With the Quake remaster now out in the wild, and gamers rediscovering (and discovering for the first time) the phenomenon that was Quake, some fans have found a little something that Nightdive added back into the game that was originally cut. As noted by PCGamer, E2M6, the Dismal Oubliette, has now been fully restored.
Quick history lesson: when developing Quake, id Software set a self-imposed limit of 1.4MB for each map file, meaning no map could go over the file size of a single floppy disk. As a result, John Romero had to remove what was originally the entrance to E2M6, which he subsequently later posted online.
Well, eagle-eyed fans like starshipwaters noticed that the remaster now has that cut section put back into the game. You now start the level at the bottom of a cave and have to fight your way up to where the mission started in the final version of the game.
“I remember spending many hours trying to get it just right, to create the feeling of an awful, cavernous pit for the player to get out of and into the real horror of the Oubliette,” recalls Romero back in 2001. “It added a nice bit of gameplay time and I’m sorry that it had to go, but we set the .BSP file size at 1.4Mb and had to be strict about it.”
The remastered Quake is out now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC, with PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series versions coming soon. And for you physical media fans, keep an eye on Limited Run Games this Friday for their stacked physical editions.