Janitor III
The old story was that Quake II which has nothing to do with Quake I was going to be a completely different name, but we got fed up with getting the names rejected so we said, "Dammit, it's Quake II. We own that trademark."https://web.archive.org/web/20120425231954/ht..._More.html
Quake II has a coherent story for once. Nothing like Quake. "So is it a sequel?" - I hear you ask; no. The only reason it uses the same name is because id encountered legal problems with the other names they come up with, besides (like Hexen II) the game became popular and known as Quake II thus it was too late to change it.https://web.archive.org/web/20090412121802/ht...mespy.com/
Paul Jaquays: I've had a request (which means that there's a lot more of you out there who don't write) to explain why I'm saying that Quake II is not a sequel to Quake. The word sequel implies a continuation of what has gone before. In this case, a continuation of the battle against Quake, the mythical overlord of evil, by soldiers fighting in an undefined army in undefined places. Although many of the features of Quake II will be similar to Quake players (such as a 3D environment, some weapons that function similar to those of Quake, lava, slime and use of game's logo in certain special game powerups), it is not a continuation of the Quake story.
With Quake II, id has chosen to follow a different story line (and they did this before I got here). Instead of a vague "Kill the minions of Quake" sort of imperative, we have created a brand new story with a solid, homogenous, entirely futuristic, totally militaristic story line. In Quake II, you are a soldier in the TCM (Terran Confederation of Man) army, a combined force put together from the surviving armies of nations on the planet Earth and those of Earth's colonies on the Moon and the new independent nation of Ares on the planet Mars. Humanity is commited to what we hope will be the terminal battle of an ongoing war to not only repell alien invaders from our system, but to destroy their ability to make war of any kind. The battle (in this episode) takes place on the planet Stroggos, the alien homeworld, the core of their barbaric "civilization." Levels are designed to be played in a logical, sequential progression. And here, your mission doesn't end until the big guy, the core of the problem goes down for the long dirtnap.
OK, now WHY are we calling it Quake II, when it's not really a sequel to Quake? Several reasons. Trademarking. The names we were going for, the ones that to our thinking, really expressed the concept and theme of the game were owned by someone else (when it appears that you may have money to actually cover real or imagined damages, "foxxing" really gets ugly. They don't just tell you to cease and desist). We kept putting forward names to our copyright attorneys and they kept telling us "You're not safe from liability with that one." The deadline for having our real and true name in time for E3 came, and our hands weren't grasping that one great name. And there it was waiting for us like an old lover ... our working title ... Quake II. It knew we'd come home to it at last. It should have been obvious. We've built up a great deal of name recognition with Quake. We shouldn't just throw that away.
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