Quake · PC · Manipulation · Saves: Level-dependent; typically 10–40% of route time in competitive maps · Documented: 1996
Exploiting Quake's Newtonian movement physics to maintain and accumulate horizontal speed through repeated jumps, combined with rocket-jump propulsion, enabling movement speeds and trajectories the game's level design never anticipated.
Quake's movement engine, written by John Carmack based on his earlier Doom and Quake prototypes, models player velocity as a vector quantity that persists between frames. Ground friction decelerates the player when grounded, but jump inputs briefly eliminate ground contact, suspending friction application for the duration of the arc. If the player jumps again immediately on landing — maintaining almost no ground contact time — friction is almost never applied, and speed accumulated from strafe inputs is preserved across jumps. This is bunny hopping: a rhythm of continuous jumping that converts lateral strafe acceleration into sustained high-speed movement that the game's friction model was not designed to handle. Rocket jumping extends the technique by using the explosion from the Rocket Launcher — which applies force to the player as well as to enemies — to launch the player vertically or at angles impossible through movement inputs alone. Skilled players can use rocket jumps to reach geometry above normal jump height, bypass large sections of level routing, and access areas the designers placed out of reach of normal movement. Together, trick jumping transformed Quake into both the origin point of speedrunning culture — the QuakeDone and QuakeDone Quicker projects established the collaborative demo format that later became the foundation of Speedrun.com — and the direct ancestor of movement mechanics in nearly every subsequent first-person shooter.
Quake's movement code calculates player velocity through an additive model: each frame, input forces (strafe, forward, backward) are added to the existing velocity vector, then friction is subtracted. Ground friction is proportional to speed — faster movement decelerates faster. The key constraint is that friction only applies when the player is flagged as grounded. A jumping player applies input forces to the existing velocity without the friction term, allowing strafe acceleration to increase speed freely during the airborne frames.
Bunny hopping chains these airborne windows by minimising ground contact to a single frame per jump. Each landing and re-jump contributes a small additional acceleration from the ground-contact strafe input, and the lack of sustained friction means this accumulates over time. After twenty to thirty consecutive hops, a player can reach speeds several times the game's intended maximum walk speed, converting what the engine models as a series of brief jumps into effective sustained flight.
Quake trick jumping had an immediate and lasting effect on first-person shooter design. Valve incorporated bunny hopping and a version of rocket jumping into Half-Life (1998), where they became foundational to competitive play. Counter-Strike's movement inherited similar physics and bunny hopping, though later versions deliberately throttled it. Team Fortress 2 made rocket jumping a core class mechanic for the Soldier. The technique effectively demonstrated that movement depth in shooters could come from physics engine interactions rather than dedicated mechanics, a lesson the industry absorbed at different speeds and with different conclusions about whether to encourage or suppress the behaviour.
The speedrunning legacy is equally direct: the QuakeDone project's collaborative approach — multiple runners contributing optimised segments that are spliced into a single demo — established the segmented speedrun format. The ethical frameworks that developed around what constituted legitimate use of tricks versus cheating were the first systematic discussions of speedrunning rules, and the conclusions the Quake community reached are still cited in debates about category definitions twenty-five years later.