12/1/2023 0 Comments Dark young shub niggurath quake![]() It is this passage on which the Shub at the end of Quake we all know likely based. Something big and black and ropy, just squatting there, waiting, with ropy arms sqirming and reaching." "Something black in the road, something that wasn't a tree. Another writer, Robert Bloch ( who was Lovecraft's protege when he was a teenager, and went on to write the novel that was cinematised as 'Psycho' ) added this himself: Shub-Niggurath - this is the only overtly female entity in the mythos, but is never encountered in Lovecraft's own stories. The vertical mouth is taken from one of Lovecraft's creatures, the Gug. The depiction in Quake of an infernal-red monster is probably id's own stylisation ( quite right too ) but if you look closely at Cthon's face, you'll notice he hasn't got one just a maw of crimson fangs opening vertically. The word cthonic is in original greek kthon or xthonos which literally means 'dweller under the earth'. What follows is a summation of all the creature sources I have discerned from my own encounters.Ĭthon - contrary to popular interpretation, the name Cthon is probably not directly from Cthulhu, but from Brian Lumley's mythos 'Chthonians'. However, although it is unlikely that Quake veterans would rate episode 4 as the greatest level design ever, it was the monsters that really bore the strongest investment of mythos character and this I am sure was due predominantly to Petersen's involvment. For the making of Quake, each level designer was ostensibly designated a separate episode and texture wad - John Romero: episode 2 American McGee: episode 3: Sandy Petersen: episode 4 - and it was the last ( and hardest ) of these that superficially contains the most Lovecraft references. Lovecraftian references certainly exist in id software's releases prior to Quake, but it was when Petersen was hired as a level designer that the major influx occurred. Credit is deserved by any system whose most critical statistic quantifies not the characters' strength, intelligence or weapon skill but their rapidly deteriorating sanity! COC was voted by readers of Dragon magazine as best RPG ever, an achievement certainly due in part to how faithful Petersen was to both the style and the substance of the mythos. Although Lovecraft was known to aficionados of horror fiction, it is probably this game that is most responsible for popularising his original writing. Sandy Petersen - a contributor to game design for many years now, Sandy Petersen's first and most influential publication was the transformation of Lovecraft's stories into the Call Of Cthulhu roleplaying game back in the early eighties. I first posted some of this material on the currently defunct QMap forum. ![]() To better convey this contribution to the atmosphere of Quake and its continuing role in my own work, I have drawn together all the examples I can cite of Lovecraft in Quake. Half-Life, while visibly based on the 1950's B-movie lore of UFOlogy, also owes much to the Cthulhu Mythos. Most, though not all, players are aware that some Lovecraftian elements exist in the first game of the Quake series, but it is not widely know just how deep the influence goes. ![]() On the contrary, imagination has always been the prime material of these narratives so each new artifact, entity or world adds to the existing storyscape while remaining free from restriction to only that which Lovecraft himself detailed.Ĭomputer games, sharing essentially the same sources of inspiration as genre movies and music, have also been infected with the presence of The Great Old Ones. I also believe that the nature of what Lovecraft did accounts for its phenomenal effect on art of many mediums across the entire length of the twentieth century unlike the supremely detailed worlds of Tolkien's Middle Earth or Herbert's Dune, the realm of the Cthulhu Mythos is so expansive and all-consuming, yet so vague and indistinct, that no one author can now be revered as its sole authority. In music, too, many themes can be traced back to that dark and swollen prose, the most authentic of which can be found in the music of the Nephilim. Movies of the profoundly effecting survival genre such as Alien, Aliens, John Carpenter's The Thing, Pitch Black and so on all are dramatisations, through indirect processes of inspiration and reinspiration, of the core concepts first expressed in Lovecraft's stories way back as early as 1917. As well as being directly affected by the writings of this eccentric and visionary author, many works in other media that have come to reside in my imagination are themselves built upon a foundation of ideas and experiences drawn from what has come to be known as the Cthulhu Mythos. The influence of Howard Philips Lovecraft on my work is apparent to anyone aquainted with both. Lovecraft In Quake - Sources And Inspiration
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