Last month saw Quake inducted into the World Videogame Hall of Fame, and it’s about time: as PCG’s Andy Chalk observed “you’ve had Halo in there since 2017, and not Quake? What? What are we even doing here?” That’s Quake fans for you.
Quake was one of four HoF inductees for 2025, with its new Hall of Fame page saying “Quake has been influential in nearly every category a game can be influential in.” Like its predecessor Doom, Quake was almost as much about the tools as the giant technological leap to real-time 3D: extensive mod support, forward-thinking online architecture, and a hard push into dedicated GPUs.
Quake co-creator John Romero said it was a “huge honor” to be inducted, and now John Carmack, the genius behind so much of id’s enduring legacy, has posted his own reaction to the news.
“I am honoured to have Quake inducted to sit alongside Doom,” says Carmack. “Quake was a really hard-fought development effort for us, where we wanted to make the same kind of generational leap that Doom had been over Wolfenstein. But we threw everything we had at it, and it was really a little bit more than we could chew at the time… it was rough.
“While the core game did deliver some really memorable moments of shock and awe, the real legacy of Quake is in the metagame rather than the game itself. Fast-paced online network play led to the esports scene and the online gaming lifestyle, while GLQuake‘s push for GPUs was one of the major factors in the adoption of GPUs that led to the AI world we’re living in today.”
I never saw an official video, so here is my little bit from the induction of Quake into the Strong Museum’s World Video Game Hall of Fame last month. pic.twitter.com/gts4sSnocKJune 16, 2025
Typically gracious, Carmack ends on what he sees as Quake’s greatest legacy: “Most importantly, a generation of game developers were born modding Quake, and they will fill many more spots in the Hall of Fame.”
Hard to argue with that: Quake’s outstanding and extensive mod scene is arguably only overshadowed by that of Doom. And in a very real sense, Quake is still with us in the background of countless games.
“Quake’s code is a literal legacy,” says the Hall of Fame citation. “The Quake Engine Family Tree, as it is called, has dozens of branches interconnecting different IPs with Quake through its legacy code-franchises… of few games can it be said that its bones—its code—continues to be present in modern games, more than twenty-five years after its release.”
Quake was joined in the World Videogame Hall of Fame by Defender, Eugene Jarvis’ brilliant arcade shooter, the N64 classic GoldenEye 007, and… Tamagotchi? Someone got my kids one of those and the beeping was so annoying I killed it: give me a Quake nailgun any day.