4’s long-lost expansion. It’s unclear exactly when this happened, or to whom the computer originally belonged, but as of this week Marshall has released his find to the rest of the world. As an expansion, The Awakening requires a copy of the base game to run, but apart from that, you can basically download it and you’re good to go. As proof, YouTube channel pagb666 has published multiple long videos of gameplay footage.
Above are the first three missions, and based on what the video shows, the game looks surprisingly complete. There’s voice acting, although its flat nature suggests it’s probably placeholder acting done by developers, and that it’d most likely have been replaced by professional voicing later on. (I’m only guessing here, though.) Anyway, the levels are impressively detailed and seem largely finished, and perhaps most interestingly for fans of later id Software games—particularly the company’s most recent release, Doom: The Dark Ages—one includes a long section where your character pilots a mech. Later missions also involve flying a speeder.
Unsurprisingly, some aspects of the game feel awfully dated. Apart from obvious factors like the graphics, the writing’s earnest military tone—with the same sort of hard-bitten we-are-the-Marines-but-in-space banter you’ve heard everywhere from Aliens to Halo—feels particularly uninspired. (Aliens feels like it was, ahem, very strong inspiration throughout.) Still, taken for what it is, this is a fascinating piece of history that could easily have been lost to the past. Marshall’s Github also notes that he “just got laid off due to the AI surge,” and that he’s open to work, so if you’re one of the three people left in any sort of creative pursuit with a budget to spend, maybe do the man a solid.
