thankyou quake, for without you the A7 engine would not be here! lol
Nope. The Ack engine was a raycasting engine like Doom and predates Quake. Later Ack became Acknex (still a raycasting engine) and then, in A3, became a Quake-like 3D engine. So you can thank Doom and not Quake for our engine's existance
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... unreal and duke do have that 'unmatched' feeling to them, I think that feeling has something to do with the fact that back in those days games were made 'just for fun' and the ideas were fresh along with the talent excited about experimenting in the new media.
I think part of it was that ALL of this was so new. Home computers, while having been around for quite some time, were a fairly new thing to many people. I mean Doom was out in the days of the DX series of Intel chips (even before?), which predated the Pentium, and was distributed as Shareware on three 3.5" floppies. The internet, while also having been around for a while, was also "new" to many people. Top games where things like Commander Keen, etc. The computer in general seemed to be a fresh thing to many people. People were running DOS and, in some cases, Windows 3.1. Computing itself, for many people, was simply a big adventure!
I remember when the original Unreal was being developed. The developers had a web site where they would discuss their engine, post development screen shots and the like and devote followers would go there and watch the development of the game in awe. The developers were just like the rest of us. It was not being developed by some big game company with a multi-million dollar budget. It was being made for fun by people who were having a good time doing it. To some degree, we all felt involved even if we were just watching it be developed! So when the game was released, we had to get it ... just had to! After all, many of us had spent many nights pouring over the Unreal web site watching the game be born like it was our own baby
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So, yeah, you are right! Games like this were developed for fun more than profit (or so it seemed) and their development included those of us that wanted to play as well as those of us that had dreamed of being a part of it somehow. Today that indie spirit seems to be dead or, if not dead, most people, having grown up with 3D games all around them, don't view the development of such a thing as any big deal. And that is a shame.
Speaking of sounding like an oldie ... I miss those days
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