The game revolves around the player infiltrating alien bases with an arsenal of weapons to recover time-traveling orbs.

The game was intentionally designed as a clone of the first-person shooter Doom (1993) and was geared toward inexpensive computers.

[3] The game was designed by Mike Taylor on an "archaic 486DX33 system with an ancient 512K VLB (VESA Local Bus) VGA card" as a clone of the first-person shooter Doom that could run smoothly on inexpensive computers while being fun.

Quiver was released in March 1997 for the MS-DOS as shareware, with the first episode serving as a demo and the rest of the game being unlocked upon inputting a registration code.

[2] In September 1997, PC Player found Quiver outdated, finding fault with its game engine and controls.