Here’s 10 Minutes of Quake 4’s Canceled ‘Awakening’ DLC Gameplay Footage
Quake 4, released in 2005, was a solid but commercially disappointing entry in the long-running FPS franchise. Despite significant development investment, the game failed to achieve the sales needed to justify continued support. While it marked a return to single-player focused gameplay and served as a spiritual successor to id Software’s DOOM, it never reached comparable commercial heights.
A planned expansion titled “Awakening” was canceled as a direct result of the game’s poor commercial performance. For over two decades, this content remained lost—until now. Beginning in April 2026, a YouTube account named Justin Marshall began posting gameplay footage from the unreleased DLC, offering players and gaming historians their first look at what might have been.
The emergence of this footage represents a significant moment in game preservation. It demonstrates the substantial work that had gone into the expansion before cancellation and provides the gaming community with a rare window into development history typically lost to commercial pressures. For Quake 4 enthusiasts and archivists, the leaked footage allows a piece of abandoned gaming history to finally be experienced, even decades after its planned release.