A Quake modding group have just polished off a game jam in which they challenged themselves to recreate every singleplayer map in id Software’s 1996 FPS from memory alone. That is, they were forbidden from replaying the original game before they started. As Slipseer user iLike80sRock puts it, “if somehow id1 was wiped off of all computers in the world, do we collectively remember the maps well enough to recreate them?”
The Quake from Memory pack has been in the works since last year. Find the finished package here, with installation instructions. I don’t know the original Quake well enough to comment on the accuracy of the results – I was naught but a sobbing child when Quake came out, and also, a hopeless Sonic the Hedgehog enthusiast. Still, I’m very interested in the concept of this jam, because when we recreate things from memory, it tends to reveal some kind of bias.
The comments on that Slipseer thread run a fun gamut. Levels are “either uncannily spot on or butchered”. Some rooms are too tall, perhaps because people remember being physically smaller when they played the game, and that difference in scale has somehow bled across the gap between simulation and the flesh. Some nail traps seem to fire too fast. Some maps “are very different in ways I can’t explain in words”.
There’s a sense of fascination, throughout: it’s not just people complaining that the Shamblers are the wrong way round. The premise of recreating the game from memory cultivates an intrigue and a generosity not typically found in responses to certain high-fidelity videogame remasters or remakes.
In the absence of lasting, external tangible records, such as writing, remembering becomes more of a communal practice. I’m interested to know if the Quake from Memory modders were allowed to show each other their work and compare reflections, or if each mapmaker had to go it alone. “Collectively” implies the former.
Inevitably, I’ve been trying to work out if I could recreate any of my favourite games from memory. Back in the day, I could have drawn most of Sonic 2’s layouts by hand, but I have played a million games since, and that squiggly hedgehog lore is lost to me. I have sharper memories of G-Police, the cyberpunk flight sim from WipEout creators Psygnosis.
In particular, I have quite vivid memories of one mission in which you have to stave off base assaults while tracking down and obliterating an approaching land train. The time management rigours of that mission have drummed those dome cities into my head. Still, don’t come crying to me if somebody manages to delete all surviving copies of G-Police. Missions 11-16 are just hypermissile whooshing noises on repeat.
Which game could you recreate from memory alone? Thanks to RPS reader Salty for posting about this in the latest RPS wappity.