PC Accelerator (abbreviated to PCXL within the mag) was a short-lived US publication devoted to computer games. Sporting a less-mature, more attitude-oriented style than other ‘zines, PC Accelerator was essentially the coverage of PC Gamer mixed with the male wish fulfillment fantasy embodied in Maxim. It launched in September 1998 under the tagline, “Bigger, Better, Faster Games”. In June of 2000, not even two years later, the tagline read, “Games, Girls, Gags…Gone” as it folded like so many other smaller press publications with gamers increasingly turning to the internet instead of monthly periodicals for their news, reviews and previews. It’s a sad story for them, but interested readers are in luck: Retromags has preserved the entire 22-issue run over at their website, which made this article possible in the first place. PCXL never shied from bold predictions, but as with other would-be psychics, this often bit them in the ass later. For my money, no prediction chomped harder than the cover feature of their first issue: “5 Games That’ll Kick Quake II‘s Ass”. Predicting a Quake II killer in 1998? If you know anything about the state of first-person shooters in the late 90’s, you can imagine how this one ends.

At the time this feature went to print, the closest thing to usurping iD’s throne the PC gaming world had seen was Epic Studio’s Unreal. PCXL gives this game its due right up front as a way to explain the rating system for the five up-and-coming games on their list. Ten-point ratings are used in six categories: Pure Action, Originality, Story, Graphics, Multiplayer, and Buzz. These numbers are then tallied to give an overall score out of 60. Quake II under this system earns scores of 10, 5, 3, 8, 10, and 10 respectively for a total of 46 out of 60. The game’s obvious weak points are a lack of originality, and a story so thin it’s actually invisible when viewed from the wrong angle, but there’s no denying the massive multiplayer component, the buzz generated by its launch, and its pure twitch factor. Unreal, by contrast, earns scores of 8, 6, 5, 10, 6, and 9 for a total of 44: it barely edges out Q2 in terms of originality and story, and it’s clearly graphically superior, requiring a beast of a machine (for the day) to play even on the minimum settings, but despite all the hype behind the ads, it just can’t compete in the multiplayer and action arenas where it counts. Props to PCXL–their ratings leaves little room for quibbling, which is why the next few pages hurt so much.

The feature is actually about sixteen games: five titles that could best Quake II, and eleven others that didn’t have a prayer (yes, the cover claims ten…math wasn’t the staff’s strong suit). Unfortunately for PCXL, the five games they chose to throw into this meat grinder of a feature were Prey, SiN, Daikatana, Half-Life, and Duke Nukem Forever. Obviously their opinion is based on information available at press time, and not any final product, but you should already see signs of the impending train wreck.

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Prey: When it comes to vaporware titles, everyone’s go-to whipping boy from 1997 up until its 2011 release was Duke Nukem Forever. But back in 1998, GT Interactive and 3D Realms were working on a new IP, one that took the interactivity shown in Duke Nukem 3D, paired it with the graphical realism of Unreal, and threw in the brand new mechanic of using portals to teleport around the map, opening up all kinds of innovative ways to murder-gib your opponents. Prey had a tentative launch date of ‘sometime in 1999’, but the problems which eventually led to the closing of 3D Realms caught up with Prey sooner than Duke, and the title was shelved until Human Head Studios finished it in 2006, a scant nine years after its original announcement. By that time most everyone had lost interest, and while it retained the portal tech from its original late 90’s incarnation, it wasn’t until 2008 when Valve released Portal that people really got into the idea of zipping from one place to another via dimensional wormhole.

PCXL’s score for Prey: 9, 9, 7, 9, 8, 8, for a total of 50. Did Prey wind up being a Quake II killer? Only by virtue of being released nine years later. I don’t think that counts, so that’s one for the ‘Miss’ column.

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SiN: Ritual Entertainment’s response to Quake II accomplished something few of its competitors managed: an on-time release. In that sense it was a contender since it arrived on store shelves prior to iD publishing Quake III: Arena, and one of its claims to fame was level design by Richard Bailey Gray, aka ‘LevelLord’ of Duke Nukem 3D. Unfortunately SiN was one of those games with a grand vision and only mediocre execution. Activision pushed Ritual to beat Half-Life to store shelves, and that push murdered any chance the game had of hooking players. Reviewers of the day savaged SiN over game-breaking bugs, lack of decent multiplayer support, and the prominent use of generously-chested antagonist Elexis Sinclair in the game’s advertising. Ritual pushed out a 20 megabyte patch as soon as they could, which squashed most of the bugs. Subsequent patches added new multiplayer modes and match-finding support for internet play; Activision even hired 2015 Studios to produce an expansion pack called Wages of SiN the next year, but the damage had been done. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, SiN was not developed with tech, but used iD’s own Quake II engine. Maybe you shouldn’t license the pre-existing tech of the game you’re trying to kill if you want your game to be known as a killer of another earlier game? Just a thought.

PCXL’s score for SiN: 9, 8, 7, 7, 8, 7, for a final score of 46. Even by their own standards, the best SiN could accomplish was tying Quake II‘s accomplishments, but what I don’t understand is how they felt a game which didn’t score as high in action, multiplayer, or even graphics was supposed to dethrone the reigning king of the FPS. Activision’s meddling aside, PCXL’s own rating couldn’t put SiN over the top. Miss number two.

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Daikatana: With one of the most infamous ads in PC gaming history, a budget balooning bigger than Lara Croft’s bazongas, and publishing dates that slipped like senior citizens on an icy sidewalk, Daikatana and developer Ion Storm are already the butt of so many jokes in the PC gaming world that it’s pointless to pile on more. There’s nothing left to say about this game that hasn’t been said better by other gaming journalists, so I’m not going to waste your time. Daikatana is it’s own monolith in the gaming graveyard, and we’ve all pissed on it enough over the years. I’m letting this one lie.

PCXL’s score for Daikatana: 9, 8, 8, 8, 7, 7 for a total of 47. Is a one-point superiority enough to really crown a game the ‘killer’ of another? Let’s assume for a moment Daikatana didn’t wind up becoming its own internet meme and these numbers fit the final release when it arrived. Yes, a win is a win, but in other events, beating your opponent by one point is usually not seen as any kind of stunning upset or vindication, it’s proof that you were equally matched and somebody got in a lucky punch. History speaks for itself, but even if it didn’t in this case, I don’t think it would be reasonable to call Daikatana a Quake II killer. Do you?

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Duke Nukem Forever: *sigh* See Daikatana and Prey above for why I don’t even have to write this paragraph.

PCXL’s score for Duke Nukem Forever: 10, 8, 7, 9, 7, 10 for a total of 51. I’ll give this to them: back when this article was written, I’d have totally bet on Duke to dethrone the mighty Quake II. As I’ve mentioned before, I was a huge fan of Duke 3D and couldn’t wait to get my hands on the next game. With both action and hype cranked up to 10, and a story which would blow that of any Quake game out of the water, this honestly seemed like the safest bet in the history of gambling on the outcome of PC gaming predictions. Hell, I’ve had arguments with my own wife where I haven’t wanted to be as right as much as when it came to believing Duke Nukem Forever was going to be the best damn FPS the planet ever saw. I’m still feeling that burn, man.

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Half-Life: Well, one out of five isn’t bad. Considering Half-Life came about from the same engine, it’s a miracle it got anywhere near Quake II‘s level, but what Valve managed to yank out of the tech is still highly-regarded to this day. Generally dubbed the thinking person’s FPS, Half-Life added so much to the genre that it fundamentally changed the way developers and players alike approached gaming and is lauded for doing so to this day. Unfortunately for Half-Life, it was only the greatest single-player FPS on the market–if you wanted multi-player, Team Fortress was where you went, and given TF was also built on the Quake engine…well, calling a game with zero multiplayer support a Quake II killer strikes me as quixotic optimism at its finest.

PCXL’s score for Half-Life: 7, 9, 9, 7, 7, 8, for a total of 47. As in Daikatana‘s case, can you really call a game which beats the competition by a single point a ‘killer’? Don’t get me wrong, Half-Life is amazing, and if we’re putting up the single player campaign in Q2 against that of HL, there’s no mistaking how soundly HL humiliates its rival. But for millions of players, Quake II‘s single-player campaign was an afterthought, something you messed around with for a few minutes in order to get the hang of the controls, and then ignored. People bought Quake II to perpetrate slaughter via modem. People bought Half-Life for those times when they couldn’t tie up the phone line for seven hours playing ‘Capture the Flag’. Comparing Half-Life and Quake II is like comparing tennis to volleyball–they both use balls and nets, and there the similarities end. Claiming volleyball to be a ‘tennis killer’, no matter what argument one proffered, is just as illogical.

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The eleven games PCXL felt didn’t have a prayer of competing with iD’s juggernaut are more interesting than the five they did pick, though all for different reasons. Three of them (X-Com Alliance, Prax War, and Amen: The Awakening) never saw release, so all we have to go on are PCXL’s thoughts based on early alpha info and screenshots garnered from the developers.

Of the remaining eight which did see a release, four more of them flat out don’t belong on the list as they weren’t attempting to kill Quake II but seeking to blaze new trails. Max Payne, for instance, might technically qualify as a shooter, but from a third-, not first-person perspective, and was designed from the beginning to be a cinematic graphic novel with gunplay components, equally heavy on the shooty bits as it was on plot development.

Heretic II was a third-person action/adventure game that licensed the Quake II engine to produce its environs. If it’s not a first-person shooter, you can’t claim it’s going to kill a first-person shooter even if they’re powered by the same tech, otherwise you’re just poisoning the well for every other title that might be trying to compete. Were Deathtrap Dungeon or Tomb Raider III marketed as Quake II killers? Neither was Heretic II. Try again.

Trespasser had the first-person perspective, but project leader Seamus Blackley never envisioned the game as an FPS, more like a first-person adventure that sought to tell a story set in the Jurassic Park world where the player might occasionally have to shoot a raptor. Multiplayer, as PCXL notes, wasn’t even a consideration. If pitting Half-Life against Quake II is comparing volleyball to tennis, throwing Trespasser on this list is akin to comparing checkers to football: they’re both games, but it’s impossible to confuse one for the other.

The Wheel of Time had the most wiggle room, but as its lead developer noted, they weren’t trying to be anything like Quake, and PCXL confirmed as much in their remarks. WoT drew on RPG and strategy conventions completely foreign to the FPS gene as a whole, and Quake II in particular. If you have to state your game is ‘a completely different beast’ from Quake II, it probably should get cut from the feature.

That leaves four legit contenders that were actual first-person shooters: Klingon Honor Guard, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, Requiem, and Aliens vs. Predator. Ultimately PCXL is right: none of these four is enough to take iD’s crown–nobody remembers Requiem; Klingon Honor Guard was strictly average and suffered from limited appeal (only Star Trek fans were likely to express interest); Shogo tried some great ideas which unfortunately never caught on and developer Monolith further set back fan relations with Blood II (a game which should have been on this list in lieu of something else) a month later; Aliens vs. Predator was a phenomenal single-player experience that missed the mark with its multiplayer offering.

Perhaps the best part of this story is the obvious game PCXL didn’t talk about as a potential Quake II killer: Quake III. Even if iD was keeping quiet on the subject, nobody doubted there would be a third entry, and if anything was going to dethrone Q2 it would likely involve iD’s own programmers. Equally fascinating is that while Unreal was unable to steal Quake II‘s position, it was Epic themselves who waged the most successful battle against Quake III with Unreal Tournament, the second game in the franchise. The two most obvious Quake II killers were the sequels PC Accelerator never even considered. Ah, the irony only uncovered in hindsight that allows me to write with smug superiority about every mistake made by others…I love this job!

Michael Crisman

In 1979, Michael Crisman was mauled by a radioactive Gorgar pinball machine. After the wounds healed, doctors discovered his DNA had been re-coded. No longer fully human, Michael requires regular infusions of video games in order to continue living among you. If you see him, he can see you. Make no sudden moves, but instead bribe him with old issues of computer and video game magazines or a mint-in-box copy of Dragon Warrior IV. If he made you laugh, drop a tip in his jar at http://paypal.me/modernzorker (If he didn't make you laugh, donate to cure his compulsion to bang keyboards by sending an absurdly huge amount of money to his tip jar instead. That'll show him!)

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