Quake
Developed by the award-winning id Software, Quake® is the ground-breaking, original dark fantasy first-person shooter that inspires today’s retro-style FPS games. With Quake (Enhanced), experience the authentic, updated, and visually enhanced version of the original.
Your like matters. Every heart nudges this game's GamingPickz Score and where it ranks (a small 5% of the score), so the lists get better for everyone.
- Released
- 1996
- Developer
- Nightdive Studios
- Platforms
- 8 systems
- Critics
- 94
- Steam Deck
- verified
- Download
- Not stated
What is Quake?
Developed by the award-winning id Software, Quake® is the ground-breaking, original dark fantasy first-person shooter that inspires today’s retro-style FPS games. With Quake (Enhanced), experience the authentic, updated, and visually enhanced version of the original.
Description as published by the developer on its own store page, read 30 August 2026. It is marketing copy, not our assessment.
The record
| First released | 22 June 1996 |
|---|---|
| Developer | Nightdive Studios |
| Publisher | Macmillan Inc., ClickBoom, MacSoft Games |
| Platforms | Nintendo 64, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Series S, Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck |
| Genres | First-Person Shooter, Horror |
| Languages | 6 supported |
Source. Catalogue facts from Wikidata Q217423, seeded 30 August 2026. Store data from Steam, read 30 August 2026.
How was Quake received?
Method. Player figures are Steam's own totals for the PC version, read 30 August 2026. The Metacritic score is the one Steam publishes on its store page and can lag the site itself. Metacritic page. Neither is our opinion. We have not published a review of this game.
Accessibility
Seeing
None declared
Hearing
None declared
Input
- Full controller support
Difficulty
None declared
Method. Features the publisher declared on its own store page. A declaration is a floor, not a review.
What does it support?
| Capability | Support |
|---|---|
| Controller | full support |
| Cloud saves | Yes |
| Cross-platform play | Yes |
| Mod support | No official workshop |
| Online play | Yes |
| In-game purchases | No |
| Steam Deck | verified |
| Download size | Not stated |
| Add-on content | None listed |
| Age gate | 17+ |
Content descriptors
- Frequent violence or gore
- General mature content
Method. Read from the publisher's Steam listing on 30 August 2026. Describes the PC version. Console versions differ.
What does it cost?
Steam price in US dollars, read 30 August 2026. Prices move hourly and vary by region. Check the current price.
Is Quake worth it?
96% of 16,302 Steam reviews are positive, which Steam rates Overwhelmingly Positive. It costs $9.99 on Steam, and critics score it 94/100.
That is the data, not a verdict for sale: whether it is worth it depends on the price you pay and what you want. Players do report problems — see the reported-problems section below before buying. We have not published our own review of this game.
How long is Quake? How long to beat it
Total play time for Quake is about 18.6 hours to do everything, and around 5.4 hours to reach the end of the main story. These are player-submitted times from HowLongToBeat, not our own, shown with the number of players behind each.
| How you play | Hours | Players logged |
|---|---|---|
| Just the main story: straight through the critical path | 5.4h | 484 |
| Main + the extras: story plus the side content most people do | 7.7h | 244 |
| Completionist: everything: 100% the game | 18.6h | 83 |
At its current price of $9.99, beating the main story works out to about $1.85 per hour. That is the price divided by the hours, a value read and not a verdict: a longer game costs less per hour, which is not the same as being the better game.
Source: HowLongToBeat community submissions, read 2026-10-19.
Where Quake sits on the grid
Compare the whole catalogueQuake plotted on the axes the GamingPickz Score is built from, on the full 0 to 100 scale so its position is its real one. Change either axis to see where it lands.
1 games have both
Players. The share of Steam reviews marked positive, pulled toward the catalogue average in proportion to how few reviews stand behind it. A game with 200 reviews moves a long way toward the average; one with 200,000 barely moves at all. Without this a title sitting at 100 percent on nine reviews outranks Half-Life 2 at 98 percent on 278,000.
Popularity. A blend of two things that are not the same. Audience is how many people wrote a Steam review, which is a floor on how many played it. Reach is how many language editions of Wikipedia document the game, which is cultural footprint rather than sales. A game can score high on one and low on the other: a huge free-to-play title has audience without reach, and a landmark console exclusive has reach without a Steam audience at all. Where both exist they are averaged; where only one does, that one carries it.
- Multi-platform
Every point links to that game's entry. The value map and the reception map are fixed views of the same data.
How positions are decided
No paid placement, no favouritism, live third-party data
- Placed by the published method, not by us. Every coordinate is computed from the axis definitions and weights printed on this site. Nobody moves a point. See the axes.
- Nothing here is paid for. No sponsored placements, no promoted slots, no arrangement of any kind affects a position. If that ever changes it will be labelled and sit outside the ranking.
- No favouritism, including our own. The 16 games we have written full reviews of are scored by exactly the same formula as the other 1,510, from the same third-party inputs, and they land where it puts them. Our own opinion of a game does not enter its coordinates.
- A position is not an endorsement. It says how a game was received and what it costs, not that we recommend it. Where we do recommend something, it carries a written review with a name on it.
- Fetched from live third-party data. Player sentiment from Steam, critic aggregates as published on store pages, prices checked hourly, attention from Wikipedia. Each figure carries its source and the date it was read, and we do not adjust any of them.
Estimated sales for Quake
These are estimates, not reported figures. Nightdive Studios has not published unit sales for Quake, and nobody outside the company can measure them. What follows is arithmetic on the review count, with the method printed below so you can check it or reject it.
How this was calculated
Steam sales track review counts closely enough that dividing one by the other across games with published figures gives a usable multiplier. This is the standard method for estimating sales from outside a publisher.
| Reviews on Steam | 16,302 |
|---|---|
| Sales per review | 30 to 60 |
| List price | $9.99 |
| Assumed average selling price | 33% to 66% of list |
What this cannot tell you
Steam only. Console, Epic, GOG and retail sales are not in here. For a game that sold heavily on PlayStation this is a fraction of the real number.
The band is wide because the method is imprecise. Review rates vary with price, genre, launch era and how insistently a game asks. Published analyses put the ratio between 30 and 60 for paid games, and we show the whole range rather than picking a point in it.
The owner estimate above measures something else. SteamSpy counts accounts that have the game, which includes free weekends, bundles, giveaways and gifts. It sits higher than a sales figure for that reason, and the two are not alternative answers to the same question.
Revenue is the shakiest line. It assumes an average selling price well below list because most copies move in sales, and it ignores regional pricing, refunds, key resellers and whatever deal the publisher actually has with Valve. Treat it as an order of magnitude, not a figure.
If Nightdive Studios publishes a real number we will use that instead and say where it came from. Our editorial policy covers how we handle figures we cannot verify.
Quake price & deals: is it on sale?
We have one reading so far: $9.99 on 30 August 2026. Prices are checked daily from here, and this becomes a chart once there is more than one point to join. A single observation is a price, not a history.
Latest Quake updates & patch notes
Pulled from Quake's own Steam feed on 5 September 2026. Posts marked as from the studio were written by the developer; the rest are articles Steam syndicated from elsewhere. Every one links to its source.
- 'Thank you so much for the best weekend ever': The id Software gang got together at QuakeCon, and it sure looks like everyone had a great time
- Trent Reznor on Doom: 'In some ways I felt a parallel with what I was trying to do with music'
- 30 years after it 'ruined id Software,' Quake gets another big update while the studio once again grapples with adversity
- 30th Anniversary Update
- "I know how devastating it is, and my heart's with all of you": Doom's John Romero responds to id Software reportedly losing half their team
- John Carmack apologizes after Sandy Petersen says 'Quake ruined id Software,' and for once John Romero doesn't tell Sandy he's wrong
What readers say about Quake
Reviews written by people who have played it. These are separate from the GamingPickz Score and are never averaged into it: that score comes from thousands of Steam reviews with a sample-size correction, and a handful of unverified ratings would distort it rather than improve it.
Loading reviews…
Problems players report
We read the 300 most recent negative Steam reviews of Quake on 30 August 2026 and counted what they mention. These are complaints, not confirmed defects: we have not reproduced any of them, and a review describes one person's machine. What the counts tell you is which problems more than one person ran into.
- Performance and stutter18 of 300 (6%)
The remaster is awfully unoptimized to a point you need a gaming rig to run it properly, which is laughable considering this is Quake and it should be able to run on any garbage.
Steam review, 2 September 2021 · 13 hours played · 13 readers marked it helpfulSome things I can understand for such an old FPS game, for example the repetitive gameplay, but the fact that this is such an annoying experience is not to blame on the age of the game.
Steam review, 3 November 2024 · 4 hours played · 3 readers marked it helpful - Crashes and freezes15 of 300 (5%)
[h1]Almost all major problems I have raised below have finally been fixed![/h1] Its absurd that these problems existed at launch, especially the cross-play match-making crash that I had forgot to mention in my original review.
Steam review, 20 August 2021 · 17 hours played · 11 readers marked it helpfulThis new 'remaster' is a tragedy, and I've only just booted it (multiple times because it crashes a lot, we'll get to that) First thing you'll notice is a bunch of new, infinitely loud splash screens.
Steam review, 20 August 2021 · 0 hours played · 5 readers marked it helpful - Will not launch or install11 of 300 (4%)
Bethesda gave me this dumb remaster version I didn't want, and now winquake, the version i DID want and was currently playing through for the first time, does not launch correctly on my machine.
Steam review, 20 August 2021 · 26 hours played · 12 readers marked it helpfulbut now my comupter cant run it.
Steam review, 6 August 2026 · 15 hours played · 8 readers marked it helpful
A further 6 reviews call the game buggy or broken without saying how, which is why they are counted separately rather than assigned to a theme. Counted by keyword across review text, so a review discussing two problems is counted under both. Read the reviews yourself.
Did it run on your PC?
Tell other players how it ran on your machine. One tap, from your saved PC if you have one.
Where Quake appears
The ranked lists and finder pages Quake qualifies for, from its own genre and platform to what it takes to run.
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Games like Quake
24 games overlap with Quake on the tags Steam players applied to it, on genre, and on theme. The closest are Quake II, Doom 64 and Unreal Gold.
Part of the Quake series
Quake is one of 3 Quake games we track. See the whole series ranked by the GamingPickz Score, plotted on the grid, and listed in release order:
Quake head to head
See Quake compared side by side, on score, price, specs and more:
More Quake comparisons: vs Turok 2: Seeds of Evil, vs Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, vs Half-Life Deathmatch: Source, vs DUSK, vs AMID EVIL, vs DOOM II, vs Unreal Tournament 3 Black, vs Red Faction, vs Blood Fresh Supply, vs Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007), vs Half-Life 2, vs DOOM, vs Wolfenstein: The New Order, vs Dead Island Definitive Edition, vs F.E.A.R., vs Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, vs BioShock Remastered, vs Deep Rock Galactic, vs Infestation: The New Z, vs Killing Floor, vs Left 4 Dead 2, vs Outlast, vs Postal 2, vs Thief Gold (1999), vs World War Z, vs Zombie Army Trilogy
Common questions about Quake
What platforms is Quake on?
Quake is available on Nintendo 64, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Series S, Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck. It first released in 1996.
How much does Quake cost?
$9.99 on Steam in the United States, read on 30 August 2026. Prices move often and vary by region, so check the store before buying.
Do players recommend Quake?
96% of 16,302 Steam reviews are positive, which Steam rates Overwhelmingly Positive. That is players rating it, not our review. We have not published a review of this game.
What is the Metacritic score for Quake?
94 out of 100 for the PC version, as published on the game's own Steam store page. Steam can lag Metacritic by a few points.
Does Quake work on Steam Deck?
Valve rates Quake as verified on the Steam Deck, from its own testing. That means it works out of the box with no configuration.
Who made Quake?
Quake was developed by Nightdive Studios and published by Macmillan Inc., ClickBoom, MacSoft Games.
Is Quake worth it in 2026?
96% of 16,302 Steam reviews are positive (Overwhelmingly Positive), and it is $9.99 on steam. That is the strongest signal we hold; "worth it" depends on the price you pay and what you want, so weigh the sentiment against the current price above.
Is Quake on sale?
Not at the moment. Quake is at its $9.99 list price on Steam, read on 30 August 2026. It has been cheaper before; the price history above shows when.
How long does it take to beat Quake?
about 5.4 hours for the main story, 7.7 hours with the main extras, 18.6 hours to complete everything, from HowLongToBeat's player-submitted times. These are community medians, so your own run may be shorter or longer.
Is Quake worth the money?
At $9.99 for about 5.4 hours to beat the main story, Quake works out to roughly $1.85 per hour. That is a value read, not a verdict: a longer game costs less per hour, which is not the same as being better. Weigh it against the review sentiment above.