One of the Saturn’s biggest games in the 1997 holiday season was Quake, a smash hit FPS on the PC that came to Sega’s platform before any other console courtesy of Lobotomy Software.
Now, the unique version that Sega fans got nearly 25 years ago is on its way back to PC thanks to a Quake fan named Jaycie Erysdren who is reverse engineering it.
With the help of a plugin for her 3D rendering software of choice, Blender, Jaycie is exporting the levels, models and sprites from the Saturn version of Quake to rebuild them in a modern PC engine.
“I think it’s a super interesting and unique port,” Jaycie said in an interview over Twitter. “Plus I love Quake more than almost any other game, so a sorta forgotten weird port is right up my alley.”
There are several unique things about the Saturn version of Quake that Lobotomy Software added that weren’t in the 1996 PC original from id Software.
There are redesigned levels with layouts that diverge “sometimes greatly” from the PC version, Jaycie said, plus the weapons are depicted with sprites instead of polygons and there are four levels only found in the Saturn version.
Additionally, there’s an Easter egg hidden in Saturn Quake that allows players to see — and hear, thanks to unnamed voices — a fan-made Quake comic from the era named Dank & Scud.
Dank & Scud is a webcomic from 1996 through 1998 that’s somewhat in the vein of Rooster Teeth’s Red vs. Blue video series, which lampooned another FPS, Halo. It set up Quake in-game assets for screenshots that matched the comedic stories that the author, Michael Houston, wanted to tell about its eponymous characters, Dank and Scud.
Jaycie said she wants to bring all of it — the level layouts, the weapon sprites and even Dank & Scud — to the PC.
“I think it’ll be a fun new Quake experience in the end, especially for experienced Quake players,” Jaycie said.
Quake players on PC are at the top of her mind because she doesn’t come from the Sega fan community found on SegaXtreme, Shiro and elsewhere but rather the Quake modding community. That’s made plumbing the depths of the Saturn a new and difficult challenge.
“The game’s code is completely obfuscated to me, I have no way to access anything related to game functionality. However, the game’s levels are in a format called .LEV, which has been somewhat documented by a man named Rich Whitehouse in 2015. Rich is a longtime Quake modder and has worked at several games studios. His documentation on the format was incredibly useful in development of a functional Blender plugin to import the geometry and texture and entity data.”
Jaycie Erysdren
Using the documentation written by Rich Whitehouse about the Saturn version of Quake’s level data, Jaycie used a programming language called KaitaiStruct to write a definitions file and Python script to facilitate importing the data into Blender. From there, it was a few more steps to import them into the Quake engine on PC.
She’s also documented other bits of the game that Whitehouse didn’t, including information about entities like monsters, doors and weapons.
She began working on the port “on and off” since September last year. While there’s still a ways to go before finishing it, including figuring out how doors, platforms and buttons work in the Saturn version, she’s getting closer to making the game more accessible to PC players.
And a PC port of Saturn Quake may not be the end of her efforts.
“If I felt crazy, I could even write an exporter to make custom levels for the format,” Jaycie said. “It’s totally possible. If I wrote that, you could use Blender to create custom levels for Saturn Quake. I’m not promising that I’ll do that, but I may consider it once the importer is done.”
Just this week, Jaycie tweeted that she adapted her level import tool to accommodate PowerSlave, the first FPS that Lobotomy made for the Saturn and whose engine, SlaveDriver, was used to make the Quake and Duke Nukem 3D ports for the console.
They would be the only three games Lobotomy would make for the Saturn, as they were acquired by Crave Entertainment in spring 1998 and closed a year later.
“I think the Saturn is a fascinating console, from an outside perspective,” Jaycie said. “I’ve never had one, but the presence of the games from Lobotomy make it extremely intriguing to me.
“My primary reason for doing this port is because I believe it deserves to be remembered and playable in 2022; the guys at Lobotomy did a stellar job with their ports and PowerSlave and it cost them their company.”
Danthrax is a contributor to the Shiro Media Group, writing stories for the website when Saturn news breaks. While he was a Sega Genesis kid in the ’90s, he didn’t get a Saturn until 2018. It didn’t take him long to fall in love with the console’s library as well as the fan translation and homebrew scene. He contributed heavily to the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS fan localizations, and has helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.
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