Cancelled Quake 4 Expansion 'The Awakening' Resurfaces Online, With A Backstory That's Hard To Believe
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Cancelled Quake 4 Expansion 'The Awakening' Resurfaces Online, With A Backstory That's Hard To Believe
Whenever I buy something secondhand online, my idea of a "surprise" usually is the item has arrived worse for wear. Stumbling across a lost expansion for a 20-year-old PC shooter? That's not really on my bingo card.
But that's apparently exactly what happened to a gamer going by jmarshall23, who was browsing Amazon for a vintage PC and ended up with something far more interesting than expected: a hard drive containing an alpha build of The Awakening, the shelved Quake 4 expansion Ritual Entertainment never finished (spotted by dsogaming, via Retro Dodo).Β
They've since uploaded the build to GitHub "for preservation purposes," giving others a chance to run it themselves, and shared a bit of the story behind the find:
"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," jmarshall23 explained. "This essentially saved my life; I was going through a divorce and just happened to come across something like this β it was insane."
Given that jmarshall23's GitHub history is already packed with Quake-related projects, it's fair to wonder whether the origin story is being dressed up a little. Even so, the build itself checks out β YouTuber pagb666 posted footage of the first three missions in action, and the config files reportedly contain the names of developers who actually worked on the expansion, according to PC Gamer.
As for the base game: Quake 4 came from Raven Software as a follow-up to Quake II, putting players in the boots of new protagonist Corporal Matthew Kane during the assault on the Strogg homeworld following the death of their leader, the Makron.
It launched in 2005 on PC and Xbox 360 to solid reviews, with expansion duties handed to SiN studio Ritual Entertainment. That expansion was ultimately shelved when Activision pulled the plug on the project β even though it was reportedly 95% finished.
If you're curious, you can find the whole thing on GitHub here.
