Retroactivate

Like a whole bunch of people, I grew into a gamer in the 90's and was a bilingual student. You had your console goodies on the one side and then there was always that friend who had the cool dad that bought the family a badass computer. This was the era where things like sound cards and CD drives were still first-class gear, and you generally had to exit out of windows and into DOS if you wanted to play anything.

It was also a golden age for First Person Shooters, where you had Doom 1 & 2, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem 3D, Rise of the Triad, Heretic, Hexen, Blood, Shadow Warrior, and Quake all landing within the space of 4 years (and who can forget Redneck Rampage?) The shareware scene was alive and well, there was no such thing as DRM, and the game industry hadn't quite exploded to the levels it would reach in 2001 or so, so the hobby still had some undercurrents of counterculture floating around.

Now we've kinda come full circle, and a whole stack of games from that era can be purchased via Steam, particularly from the id Super Pack. Problem is, modern day computers generally won't run these things like they should, and they haven't really aged very well besides.

So when I bought the pack, the first thing I tried to figure out was how to get these old games up to modern-ish standards without drastically changing the core gameplay. Doom and its derivatives were easy enough to pull off with zDoom, but recently I've been having a lot of fun plinking about with Quake 1 using an engine mod called Dark Places. The basic necessities are there; you can run the game in windows, it adds widescreen and high resolution support, etc. But the real fun is jacking the graphics of a 12 year old game up to absurd levels and seeing what it looks like. Check out Quake 1 with HDR Lighting! (click for full size)





More screenshots here.