Nu Quakeguy

11 Aug 2026 / Brendon

Some time ago I was checking out Nightdive’s Quake remaster, and trying out the splitscreen coop mode.

I thought the player model looked pretty great, and appreciated how it retained the beautiful low-rez low-poly look of the original Quake. Here’s how it looks:

Opening the PAK

I was curious to see what tweaks were made to the player model. So, I opened up the game’s .PAK file:

MD5 models

As you can see in the screenshot above, the model file format used in the Quake remaster is MD5.

I thought this was very cool. For context:

id Software’s Quake (1996) used MDL files for its models. MDL models are vertex-animated, meaning each frame stores the individual position of each vertex.
id Software’s Doom 3 (2004) used MD5 files for its models. These models use skeletal animation. (also, this is the model format we used for Skin Deep)

So basically: in the Quake remaster, they still use an in-house idTech model format – a model format that id Software would devise 8 years in the future after the original Quake.

I thought it was fascinating to see the remaster of an id Software 1996 game use a model format from an id Software 2004 game. There’s something kinda beautiful about that???

Loading the MD5 model

I still have my Skin Deep tool chain still set up on my computer, so I was able to import in the remastered Quakeguy and take a peek:

Wiggling the Quakeguy…

Texture

Here’s a comparison of the textures.

Original texture, 296x194:

Remaster texture, 256x256:

Here’s a size comparison of a small portion:

The remaster’s new UV map layout allows for more real estate, there’s more detail, but is extremely restrained and maintains the original spirit. I love how the chunky pixel density was retained. Really lovely stuff.

Model

The model itself surprised me a lot.

At a glance, it looked to me like they cleaned up the model a bit, maybe nipped and tucked some polys:

Imagine my surprise when I compared them further: Original model: 408 triangles | Remaster model: 1404 triangles

So yea, the remaster’s Quakeguy has about 3x the polycount of the original. I think it’s really well done: at a (non-wireframe) glance, the two quakeguys look so similar.

They really nailed the same shapes, silhouette, proportions, and spirit of the original model – and at the same time adjusted the texture stretching & found ways to make it look like how you remember it looking in your memories.

Et al

There’s a million ways to adapt anything. I appreciated the approach taken here – embracing its lineage, a nice coat of new paint that still retained the spirit of the original, using an upgraded model file format created for a later id Software game (!). Love it.

Anyway, great stuff. I dunno how they pulled it off, but they did.