As much fun as Doom was, it felt more like a gory cartoon with most of the scares coming from enemies hidden behind doors and blind corners. Quake, on the other hand, felt endlessly creepy and scary thanks in part to its real-time lighting that helped set the mood. To make any room feel as spooky, Rodrigo Feliciano went back to the game’s original source code to make a flickering Quake lamp.
What exactly is going on with the power grid where Quake takes place is anybody’s guess—there’s zero chance those buildings are up to code—but as someone discovered back in June, the moody lighting in Half-Life: Alyx used the same flickering code as the original Half-Life, and that code can actually be traced all the way back to Quake, which was created by id Software’s John Carmack over 25 years ago.
