Quake 4 is kinda the forgotten sibling of the Quake family, so much so that just over two decades after its initial release, casual gamers might be forgiven for not realizing the series didn’t end with Quake III: Arena. Each of the series’ first three entries were, after all, both great games and landmarks for one reason or another: the original game was a flat-out masterpiece of low-poly Lovecraftian weirdness; its sequel was a milestone in the development of hardware-accelerated graphics; and Arena broke new ground with its focus on multiplayer action. Quake 4, though? It… um, well, it came out on Xbox? Quake 4’s poor-relation status may or may not explain why it remains to date the last numbered entry in the series, and why a planned expansion—entitled Quake 4: The Awakening, and developed externally by a company called Ritual Entertainment—was cancelled. The Awakening was buried so comprehensively, in fact, that basically no-one knew of its (non-)existence until 2017, when artist Vitaliy Naymushin released several images of models that would have appeared in the game. The models are interesting in and of themselves, and have been picked over in the decade since—this one, in particular, bears more than a passing resemblance to the Carcass monster from 2020’s Doom Eternal. Anyway, that would probably have been it for the story of The Awakening had a veteran game developer by the name of Justin Marshall not gotten divorced. As per his Github, at some point during his divorce, Marshall bought a vintage computer from Amazon. What he found on that computer, he writes, “essentially saved my life.”