John Carmack did most of the programming of the engine, with help from Michael Abrash in algorithms and assembly optimization.

John Romero initially conceived of Quake as an action game taking place in a fully 3D polygon world, inspired by Sega AM2's 3D fighting game Virtua Fighter.

Quake was also intended to feature Virtua Fighter-influenced third-person melee combat.

However, id Software considered it to be risky, and it would've taken longer to develop the engine.

[4][5] On December 21, 1999, John Carmack of id Software released the Quake engine source code on the Internet under the terms of GPL-2.0-or-later, allowing programmers to edit the engine and add new features.