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I know that Quake (the 1996 MS-DOS game) is a "full" 3D engine, and always had some kind of mouse support.

However, even the original Wolfenstein 3D from 1992 also had mouse support from the get-go, only it was of course not "look up/down" mouse support. Same thing with the DOOM games which came after Wolfenstein and before Quake (1993-1995). They allowed you to use a mouse to move, but not look up/down, because they were not "true" 3D engines. But Quake was.

Yesterday, I watched a live stream of somebody playing Quake. It was apparently on a modern computer, but in a very faithful-looking manner. For example, it was rendered in software mode, and everything looked very similar to how I remember it. He had trouble playing it because he had to use keyboard keys to look up/down, even though he used the mouse for looking to the sides and fire the gun. I was shocked by this and asked him to go into the menu. And, lo and behold, there was no freelook option anywhere! "Lookspring" seemed like it could be it, but it was not. The menu system did not have an option to enable "full"/"free" mouselook. That is, look up/down with the mouse.

I searched the 'net while he was playing and found a forum past saying that all Quake 1 engines/ports ever since the very first version for MS-DOS had so-called freelook support, but that some of them lacked a menu option for this for some bizarre reason. It went on to mention that, if such is the case, you have to go to the Quake console and type +mlook. So I asked the streamer to do so. And he did.

It worked. After that command was typed, he suddenly had full freelook support, and was able to look up and down with the mouse!

Now I wonder:

  1. Since Quake 1 was a full-3D polygon engine right from day one, and mouse support existed also since day one, why would id Software not have made this enabled by default to literally "free" the player and show off their fantastic new engine?
  2. Why would any Quake 1 version/port not have this as a menu item in options, but rather hidden away in the cryptic console?

Even though I remember playing Quake 1 with the keyboard only when it was new, probably mostly due to general MS-DOS mouse issues, I associate that game with free mouselook since it was the first FPS to be in full "real 3D" and thus would have every reason to "brag" about this fact by letting the player look around freely with the mouse.

user3840170
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Faisal
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    As well as type it into the console, you could add +mlook to your autoexec.cfg file, to enable it automatically in every level. This was standard operating procedure among my peer group in the late 90s. – Kaz Jul 28 '21 at 09:25
  • @Kaz But why did they require this? – Faisal Jul 28 '21 at 09:29
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    Mouse was not a common thing in 1996 for gamers. It was only used in strategy games or used with Windows. I recall loading mouse drive manually before running SimCity cause I want to save the memory to be be used mouse driver.

    When it comes the Quake, It was close successor of Doom. Mouse was not required in Doom. Aiming was done in horizontal only and players were used to go with keyboard only. Apparently, Quake didn't wanted to confuse or frustrate the players with mouselook option and stick with minimal mouse options.

     – wizofwor Jul 28 '21 at 11:51
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    Quake was probably the game that caused mouse support to mature to what we know today. When it launched, it was familiar to DooM players. – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Jul 28 '21 at 12:18
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    I have in my mind that Quake is the progenitor of the mouse y-axis being the modern way around where pulling the mouse towards you looks down rather than up, reversing the norm established by earlier titles such as Descent, Duke Nukem, Mechwarrior, and more. I guess this means that — wherever it was placed — the mouse-look option must not have been too obscure, since the implementation details ended up being quite influential. – Tommy Jul 28 '21 at 13:59
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    Quake the first true 3D game ? Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss says hi. – Alan B Jul 28 '21 at 14:07
  • In fact, all the Freescape games on the Commodore 64 also say hi. – Alan B Jul 28 '21 at 15:10
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    @AlanB he claims only that Quake 'was the first FPS to be in full "real 3D"' which gets you into a much more nuanced debate on genre, I fear. Though I don't see how you can take e.g. 1995's Terminator: Future Shock out of that genre no matter how you try to define it, to name one full-3d predecessor that springs to mind. – Tommy Jul 28 '21 at 15:52
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    Honestly, having played the original game when it came out, I would say that in this era of gaming the distinction between a menu item and a console-enabled item was minor, from the player's perspective. Even on Quake II, I was in and out of the console every ten minutes. – tbrookside Jul 28 '21 at 18:16
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    @tbrookside Quake was the very first game with a console; there were zero other games at the time that you could tweak at runtime via a command-based environment. – Tommy Jul 28 '21 at 20:20
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    Leave out the FUD about "cryptic console" please. – hobbs Jul 28 '21 at 21:13
  • @Tommy Yes, but you would access the console with a keyboard command and access the menu with a keyboard command, and at least from my perspective as a gamer at that time they weren't that different. Maybe I just didn't play enough games at that time to know how revolutionary it was. – tbrookside Jul 28 '21 at 23:03
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    @hobbs Meh, you have to admit a command line is a pretty obscure interface for a game, even if quite familiar from DOS at the time. – user3840170 Jul 29 '21 at 15:36
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    @user3840170 it was an adult game, rated 15+ or 18+ in most locations. It's not unreasonable to expect people to understand the bare minimum concept of communicating in language rather than point-and-grunt. "Type a word and a thing happens" is not a complex, esoteric, or scary concept, except for people who go out of their way to make it so. – hobbs Jul 29 '21 at 17:42
  • A side note to the question: mouselook and the engine being ‘full 3D’ have nothing to do with each other. It just so happened that the two were developed more or less at the same time. In fact, Duke Nukem 3D, based on the ‘2.5D’ Build engine sort of had freelook a year before Quake: you could configure the ‘mouse aiming’ key to toggle the setting when pressed, press it once and then just leave it permanently on. The later Blood, based on the same engine, allowed inverting the Y axis and remembered the mouselook state between gameplays. – user3840170 Jul 29 '21 at 19:17
  • @hobbs Most people imagine ‘communicating in language [with a computer]’ to mean something like writing ‘computer, do what I mean’ into a text file, changing the extension to EXE and expecting that to work. Successfully using a command line takes much more discipline and knowledge than that: knowing what commands are available, their syntax, what actions they perform, etc. – user3840170 Jul 29 '21 at 19:35
  • @hobbs Command lines are also well known to be less discoverable than menu-driven UIs. That commands are usually optimised for fast typing rather than comprehensibility doesn’t help either. It makes some sense to acknowledge this; calling that FUD is just hysteria. – user3840170 Jul 29 '21 at 19:38
  • @user3840170 yes, that's the overall point of the question, and already established. Calling it "cryptic" is just people thinking it's cool to cultivate an inability (or perceived inability) to handle things that any moderately bright eight-year-old can do with ease. – hobbs Jul 29 '21 at 21:53
  • Doom helped with aiming up/down so mousing was just pointing in the right direction. Quake didn't. – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Mar 10 '22 at 12:04

1 Answers1

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Answering the first part: why does Quake not have +mlook by default?

John Romero thought mouselook was too advanced to be the default.

https://twitter.com/romero/status/719115335488708608

John Romero: when we released Quake I thought mouselook was too advanced as a default so made it an option. Defaulted on in later update.

https://twitter.com/romero/status/569566302949412866

Robert McGregor: Thank you. Sorry, I think I wasn't very clear, specifically "mouse look" for fps control, who in the office / how did it start?

John Romero: mouselook was Quake. We had it in and felt it might be too advanced so we made it optional at launch. Later flipped it back

user3840170
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knol
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    True story: In 1996, I wrote a short story (and published it on the web) where a key plot point was the narrator learning how to use mouselook with Quake. – Jim Nelson Jul 28 '21 at 22:04
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    When Quake first came out, we all played it with Doom controls. It was only a few months later that I ran across WASD and mouselook in a gaming magazine, and it was presented as something completely new and revolutionary to try. This was buried alongside other Quake binds and console commands of varying usefulness, such as tying viewing angle commands to the mouse wheel to make a sniper scope. – Dranon Jul 29 '21 at 03:27
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    @JimNelson: Is the story still online? – Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine Jul 29 '21 at 12:47
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    Back in the day I didn't know of that option, so I chose the right mouse button for lookspring, and kept it pressed all the time when I was aiming ... so, if I kept the right mouse button down I pretty much had mouselook. – vsz Jul 29 '21 at 15:36
  • @vsc Similar here, I had it mapped to Q together with WASD controls – Tobias Kienzler Nov 20 '23 at 08:41