It's kind of weird to see people still gripping onto the idea of a new Quake game, so let me sit down and explain in one place (as opposed to random forum posts scattered around) where the rumors came from, what they mean, and why I'm frankly so confused.

Back in 2021, Id and Night Dive Studios released a remaster of Quake 1 featuring a wonderful new campaign by an "after school club" at MachineGames consisting of veteran Quake mappers teaching modern AAA developers how things used to be done back before megatextures. It rules!

Evidently, during development, someone somewhere heard the words "MachineGames" and "Quake" together in one sentence, and came to the understandable, if incorrect, conclusion that MachineGames was doing a whole new AAA Quake game.

This is where it gets a bit weird, though: From the sounds of things, whoever took those bread crumbs and glued them together wrongly started adding their own random bits on top of that to flesh it out? Leading to a weird thing of "We know next to nothing about this, but we definitely know this one very specific detail!"

Now, you'd think that the Quake Remaster(s) coming out and MachineGames being committed to Indiana Jones would have killed the rumors off, right? But no, you still occasionally see it swirling around, usually in relation to Id having the goddamned nerve to do new Doom games instead. Hell, I've seen people claiming, with no particular evidence, just purely off of vibes, that Doom: The Dark Ages absolutely must have started life as The Fabled Quake Reboot because, uhh, I dunno, it's real brown I guess.

Baffling.

Anyway, the real reason there won't be a Quake reboot is because Quake Champions sold like utter shit and has a player count of like five and a half adderalled-up Swedes, all named Nils. Thank you for subscribing to my Substack newsletter.

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