FUNKe April Update - Next Video Coming This Month

Bad news, FUNKe fans. The newest video missed its release deadline of late March. Good news, FUNKe fans. Quake 1 missed its original release deadline too; and so missing mine was abstractly speaking a faithful homage to its subject material.

The next video, mentioned previously, is a full "bucket list" video of every (notable) quake title, with a through line of the series history but largely just a tightly focused retrospective on what I noticed playing through the series. Footage for most of every title is done, the script is (largely) finished and i'm headed into animation/editing now.

The primary reason for the delay is actually three particular choices made I for the video. The top one was choosing to read a few relevant books (namely masters of doom) to better understand id tech's history during quake. Reading the book didn't take much time (although i'm also reading the first yangchen novel and fellowship of the ring, so it took a bit longer than usual). It's a great book, but my video won't just be a rehash of masters of doom; that did however lead to my second choice which was to play through Daikatana and give that game its own little section in the video. Daikatana being John Romero's focal game following his leave from id tech, and it running on the Quake II engine, and the oddity that is Quake II itself, it felt fitting to include another game in the quake series family tree. I'm still finishing Daikatana and writing that section as a later addition, so that's added some time to production too. The first level of Daikatana sucks fucking ass. You have to shoot tiny frogs and endless mosquitos and modern ports of the game have garbage controls/sensitivity. If that makes me Romero's bitch then so be it, it sucks actual ass.

The third choice was that I decided to make my own little Quake 1 map as a means of better understanding its design and overall cultural impact having shipped out with mapping tools. This also unintentionally helped me better understand the cleverness of Quake's map design, and the way those design decisions differ in later quake games (3 excluded?). It's not a masterpiece or a leviathan of a level, but it's a fairly thorough romp through a chasm with secrets and my own take on a quake bossfight at the end. I call it gorechasm. I'll release gorechasm when the video is out but keep an eye here and on discord in the coming weeks because I might ask for people to playtest it just for fun and feedback before then.

I still want to get some more footage of Quake 3/Quake Live so you can expect a few sporadic streams in the next two weeks of me populating deathmatch servers. If enough people are available, maybe i'll run a tournament and give away a cherry red hot wheels ferrari. Until then: frag on.