Quake Army Knife (QuArK) is a multi-purpose tool for the games generally based on the Quake engine by id software. QuArK has the ability to directly edit maps, models, and QuakeC, plus easily allows importing and exporting of graphics, sounds, and QuakeC patches. It is also able to modify .PAK files, as well as importing compiled BSP's in order to study the entities as well as add/change/delete entities from these files. No other Quake tool available has the ability to do all of these things.

QuArK is programmed by Armin Rigo, a mathematics student from Lausanne Switzerland. Armin has been programming Quake related utilities since Quake's release, and was the first one to release a program for de-compiling progs.dat files in order to study the structure. This program, called DEACC, was quickly followed by REACC (used to facilitate re-compiling) and Armin has just recently released a native 32bit version of DEACC called DEACC32. QuArK now incorporates parts of DEACC and REACC, into it's QuakeC abilities, and you can easily add specific sections to an existing progs.dat file with QuArK's QuakeC tools, making it extremely simple to add new functionality to your Quake maps.

QuArK is an acronym of sorts for QUake ARmy Knife. For more information see 'What is the history of QuArK?' below.

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 it's complicated arrays of views and tool buttons.

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

QuArK has expanded to integrate all of it's various editors and abilities into a single interface called the QuArK Explorer that allows you to control any Quake related resource 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 a simple as clicking on an entry.

Complete conversions have been done using nothing but QuArK, and with Armin constantly improving and adding functionality, it is fast proving to be the only tool needed to do anything you like with Quake and Hexen2.

Any and everyone who wants to create cool TC, or edit resources for their favorite game. QuArK is fast becoming an all-around flexible tool for helping development for any game or development project.

One of the primary differences QuArK has from other editors is that it allows users to edit more than one aspect of games like Quake, Quake 2, Hexen II, etc. Versatile, it allows you to use one tool to edit textures, manipulate models, organize .PAK files and create maps, among many other things.

In the past, another interesting difference was that QuArK had a distinctive 2-view format in regards to looking at your map. It still retains this as a default, but now, allows you to choose other formats that might be better suited for your needs.

Aside from the map-editor called BSP, QuArK is one of the most feature-rich editors in the community today. Rumours say, that BSP's author has been hired by a gaming company, and development on this editor has been discontinued.

Worldcraft and QERadiant remain two of QuArK's other "rivals" in the area of level editing. As different people work in different ways, it's not a "given" that any editor is immediately inferior to another based solely on features, but on the whole, QuArK remains one of the easiest, and most powerful editor's out there. Part of QuArK's appeal (and sometimes unappeal), is it's ability to do so many things, without needing to jump from one program to the next, or struggle to manage your different media for a given project.

QuArK can read and play audio files, view models, display a variety of image and video formats.

In terms of raw feature comparisons, since many of these programs (including QuArK) are continually being updated, and nobody has had time to make a least of all their "features", a clear comparison chart would be hard to compile.