"Quake was the last collaboration between Id Software's two Johns, Romero and Carmack, before Romero went off to make Daikatana out of mousetraps and semen and Carmack proceeded to craft Quake 2 out of stale Weetabix and paste. Quake 1 finds the happy medium and illustrates why they kinda needed each other. That lightning gun that murders you if you use it in water definitely smells of Romero, but at least there's some imagination on display. The colour scheme and repetitive levels were probably scraped up from the Carmack tarmac, but the gameplay is characteristically solid. I like that every monster is clearly distinct - from each other, I mean, if not from the background since everything looks like it just dropped out of a sewage worker's nose - and all have a different role in life. The knight harasses you in tight spaces and the fiend harasses you in the open, there's the floating scrag, whose job is the molest you in those troublesome hard-to-reach places, and then there's the ogre, whose job is to GET FUCKED! You think you're so great sitting up there spamming grenades with impossible to predict bounce trajectories, let's see who has the last laugh after I've quick saved another seven or eight hundred times!"