Quake is a game about surreal technology and benighted worlds filled with primeval, gore-caked nightmares. It is ostensibly and aesthetically about passing beyond the threshold of human knowledge and into the benthic stretches of an unknown universe. The theme is obvious: gothic, atavistic cosmic horror amidst the pulp-action tones established by Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. This puts Quake in the jarring position that most offshoots of Lovecraft’s weird fictive mythos find themselves stranded, and it’s from this particular dichotomy that its strangest element comes into play.
The weirdest enemy in Quake is a dog. Just a regular-ass dog. In the eternal war against The Black Goat with a Thousand Young, there are dogs and you blow them away with a shotgun.
In terms of cold, hard facts, there is very little to say about Quake’s rottweiler, which carries the internal designation of monster_dog. It makes barking and yelping noises that seem to come straight from a sound library; it can bite or leap a small distance to take you by surprise; it takes about 25 damage to kill and an additional 10 overkill damage to gib. Most players will perceive this much and walk away with a full understanding of what it does and how it dies.
Like most Quake enemies, monster_dog is tied to a specific “theme,” that being the Techbase levels. Since there are only four, this amounts to four total appearances, all of which occur at the beginning of any given episode. To go a step further, I opened the official map sources and counted each individual instance myself: E1M1 and E1M2 both have 8, E3M1 has 9, and E4M1 only has 5. In total, there are exactly thirty dogs in Quake. Experientially, however, this depends on difficulty. Easy mode excludes twenty dogs from spawning, which means that players on the lowest difficulty will only ever encounter ten.
The most imminently unique facet of monster_dog is that it’s the rarest Quake enemy that isn’t a one-off. I originally thought this was monster_rotfish, but apparently there are far more than I remember. (A bug causes every monster_rotfish to count itself as two enemies, so they’re also just cheating.) Even the levels that feature dogs do so conservatively, especially accounting for difficulty-dependent spawns. I noticed that E1M1 only has a single dog on Easy, naturally extending to the entire first episode. This means that anyone who played the original shareware demo on Easy encountered two singular, mysterious beings: the eldritch Chthon, and a rottweiler.
During my intense investigation, I noticed this monster_dog in E2M1 that only appears on Normal difficulty. I was puzzled by this until I checked the other enemies in the hallway: the monster_army in front of it only appears on Easy, while the monster_enforcer behind only appears on Hard. It’s notable that rottweilers have less health than grunts but were nonetheless considered more individually dangerous for balancing purposes. This tells us a little about how id’s designers (namely Romero) ranked dogs in Quake’s food chain. Are they actually scarier than grunts for most players? Maybe! I’ve honestly never thought about it.
What other meaningful facts about monster_dog? Well, they’re one of the weakest enemies in Quake, being possibly the only thing you’d ever bother using the Axe on. They kinda feel like an enemy from a previous id game – even Quake’s lowest enemies are usually stronger than their closest Doom equivalents to account for how much less of them could be reasonably packaged in a level, but they forgot to explain the situation to their dogs, which is a rookie mistake.
Visually, the rottweiler is a little hilarious. It has probably the worst model in the game, with an inscrutable texture that makes it seem like more of an eldritch monster than several of the actual eldritch monsters it ends up guarding. The twitchy floatiness it has while ambulating further creates the (unintentional) sensation that it’s less of a dog and more of a thing, not unlike the Hounds of Tindalos. It technically has eyes, but they’re nearly invisible in-game, which means you could credibly pass it off as a Baby Shambler if you made the fur white. They even take after their parents by inheriting a comically large bounding box, which makes it surprisingly difficult to fit them in the same enclosed spaces their presumed owners have zero trouble navigating.
I tried to hunt down a specific source for a few of the recurring, manual-that-came-in-the-box sounding paragraphs about how the Quake dog is possessed or ontologically evil or taking orders from Yog–Sothoth, but none of my leads turned anything up. In my mind, this has usurped the great Shambler fur debate: are the rottweilers simply mistreated and trained for violence, or are they reporting directly to the Black Goat with a Thousand Young?
Other monster_dog facts? Uh… You can hear some earlier noises for them in this pre-release footage of Quake. There was a classic mod from 1996 that gave you a rottweiler companion that ended up getting rolled into a bunch of other people’s work. There’s a bug you can get in certain versions of the game where letting one land on your head instantly gibs you. Some websites describe them as “possessed,” but I haven’t been able to find a source for that. Maybe there’s a secret cache of monster_dog facts out there, waiting to be discovered…
Still, this covers virtually all official minutiae about the rottweiler, save their appearance (or lack thereof) in the game’s retail and “official” expansions, which I’d emphasize as really no more canonical than any other map that’s been produced in the last 28 years. It is a story without any single author, without any specific end – if you’ve ever felt bad about killing them, rest assured: monster_dog may just live forever.
The only question remaining is… why? Why did I write this and why do I care? Neither you nor I need an answer, but in this case, I think I have one.
The Techbases and their growling keepers – both human and animal – always create an interesting contrast between the menagerie of vague, complex-seeming machines and a cast of figures you couldn’t possibly imagine building or managing any of them. This theme, especially when it operates with the complexity of modern Quake maps, always gives me the same vibe as Warhammer 40k Orks, minus an embedded explanation for why or how their technology works. You can’t tell what’s more invasive: the insane machines or their crazed protectors. Where did any of this come from?
I mentioned that I find the rottweilers in Quake pretty unusual, which seems weird by itself. They are, after all, a stock trope occupying a stock enemy type. Even their name simply evokes the most popular and erroneous scapegoat among aggressive dog breeds. They seem fundamentally uninteresting, and in a game with eldritch monsters and strange geometry, why should such a bottom-shelf concept mean anything at all?
Paradoxically, and in part due to their normalcy, I consider monster_dog to be an anomaly. It isn’t precisely that it doesn’t fit within the aesthetic modalities of Quake (it very much does) but rather that it doesn’t fit in the way you’d anticipate. Creatures like the Shambler, Vore, and Ogre can typically be reconciled with the environments they occupy, or can easily get away with feeling invasive to their surroundings since, y’know, cosmic horror. However, dogs are specific; the fact that they actually exist and are generally perceived in a certain context is a source of mental friction, however subtle it may be.
As I mentioned, dogs are only found in Techbase levels. These spaces exist to establish a contrast – the haunted shadow-worlds they precede can only feel abnormal if there’s a baseline to deviate from. Make no mistake, the Techbases are weird by themselves. They suggest the presence of bewildering technologies tearing apart reality in empty, remote places. Still, most of this evocative weirdness is of the conventional first-episode-of-Doom variety. But bloodthirsty dogs… wouldn’t you expect a techno-fortress to be guarded by technology? Zoomorphic robo-mutts of the Doctor Who or Fahrenheit 451 type? Maybe a mutant of some kind?
You could easily imagine them roaming the tortured semi-medieval architecture beyond the slipgates, but once you’re there, you’ve already seen the last of them. It’s like showing up at Area 51 and expecting human guards or hostile aliens, only to have your path intentionally blocked by vicious shrews or a bunch of bighorn sheep. Vampires are weird, but as Mark Fisher pointed out, black holes exist in reality and make a vampire seem pretty mundane.
It also helps that Quake makes no effort to contextualize the presence of the dogs, as might be done with a handful of brushwork kennels or a texture resembling literal dogshit. Even Wolfenstein had dog food scattered around. By importing something with a clear basis in our reality without any reference to itself, the rottweilers feel inexplicable and somehow not clearly understood, as though we aren’t perceiving the situation correctly.
This is the intellectual excuse behind my interest, but the reason at the center of my heart is perhaps truer: I consider monster_dog to be unloved.
This isn’t to say that monster_dog is hated or even really disliked – I don’t think Quake players especially care about it one way or the other, which is probably why I do. As an enemy, it lacks the targeted utility of the rotfish or the beloved infamy of the spawn. I’m sure more than a few impassioned testimonies have been raised in its honor; Quake has so few enemies that all of them become subculturally iconic in their own way. But if you held the average mapper at gunpoint and asked them to pick an enemy to erase from the game entirely… that person would probably cheat and pick the Ogre Marksman. But if they picked something else, it would be the rottweiler.1
This lack of any significant attention or meaningful cultural cachet immediately endears me to it. As a general rule, I love underdogs. Hold for applause. I love anomalies and leftovers and things in games that are genuinely bespoke – singular one-offs or simply unremarked elements that don’t get pasted across every facet of the experience or made into a huge deal, and which consequently feel a little like they just don’t belong, however true that may be.
I frequently think about the alien turret or the bizarre purple-crystal-beam-thing in Half-Life, random threats made of level scripting and geometry and hopes and prayers, both only appearing in a single map. Whenever I play Half-Life 2, I always recognize the only Combine Elite in the game that wields an SMG. If I’m playing Halo: Reach with a friend, I make a special note of the only two Gúta creatures, both of which are constrained to a single mission due to cuts across the rest of the levels. I’ve been thinking about the only red Snifit in the entirety of Super Mario Bros. 2 since I was seven or eight. Its image will likely flash across my brain while I’m dying.
Somebody has to love them, these extraneous curiosities. They’re like digital cryptids of the purest sort: rare accidents of nature or antediluvian, vestigial remnants of an environment that no longer exists. A world in which all of these misfits stopped existing might change very little. The temporal part of our brain, the one that can apparently tell when some time traveler fucks up and changes the name of the Berenstain Bears, might not even notice the difference. But I believe there’s a part of us that fails to recognize itself, just as it fails to recognize the small things we can’t live without. That part, in its unnameable sorrow, would miss them all the same.
You’re a weird and ugly little thing, monster_dog. God bless you.
- I’d emphasize that this isn’t the best choice, but merely the most obvious one. Obviously the correct choice would be to remove the Knight. ↩︎