Cancelled Quake 4 expansion Awakening surfaces on GitHub after dev finds it on a secondhand hard drive

A build of Quake 4: Awakening — the cancelled expansion for Raven Software's 2005 shooter — has been uploaded to GitHub by programmer Justin Marshall, who stumbled across it on the hard drive of a secondhand PC he bought on Amazon. The timing is striking: the original Quake just got an official new episode as part of its 30th anniversary at QuakeCon, and now its sequel's long-lost expansion has resurfaced too.

Awakening was developed by Ritual Entertainment — the studio behind SiN, which is itself getting a remaster — but Activision cancelled it due to weak sales of the base game. Marshall, who has credits on The Evil Within, XCOM 2, Dead Island 2, and The Dark Pictures Anthology, shared the build for preservation purposes and in the hope that "the community can make something cool with it." He was candid about the personal weight of the find: "I came across this at a very sad point in my life... Literally this essentially saved my life, I was going through a divorce and just happen[ing] to come across something like this was insane." Marshall is also among the many developers caught up in the industry's ongoing wave of layoffs.

The build's legitimacy looks solid. Config files reference real Ritual employees by name, including Duke Nukem 3D legend Richard 'Levelord' Grey and Michael 'RomSteady' Russell. Russell told PC Gamer last year that the expansion was "95% done" when Activision pulled the plug — and what's playable backs that up. YouTuber pagb666 has already posted a no-commentary playthrough of the first three missions, which show new weapons including a cryo cannon and a mech piloting sequence. Some scripted moments look unfinished, but the overall state suggests a near-complete product rather than an early prototype.

With the expansion apparently this close to done, the community is already eyeing the possibility of polishing it to a releasable state. Whether that happens depends on who picks it up — and whether any rights holders weigh in — but for now, something that was considered lost forever is at least preserved and playable.