Typical, isn’t it? You wait ages for a surprise launch of additional Quake adventures, and then two come along at once. The original game just received an official new episode as part of the shooter’s 30th anniversary celebrations taking place at this year’s QuakeCon. But now Raven Software’s Quake 4 has got in on the action, as a build of the sequel’s cancelled expansion has been discovered and uploaded to GitHub.
Quake 4: Awakening was being developed at Ritual Entertainment—creators of the soon to be remastered SiN and its aborted episodic sequel—but the project was canned by Activision due to underwhelming sales of the base game. The expansion was thought lost to time, until a veteran game developer chanced upon a copy on the hard drive of a second-hand PC he bought.
Said developer is Justin Marshall, a programmer who has worked on games such as The Evil Within, XCOM 2, Dead Island 2, and The Dark Pictures Anthology—and unfortunately is one of the casualties of the industry’s massive swathe of layoffs. The discovery of the build appears to have had a profound impact on him.
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“I came across this at a very sad point in my life, it was on a hard drive on a vintage computer I bought off Amazon,” Marshall explains on the expansion’s GitHub page. “Literally this essentially saved my life, I was going through a divorce and just happen[ing] to come across something like this was insane.”
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While there’s an outside chance this is an elaborate prank, everything points to it being legit. A big clue can be found in the config files, some of which are named after then-employees at Ritual, such as legendary Duke Nukem 3D level designer Richard ‘Levelord’ Grey, and Michael ‘RomSteady’ Russell, who has discussed the Quake 4 expansion in the past. Speaking to PC Gamer last year, Russell told us that “the expansion pack was 95% done” before Activision pulled the plug.
The far bigger clue, though, is that numerous people have already got the expansion up and running. A no-commentary let’s play by Youtuber pagb666 shows the expansion’s first three missions, which feature new weapons like a cryo cannon, and a section where the player pilots a mech (because what self-respecting noughties FPS would be complete without a mech sequence?).
While some elements do look unfinished, like a few of the scripted sequences, it does appear that Russell’s estimate of how complete the expansion was may be accurate. Marshall says he uploaded the expansion for preservation purposes, and in the hope that “the community can make something cool with it.” Given its apparent state, polishing it up to release-level quality may not be beyond the realms of possibility.
