Quarantine (video game)



Quarantine is a First-Person Vehicular Combat Game developed by Imageexcel and released by Game Tek in 1994 for MSDOS and the 3DO. It was part of the wave of first-person games that followed the release of the original Doom in 1993.

The game is set in the 2040s in a cesspool of a burg called KEMO City. Criminals roam the streets in armored hovercars, terrorizing citizens without fear of retribution. OmniCorp rules the city with an iron fist, via a massive wall around the city under the guise of a "defensive measure". The wall has only one -sealed- exit, so essentially the entire city is one big prison for everyone who lives within it, criminal or otherwise.

Just prior to the events of the game, Omnicorp decided to test the behavior-altering chemical Hydergine 344 on the citizens. This chemical was supposed to pacify them, and was distributed through the city's water supply. Unfortunately, OmniCorp failed to predict the chemical's reaction to the stagnant water, resulting in massive brain damage and insanity in many citizens. More than half the population became crazed killers overnight.

You are Drake Edgewater, trash-talking, hard-drinking cab driver and one of the lucky few unaffected by the spreading virus. You drive a '52 Checker "hovercab", armed with an assortment of lethal weaponry. Your goal is to deliver passengers and packages for what money you can scrounge, buy upgrades, and eventually escape.

The game later received a sequel, Road Warrior, which featured largely the same gameplay but a more mission-based, story focused campaign. Both of these should not be confused with the films of the same names.

Quarantine provides examples of:

 * Badass Driver: Drake.
 * Bottomless Magazines: mostly averted, each weapon has a single pool of ammo but is limited, sometimes extremely so.
 * Car Fu: Not very effective here, curiously enough, as ramming other cars is as likely to damage you as them. Pedestrians on the other hand...
 * Chainsaw Good: The Thrasher, which is a hood-mounted circular saw that can rip apart vehicles and any hapless citizen that gets in your path.
 * City Full Of Crazy
 * Cool Car: Your character drives a '52 Checkered Taxi very similar to the one in Escape From New York, though with added guns and Anti Gravity lifts in place of wheels.
 * Cutscene: Road Warrior had these, in the form of comic-book pages. Typically, they involved Drake complaining about something.
 * Death Course: Early in Road Warrior, Drake must negotiate a desert in the midst of a sandstorm, and filled with hostile tanks. His cab stands no chance in combat against said tanks, and the player's only option is to speed past them and hope you don't crash directly into one, thanks to the low visibility. They can't see you too well either, so they're firing wildly trying to hit you- and just might. And if you don't hurry, you'll run out of battery power.
 * Drives Like Crazy: The mooks in their cars do this to you if you get in their way. You, too, can likewise do the same, though it's better to do it on pedestrians unless they wave their hands at you for a fare.
 * Ejection Seat: You can eject your current passenger out of the car, while still moving. The Manual even comes with a handy table that shows the force of the impact in relation to speed. In some missions you have to do this with bombs.
 * Emergency Weapon: Your headlight-mounted "Hood Guns" are fast-firing machine guns that are useful for a little while as your main weapon. You're going to want to upgrade to something better fairly quickly. You always have these equipped, however.
 * Everything Trying to Kill You: Although it's partially averted with other taxis and some pedestrians either minding their own business or calling you to hitch a ride.
 * Gorn: This game was known for its gratuitous violence, causing a bit of a stir back in those pre-ESRB days.
 * Glass Cannon: Armor upgrades aside, your car can dish out a whole lot more punishment then it can take. Keep moving or die.
 * Hover Car: All the cars in the game use anti-gravity propulsion, save the tanks seen in the sequel. They are tied to a power grid embedded in the roads and run on batteries whenever they go off-road.
 * Kill It With Fire: Your car can mount a hood-mounted flamethrower that can easily cook other vehicles as well as turning pedestrians into human barbecue.
 * Lockdown: The entire city is a walled-in prison. Serves as a convenient Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence.
 * More Dakka: In terms of bullet-based weapons, you have your "Hood Guns", a pair of fire-linked machine guns emerging from two of your cab's four headlights, and the roof-mounted "Punisher" Gatling Cannon. All of these can be fired at once.
 * Multi Platform: The game was functionally identical in both the DOS and 3DO versions, but the 3DO version included Full Motion Video cutscenes featuring Drake in his cab. It also features an odd collection of tracks by Australian alt-rock bands that really don't sync well with the gameplay.
 * Nintendo Hard: Between the limited number of hits you can take (forcing you to spend a lot of money on repairs) and the sometimes miniscule monetary awards, this game doesn't screw around. Road Warrior was a little better about this.
 * No Export for You: There was a Japan-only Play Station release of the game under the name Hard Rock Cab, essentially unchanged but with Loads and Loads of Loading and Japanese-only script.
 * Precision F-Strike: You can taunt at other people with a button that has you utter out, "Up yours!"
 * The Immune: Drake himself, and anyone still sane enough to pay the cab fare.
 * The Taxi: Quarantine was the original Crazy Taxi, before Crazy Taxi came along. It would have been more aptly titled since this game has you gaining fares in a city run amok and your car equipped with the best weaponry the city can offer.
 * The Virus: Hydergine 344, originally meant to pacify would-be criminals, fries your brain and turns you into an Ax Crazy psycho.
 * Weaponized Car: Your tools of destruction include machine guns, a Gatling gun, a flamethrower, mines, and cruise missiles.
 * Wide Open Sandbox: You don't have a clear objective beyond "Escape the City", and even that is ill-defined. The second game mostly averts this.
 * Wretched Hive: KEMO City essentially has no law enforcement, but plenty of criminals.