The release of Quake Remastered was a pretty cool move by Bethesda Softworks, but that wasn't the only surprise — cut content known as "The Lost Entrance to the Dismal Oubliette" has been restored.
Quake is inarguably a classic first-person shooter, but no game is truly perfect and many developers end up cutting content from the final product. Sometimes these abandoned files are included in the game and sometimes they're lost to the sands of time.
This iconic FPS originally created by Id Software is no exception, but the latest version of the game has a special surprise: the biggest piece of Quake Remastered cut content has been restored in the newest version of Quake that was recently released by Nightdive Studios and Bethesda Softworks.
'The Lost Entrance to the Dismal Oubliette' Returns in Quake Remastered
John Romero left a fair amount of unfinished maps on the cutting room floor. The most iconic piece of cut content, however, is something known as "The Lost Entrance to the Dismal Oubliette." As @starshipwaters on Twitter reports, this missing part of the map has now returned to the game.
"For a long time now, I’ve kept one remnant of Quake’s creation that I had to cut out. It’s the Lost Entrance of the Dismal Oubliette," John Romero explained in 2010. "Yes, there used to be a much more interesting beginning to that area of Quake, but I had to amputate the guy and cauterize the wound into its current state, the starting point of e2m6."
The Dismal Oubliette is a challenging map due to its tight corridors; Romero considered the map the sole "defective gene" in the game, owing to his lack of understanding of how large the space of a Quake level was in comparison to the size of maps in Doom. The beginning of the map, however, was different from what gamers actually got to play when Quake first launched in 1996.
"I remember spending many hours trying to get it just right, to create the feeling of an awful, cavernous pit for the player to get out of and into the real horror of the Oubliette." – John Romero, One of Quake's Designers
So, why was this cut from the game? Believe it or not, it all had to do with the removable media of the day: The Lost Entrance to the Dismal Oubliette made this particular level larger than 1.4MB in size and this single map file could no longer fit onto a floppy disk. Ultimately, it was axed and players never got the chance to play it until Romero released it to the world in 2010.
Sadly, this isn't the only piece of Quake cut content — Romero says that there are even more maps that he doesn't have the files for, but these missing maps may truly be lost forever.
"I remember many maps that I thought were going to turn out great, but just didn’t make the cut in the end," Romero said. "I wish I had copies of those old guys — I spent a lot of time in them, thinking about them during their creation, learning how to create spaces with them."
It's too bad we can't play all of the missing maps from Quake, but at least we have the chance to play one of them — you can buy Quake Remastered on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch for $9.99 or your regional equivalent.
What do you think of the return of The Lost Entrance to the Dismal Oubliette in Quake Remastered? What's your favorite level in the game? Let us know in the comments below!
