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I don't know about you, but whenever I order something online, the only "surprise" I typically get is a crushed spider carcass or the disappointment of discovering my items have been damaged in transit. Not — shall we say — discovering a lost expansion to Quake 4, a 20-plus-year-old PC game.
For one particularly lucky gamer, named jmarshall23, however, the latter seems to be exactly what happened to them recently when they went shopping for a vintage PC on Amazon, only to find an alpha of Ritual Entertainment's abandoned Quake 4 expansion, The Awakening, lurking on the hard drive (h/t: dsogaming via Retro Dodo) — that's their story, anyway.
They have now made the expansion available on GitHub "for preservation purposes," allowing others to get it up and running, and even offered a little background on what it was like to discover the build, in the first place:
"I came across this at a very sad point in my life; it was on a hard drive on a vintage computer I bought off Amazon," wrote jmarshall23. "This essentially saved my life; I was going through a divorce and just happened to come across something like this — it was insane."
Given jmarshall23 has various GitHub projects related to Quake, it's hard to know how seriously to take this story, with this shock discovery possibly just being a clever ruse to hide the true origins of how the game was actually discovered. Regardless, it does seem the alpha is legit, with an individual named pagb666 uploading a video of the first three missions from the build and the config files featuring the names of former developers who worked on the project (as reported by PC Gamer).
Quake 4, as you may already be aware, was the fourth entry in the Quake series (which began all the way back in 1996), and was developed by Raven Software.
It is a sequel to Quake II and sees players step into the role of Corporal Matthew Kane, a new protagonist, as they take part in the invasion of the Strogg home planet after the death of the Makron, the Strogg supreme leader.
Released in 2005 for PC & Xbox 360, it received generally positive reviews, with work on the expansion being assigned to SiN developer Ritual Entertainment. This never saw the light of day, however, due to Activision cancelling the project — despite it apparently being 95% complete.
You can find the expansion's GitHub page here.