Comment by kar1181

Quake was special for me, the first time I felt truly immersed in a world. I'd played doom/wolf, obviously, but being able to look down, and move in a 3d space just felt real in a way nothing had until then.

Then the multiplayer - lived in the sticks had a 33.6k modem - ping times on a good day of 300ms. Even with all the limitations (and lack of any sort of predictive netcode) that was it, a very expensive (we paid by the minute for phone bills!), game!

Later teamfortress came out from the guys at RMIT in Melbourne who later went on to Valve (Robin Walker/John Cook from memory) and TF set the bar for so much to come.

I know a lot of folks recommend masters of doom for the atmosphere at ID during quake's difficult development, but actually Michael Abrash's graphics black book (free on github - https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book) is an even better companion, still a wonderfully readable book today, but captures the mindset of the development that we can take much from still. Indeed Abrash's anecdote about sliderule jockey's in the day of pocket calculators rings very true today as we grapple with the impact of AI on our work.

How many of us can thank our careers to id for hooking us on computers and things like quakec and even quake2's game dll source and later full engine sources.