“And it was refreshing for us to do something new but kind of familiar. “We were a bunch of sci-fi nuts!” Tim reasons. That’s why you were by yourself, because the human forces had sent individual pods out since everything else was too big and would get hit by the big guns.”īut while id strived to instil Quake II with the key tenants of Quake’s core gameplay, rather than reworking the sequel as a dark fantasy it decided to retain the project’s decidedly sci-fi -themed narrative. So in Quake II, your job would be to knock out the big guns before the big dropships could come in. Kevin had this great idea where he said: ‘Guns Of Navarone.’ That was the inspiration for Quake II, and it made sense because in the movie the Allies had to knock out the big guns that the Germans had before they could assault.

“Kevin Cloud stepped up to lead the project and refocus us on something that was more story-based and set in a different universe.

“Romero was let go, and we took a different approach to the next Quake game,” he tells us.

But after helping id to make the FPS mainstream with instant classics such as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake, John parted ways with the small firm, and its remaining developers made the decision to take their next project in a new direction, as Quake II level designer Tim Willits remembers. Few western developers had higher profiles during the '90s than id Software cofounder John Romero, and fewer still had a rockstar image to go with their fame.

Quake 2 machine gun