Quake

PC · Any% Episode 1 (Nightmare, 100%) · 1996

Current WR

4:24 (100% Nightmare Episode 1)

First Known Run

~8:00

Quake speedrunning inherited the Doom community's infrastructure and added a fully 3D movement system whose bunny-hopping physics have been exploited to their mathematical limit.

Quake's speedrun community formed around the Quake Done Quick project, a 1997 collaborative segmented run that finished the game in nineteen minutes and was later improved to under twelve minutes in Quake Done Quicker. The game's movement physics allow velocity to be preserved and amplified by bunny-hopping — strafe-jumping while airborne — producing speeds far above the normal walking cap. Grenade jumping and rocket jumping extend vertical mobility. The Quake community pioneered the segmented run format, where players combine individually optimised level recordings into a complete-game time, and also produced some of the earliest professional-quality speedrun videos distributed online. id Software again acknowledged the community, with John Romero and John Carmack commenting on the Quake Done Quick demos.

Famous Techniques:

Bunny Hopping — strafe-jumping repeatedly while airborne to accumulate speed beyond the walking cap, exploiting the game's air-acceleration physics
Rocket Jump — firing a rocket at the ground simultaneously with jumping to use the explosion's upward knockback for extreme vertical height
Grenade Jump — a slower but more precisely controllable alternative to the rocket jump, used where ceiling height restricts rocket trajectories
Strafe-Jump Acceleration — timing directional inputs during airborne phases to continuously add velocity, theoretically without upper limit

Notable Runners:

Nolan "Rotty" Pflug — key organiser of the original Quake Done Quick collaboration and long-time community figure
Markus "Spider-Waffle" Taipale — world-record holder across multiple individual maps who defined modern Quake routing
Sergey "negke" Puschkarew — top runner and map researcher who contributed the majority of records in the Quake Done Quickest segmented project

Key Facts:

Quake Done Quick (1997) was among the first collaborative segmented speedruns ever assembled and distributed online
Bunny-hopping was an unintended consequence of the Quake Engine's air-strafing physics, preserved in subsequent engines including GoldSrc and Source
John Carmack and id Software publicly acknowledged and praised the Quake Done Quick project on release
The technique migrated into Counter-Strike and Half-Life, where bunny-hopping became a defining competitive movement skill