The South Korean Game Rating and Administration Committee (GRAC) has done it again, folks. With just under two months to go until this year’s QuakeCon event, the agency has gone and rated Quake 2 Remastered (via Gematsu), which we can probably assume does for the second game in the series what Quake Remastered did for the first.
The GRAC does this a lot. Not only has it leaked a new League of Legends game and some kind of new Silent Hill thing in recent memory, it actually leaked the remaster of the first Quake before that got announced and released at QuakeCon 2021.
It’s impossible to say for certain, but I’d be very surprised if we didn’t see the same happen for Quake 2 Remastered at QuakeCon 2023, which runs from August 10 to August 13 and will be the convention’s first in-person event since the Covid-19 pandemic kicked off in 2020.
The rating on the GRAC’s website is sparse on detail and mostly just describes Quake 2. A machine translation of the contents says it’s about “war against the hostile alien race, Strogg, who plans to invade the earth” and contains “excessive expression of violence”. Still, I’m pretty excited. Quake 2 was a formative game for me—something I remember playing sitting at my dad’s enormous Fujitsu desktop when I was 6 years old—and I’ll take any excuse to plunge back into that nostalgic feeling. The GRAC’s rating says it’s unsuitable for kids, but what do they know?
Quake 2 already has a kind of pseudo-remaster in the form of Quake 2 RTX, but that’s more of a technical showpiece designed to show off the kind of lighting wizardry that Nvidia’s ray tracing-capable cards are able to pull off. There’s still plenty a more formal remaster could accomplish.
When the Quake 1 remaster released, it was accompanied by a brand new expansion from MachineGames—Dimension of the Machine—and even got a horde mode a couple of months after it came out. I’ve got my fingers crossed that a similar remaster for the second game would get the same level of love.