A downloadable mod

This mod re-scores Quake using every track from the 2008 Nine Inch Nails ambient/instrumental album "Ghosts I-IV", and puts the game into a "tourism mode" where there are no enemies, weapons, and the player can't take damage.
See "Disabling Tourism" in the readme if you'd prefer to play with regular Quake gameplay. Also see Joel Baxter's variation of this mod, Ghosts Made Flesh, which adds non-hostile monsters back in and provides several interesting customization options.

Ghosts I-IV was released by the band under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA
license, all terms of which are complied with here, with an encouragement to reinterpret and remix the music. See the readme for more on this.

Quake has 32 levels and Ghosts has 36 tracks, so each of the 4 episodes also uses a unique track for the intermission between levels.

This mod also integrates John Romero's original intro sequence for E2M6, "Lost Entrance of the Dismal Oubliette", which was cut from the original release for disk space reasons and released by Romero in 2001.

See the included file README.TXT for details on how to run the mod, how to disable tourism mode, and how to remix the mod with your own track ordering.

StatusReleased
CategoryGame mod
Rating
Rated 4.4 out of 5 stars
(8 total ratings)
AuthorJP LeBreton
Tagsambient, FPS, mod, quake, tourism
Code licenseMIT License
Asset licenseCreative Commons Attribution_NonCommercial_ShareAlike v4.0 International
Average sessionA few hours
InputsKeyboard, Mouse, Gamepad (any)

Download

Download
quake-ghosts.zip 140 MB
Version 3 Jan 13, 2018

Install instructions

You'll need Quakespasm, a port of Quake that runs on modern systems (Windows, macOS, Linux) and includes many enhancements: http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net

You'll also need the two PAK data files from the full (aka "registered") version of Quake, pak0.pak and pak1.pak, which can be purchased from a variety of online game stores. Place these files in a subdirectory called "id1/" beneath the Quakespasm executable.

Then extract the contents of this file at that same level, so that the "ghosts/" subdirectory sits next to id1.

Finally, launch Quakespasm, press the ~ key to open the console, and type "game ghosts".

Development log

Comments

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(+1)

oh yeah i found that this is compatible with darkplaces (which is pretty cool) also since it has a mod menu you can turn it on of off without using a text editor

When I ran it, the monsters and items still show up, and I didn't even disable the tourism mode.

That's odd. Here's something to try, type "showturtle" at the console. What value does it read back? It should be 1, if it's 0 or something else try setting it to 1 and see if the problem persists.

Okay that settled it! Thanks!

Another bug report (sort of). If a player inadvertently changes their weapon to axe, like by hitting their mouse scroll wheel, it can seem mysterious why the boomstick stops working since there is no HUD. Might want to disable weapon-switch impulses in tourism mode.

And I think there's still an issue w/ flying and swimming monsters not spawning in non-tourism mode. I haven't tried it but just from code inspection it looks like they are always killed off regardless.

Good catch, should be fixed.

(+2)

Just wanted to say I really like this.

Booting up the first intro/select difficulty map, and the simple piano track starts to play. Just fits it perfectly. I had some friends that I used to play Quake with who have passed on, and I toasted them with a drink while playing this mod.

Like a digital memorial of sorts.

If you want to make launch easier, you can add arguments like:

quakespasm.exe -width 1024 -height 768 -game ghosts

So when you select new game, it starts automatically with the right resolution, or you can use -f for fullscreen.

Thanks for doing this, really means a lot to me.

Oh, is there a way to say do a "flythrough" or demo while doing the same music? Just curious.

Having fun poking around with this! If you're interested in providing an option for visible (noninteractive) monsters BTW, I've been running this mod with a small change to make that choice available: https://github.com/neogeographica/quakec/compare/ghosts...ghosts_modified

(also a couple of bugfixes in there I think, to make sure that flying/swimming monsters spawn correctly when tourism is disabled)

These are very cool additions! I'll have to think about how they'd fit into the mod as it currently stands...

(2 edits)

One more thing that may need doing in that modification, if a monster death is required to trigger something to enable advancement. To be safe I should probably make sure that code like the last few lines of monster_death_use gets invoked for all the ghosts (and then maybe NOT do that part of monster_death_use when it actually dies). Will get back to poking around at that soon.

Edit: E4M7 is a nice test case (the vores at the end). Made a couple of changes so that that map is completable.

Edit 2: Checked that all maps are completable.

Two tiny bugs found when the "tourism" config is disabled, the shooting traps don't work anymore and  shotgun has unlimited ammo.

Good catch, I'll fix those issues.

I can't seem to get the mod to run. I get an autoexec error when running in quakespasm.

What sort of error? What does it say in the log?