498 Words About: Quake’s Nailgun
The ammo boxes literally have the Nine Inch Nails band logo printed on the sides. The only reason this didn’t flip me out when I first played Quake was because I had read the book Masters of Doom by David Kirshner and knew that Trent Reznor, apart from being a fan of DOOM, had been involved with the soundtrack. I didn’t know that the Nailgun, one of the numerous weapons that can be employed in the game, was considered under-powered, and even in some circles considered useless by the fan community of Quake. I was just impressed that someone had thought to include a nailgun in a first person shooter.
I mean, seriously, why aren’t there more nailguns?
The first time I found the Nailgun was when I was playing Quake on my Playstation 5, impressed by this videogame that was basically DOOM but in 3D. It had monsters, geometric level designs, and it had guns.
LOTS of guns.
The nailgun can be found in E1M1, and no not THAT E1M1. This E1M1 is subtitled: The Slipgate Complex. The Nailgun can be found in multiple levels, and I actually didn’t find it until E2M2, and no, not THAT E2M2. Once I found the nailgun, I used it as my primary weapon because, honestly, it was fun to use. Though not as aesthetically brilliant as the weapons of DOOM, the Nailgun had a blocky brilliance that most of the early 3D videogame engines possessed, and it’s high pitched racketting as the small tetrahedron “nails” fire from the barrels of the gun rang pleasant in my ear.
As did the sound of enemies gurgling and dying.
The graphics of Quake (even at 60 FPS and 1080p) make shooting the Nailgun an abstract exercise in projectile launching. The nails don’t look like nails, and the gun doesn’t even truly resemble a gun. Instead the twin barrels resemble two towers made in a Minecraft engine projecting from the bottom of the screen, pointing at the various monsters, walking corpses, and floating sperm creatures that roam the halls.There’s a shotgun, a rocket launcher, a grenade launcher, an energy beam, and a super shotgun (because John Romero and John Carmack) but the Nailgun remains my go-to weapon.
Quake is an abstract nightmare of a game. I mean that in the sense that running through its halls, shooting enemies, and solving puzzles doesn’t take me to another world the way DOOM does.
When I play DOOM, I have a shotgun on Mars.
When I play Quake, I’m nowhere, and these guns are just impressions or concepts at best.
This isn’t a weakness because, again, I love Quake. I’ve spent hours playing it. I’m going to keep playing it. But calling the abstract blocks shooting tetrahedrons a “nailgun” insists too much on what feels like an uncanny miasma of digital brilliance. My intellectual impression of Quake’s Nailgun is like that of every other weapon in the game: it’s a blocky smudge in a dark dream.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
10.14.2024
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