Earlier today, the original Quake soundtrack—composed back in 1996 by Nine Inch Nails—went up for preorder on the band’s site. And accompanying the release was an all-caps note saying “A CERTAIN UNNAMED VIDEO GAME PUBLISHER” stopped the release of some behind-the-scenes essays by former id developers John Romero and American McGee.
The note, as it appeared earlier in the day, read:
We designed this reissue to include a booklet containing essays from id Software’s John Carmack and American McGee. A certain unnamed video game publisher made it impossible to include this in the package, so please honour their wishes by not clicking here to even see the essays, or here to print the booklet out yourself.
Those links let fans both check out and download the essays as they were originally intended to appear alongside the vinyl.
A few hours later, though, that note was removed from the vinyl’s store listing, and the links leading to the essays were also taken down. That said, at time of posting you could still see the booklet here if you want to check it out (the essays are pretty interesting!)
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The “certain unnamed video game publisher” is of course Bethesda, whose parent company Zenimax also owns id and who now publishes all of id’s games, including the Quake series.