Quake II is a first-person shooter video game released in December 1997.
PC Gaming World's Simon Quirk wrote of the game, "The Action Quake team fancied a multiplayer-only total conversion of Quake II where strategy, accuracy, and cool-looking fights would dominate." ==Release== Quake II released on December 9, 1997, in the United States (one day short of the release of Doom four years prior) and on December 12 in Europe.
of Game Revolution rated the expansion D+, citing bad level design and few additions to the original game, and noted the multiplayer power-up gameplay as the only fun feature. ===Quake II Netpack I: Extremities=== Quake II Netpack I: Extremities contains, among other features, 11 game mods and 12 deathmatch maps. ==Reception== ===Sales=== Quake II entered PC Data's monthly computer game sales rankings at #2 for December 1997, behind Riven.
The game's sales in the United States alone reached 240,913 copies by the end of 1997, after its release on December 9.
According to PC Data, it was the country's 22nd-best-selling computer game of 1997.
It also won Computer Gaming World's 1997 "Action Game of the Year" award.
Valve's 1998 video game Half-Life used the Quake II engine during early development stages.
This is only possible because of the otherwise low hardware demands of Quake II. ==Expansions== ===Quake II Mission Pack: The Reckoning=== Quake II Mission Pack: The Reckoning is the first official expansion pack, released on May 31, 1998.
First announced in January 1998, it features eighteen new single player levels, six new deathmatch levels, three new weapons (the Ion Ripper, Phalanx Particle Cannon, and Trap), a new power-up, two new enemies, seven modified versions of existing enemies, and five new music tracks.
It holds 69.50% from Gamerankings and Gamespot given a score of 7.4/10. ===Quake II Mission Pack: Ground Zero=== Quake II Mission Pack: Ground Zero is the second official expansion pack, released on September 11, 1998.
The following year, Quake II secured fifth place on PC Data's charts for January and February 1998, then dropped to #8 in March and #9 in April.
It remained in PC Data's top 20 for another two months, before exiting in July 1998.
Quake II surpassed 850,000 units shipped to retailers by May 1998, and 900,000 by June. According to PC Data, Quake II was the United States' 14th-best-selling computer game during the January–November 1998 period.
However, the final version runs on a heavily modified version of the Quake engine, GoldSrc, with a small amount of the Quake II code. ===Ports=== Ports of Quake II were released in 1999 on the Nintendo 64 (ported by Raster Productions) and PlayStation (ported by HammerHead) video game consoles.
A Macintosh port was developed by Logicware and released in July 1999.
Quake II: Colossus (Quake II with both official add-ons) was ported to Linux by id Software and published by Macmillan Digital Publishing in 1999.
officially ported Quake II: Colossus to the BeOS to test their OpenGL acceleration in 1999, and provided the game files for free download at a later date—a Windows, Macintosh, or Linux install CD was required to install the game, with the official add-ons being optional. The PlayStation version contains abridged versions of Units 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, and 10 of the PC version, redesigned to meet the console's technical limitations.
Another improvement over Quake was that it was easier to select custom player models, skins, and sound effects because they could be selected from an in-game menu. Mods for the game include Action Quake from 1999.
GameDaily reported in January 1999 that Quake II's sales in the United States had reached 550,000 units; this number rose to 610,000 units by December of that year.
The full source code to Quake II version 3.19 was released under the terms of the GNU GPL-2.0-or-later on December 22, 2001.
An LCC-friendly version was released on January 1, 2002, by a modder going by the name of Major Bitch. Since the release of the Quake II source code, several updates from third-party projects to the game engine have been created; the most prominent of these are projects focused on graphical enhancements to the game such as most notable "Yamagi Quake II", Quake2maX, EGL, Quake II Evolved, and KMQuake II.
In July 2003, Vertigo Software released a port of Quake II for the Microsoft .NET platform, using Managed C++, called Quake II .NET.
In May 2004, Bytonic Software released a port of Quake II (called Jake2) written in Java using JOGL.
In 2010 Google ported Jake2 to HTML5, running in Safari and Chrome. Quake II's game engine was a popular license and formed the basis for several commercial and free games, such as Alien Arena, War§ow, SiN, Anachronox, Heretic II, Daikatana, Soldier of Fortune, Life of Crime, and Alien Invasion.
The port allows for System Link play for up to sixteen players, split-screen for four players, and cooperative play in single-player for up to sixteen players or four players with split-screen alone. ====Unofficial==== In December 2018, Polish programmer Krzysztof Kondrak released the original Quake 2 v3.21 source code with Vulkan support added.
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