title: What is the history of QuArK?
author: Gryphon, tiglari

QuArK was originally called QuakeMap, and was a map-only editor for Quake. QuakeMap broke
with the "traditional" 3-view (xy, xz, yz) interface and opted to go for a much simpler to
understand interface that showed just a "side" and "top" view, with a "compass" that rotated
your level through 360 degrees, making the third "view" unnecessary. This opened up much of
the screen real estate, and by incorporating a small uncluttered toolbar on the left hand
side, along with extensive right-click functionality, this enabled new users to quickly and
easily learn the interface enough to put their efforts into their creations, and not into
learning the editor and its complicated arrays of views and tool buttons.

As Armin expanded the program, it progressed to the point where Quake"map" was
no longer representative of its scope. The name was changed to Quake Army
Knife (QuArK for short) which better signified its "all-in-one" abilities.

QuArK expanded to integrate all of its various editors and abilities into a single
interface called the QuArK Explorer that allows you to control most game assets
and to seamlessly integrate any and all of these items into a single QuArK file with the
extension ".QRK". Items can be added, removed, and changed at will, and this means that your
past projects can be included in your future projects, simply by "linking" to the .QRK file
that contains them. All of your current items are shown in the Explorer, and managing the
items is as simple as clicking on an entry.

As Armin approached the end of his undergraduate work, he foresaw that he would no
longer have the time to continue QuArK development, and released the source code
under the GPL, and begin to help various enthusiasts to begin to learn to maintain and
extend it.

It is now maintained at SourceForge as the project <link project>QuArK</link>, and has
expanded its scope from just Quake to 31 different games at time of writing (maybe more
by the time you are reading this).
