It looks like Fabien Sanglard is writing a Quake Engine Black Book.
This will sit along side is excellent Doom and Wolf3d engine black books:
See the series here, which includes free PDF downloads. I read his “The Book of CP-System” book, but it was not as nostalgic as the other two.
He has not come out and declared the Quake book, but he’s been writing a lot about Quake recently (~4 months), for example:
- How quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack, Nov 17, 2025
- Quake Engine Indicators, Nov 24, 2025
- Why WinQuake exists and how it works, Dec 3, 2025
- Building a Quake PC, Jan 8, 2026
- Is QSpy still cool? Let’s play QuakeWorld!, Jan 16, 2026
- Let’s compile Quake like it’s 1997!, Feb 5, 2026
- How Michael Abrash doubled Quake framerate, Feb 14, 2026
- Mo RAM, mo problems, Feb 16, 2025
His building and testing of a Quake PC was particularly awesome as it got into 3Dfx and OpenGL Quake.
Such good memories!
One cool thing is that he has linked/referenced my Quake Official Archive a few times. Yay!
He also has some older Quake code review articles/series:
- Quake Engine code review, March 9th, 2009
- Quake 2 Source Code Review, September 16th, 2011
- Quake 3 Source Code Review, June 30, 2012
Anyway, a Quake engine book would be fantastic, especially for this old Quake archivist!
I even suggested that he gather funds via pre-sales and take time of work in an effort to get the book out sooner:
I cannot wait for a quake engine book. I’m sure a few hundred of us would be happy to pre-pay so you can take some time off work and write it all up :)
Hopefully 2026 will see a “Game Engine Black Book: Quake”.