Quake turned 30 this month, and MachineGames marked the occasion with Dawn of the Machine, a free new episode developed in collaboration with original studio id Software. The 19-map campaign shipped Aug. 6 as a free update for Quake on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4, according to PlayStation, and pairs the campaign with a new soundtrack and an added Deathmatch map. A launch trailer accompanies the release, showing Ranger battling through the episode's time-looping dimension.
The expansion traces back to a pitch from MachineGames Lead Level Designer Andrew Yoder, who approached studio Game Director Jerk Gustafsson about a Quake project after wrapping work on the Indiana Jones and the Great Circle DLC The Order of Giants. The team, nicknamed Quake Club internally, built Dawn of the Machine around three goals: staying true to Quake's original horror-and-carnage tone, giving veteran players a continuous campaign instead of the hub-and-reset structure used in earlier MachineGames episodes Call of the Machine and Dimension of the Machine, and giving developers across both studios room to contribute outside their usual specialties on a smaller-scale project than a full AAA release.
The episode follows Quake protagonist Ranger as he fights to escape a looping, illusory dimension controlled by an enemy called the Nightmare Machine, uncovering health and ammunition upgrades as the loop resets around him. New enemies include altered versions of the Rocket Ogre, Demo Dog and Blood Shambler, matched against two new weapons: a ricochet-firing Laser Cannon and a lightning-charged Super Axe. MachineGames Advanced Level Designer Christian Plogfors contributed two of the episode's levels and composed its soundtrack, which Yoder says gives Dawn of the Machine "its own identity."
Dawn of the Machine extends a run of MachineGames-developed Quake content that began with Call of the Machine in 2023, keeping the mod-friendly afterlife going three decades after id Software's original 1996 release helped define the first-person shooter genre.
