Okay, maybe I leapt into conclusions some.
The interview is a fascinating read anyway

http://archive.gamespy.com/interviews/january01/aog10/

GameSpy: Could you describe your creation process? How do you move from concept to the final skin or texture?

Kevin Cloud: My process has changed from project to project.

I used DeluxePaint for years. We didn't have an animation program. So we tested our animations by toggling between the page and spare page.

For DOOM we sculpted and scanned.
[snipped doom stuff...]

With Quake, I picked up Alias's PowerAnimator to create and animate the models. Adrian did an excellent job creating the skins and in the end they turned out pretty good. Compared to today's games the models and textures in Quake look pretty crude, but in the end I was proud of the work. In my opinion Quake's art was far superior to the work we had created for DOOM. 

This should settle the shit.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.08/id_pr.html

"Adrian is tall, with long brown hair, a goatee, and a soft Southern accent. Sitting next to his partner Kevin Cloud, he clicks his lightpen all day long, making minuscule adjustments, one pixel at a time, to countless texture tiles: lichened stone, pitted wood, corroded metal, viny corpuscular stuff. This monotonous detail work is the foundation of Quake's environments, giving level architects an extensive index of patterns and textures to draw from as they construct interiors. Adrian's pencil drawings of Quake's monsters are beautifully detailed. The game's relatively low resolution barely conveys his sinister sketches. Of course, there's little time to appreciate the aesthetics of creatures whose only aim is to destroy you."

Word. Quake is eternal. 

and

Ponderous wooden doors swung open with an incongruous pneumatic hiss instantly recognizable from Doom

I know that sound! Though, I always thought it sounded similar to doors opening on the Starship Enterprise. 

made of wood always remind me of Myst/Riven. Having read the books of Myst only helps to reinforce that notion. 

Quake is fine as it is. leave it be! :D 

that id sponsored a team to make quake V for the original quake engine?

Hmm. How nice.

Maybe there could be a shadow "QV" project with 4 grand episodes in the making... wait, there are such already like Nehahra. But a more high-profile recent more kind of a quake-vee-ey thing? A bit like doom2 was for doom? What slight texture, model and client updates? Who could be the taste judge? 

I think the thing that made Quake unique WAS the sense of no explanation. Quake had a severely powerful sense of place, a sense of weirdness, that would never be conveyed if the game slowed down and zoomed in on some boss monster who made a cut-scene speech to the player character (Prince of Persia style, or some other new game, etc).

Quake worked because it was a combination of three influences: attempted fantasy RPG, attempted update on DOOM, attempted Lovecraftian mood piece. The sense of being an anonymous killer in an anonymous, unknown, unearthly world - that's what Quake's all about, and what has made all the custom maps for all these years all so playable and so good. The Quake Guy could be a space marine fighting robots. He could be a godlike savior destroying degenerate beasts, or a demonic destroyer dismantling the world of men. He could be involved in some kind of struggle between demons (Vondur's Koohoo), or a pawn of higher forces (as masterfully stated in Nehahra). The point is there is no real answer as to who he is, or as to why he is where he is. Imagine waking up in a fucked up world with only an axe, and walking around the corner and seeing an Ogre (in real life graphics of course). And you'd kill the Ogre first, survive that, but imagine if this world never ended. And your only existence, with possibly no ultimate goal or meaning at all, was just to kill those other lurking things out there, before they killed you. After all, after at least 1,000 Quake levels it's impossible to say when the anonymous player has ever reached the finish line.

As the Doom Marine said, "Where's my fat reward and ticket home????"

? 

After all, after at least 1,000 Quake levels it's impossible to say when the anonymous player has ever reached the finish line.

Some say he came close in the interval between Bastion and Marcher, reaching the outer northern steppes after breaching one of the larger of Quake's netherworld garrisons, but then the Gaurochs used long distance telepathy or some shit to mess with his head and drove him into the mountains so it was back to square one lmbo. 

Quake 5 (five) will be...

MMORPG
in a fantasy setting
with cartoonish style
and maybe an anime tilt
with emphasis on social interraction (ala 2nd life)
and on Wii

:) 

uniquely textured on every polygon of the world
3 years late, 3 hours long, and dull 

You seem like, just perhaps, you have a negative attitude upon occasion. 

Well, what choice do you have when you grow up in a frozen region where one only sees the sun at most 1 month of the year? He even grew resentful of those living in the sunny south, proving this by hating his time in Savannah. All this is rather reminiscent of the Morlocks, really.

So he had but one choice: become a cynic, or a Russian. And because of the sentiments toward communism at his birth, there really wasn't even a choice. 

yeah ... I should do something about that. 

could only happen if iD made a couple of games that weren't received well, and realized that they needed to make something just as innovative as the original quake

oh, wait. 

I'm still up for a Q5 TC for Doom 3, or, even better, Prey. PLLEEEEASSSSSEEE???? 

I think Source would be a better engine.

The Doom 3/Prey engine has shiny, plastic-like crap everywhere which is a visual blight that I've yet to see anybody adequately overcome. 

Edit: That said, Quake Wars does seem to have removed the shineyness and looks a lot better for it, so that would be a great Quake to mod. It'd allow for some truly immense hell-bastions as well. 

I think Source would be a better engine.

The Doom 3/Prey engine has shiny, plastic-like crap everywhere which is a visual blight that I've yet to see anybody adequately overcome.


Or you could just, you know, make new materials that aren't supposed to be simulating shiny metal or plastic in the first place. 

because I've never seen it done, even by people who've tried to simulate bricks. 

Turning down the spec is hardly difficult. Authoring decent materials is, though.

Having said that, I also far prefer the look of source. Realtime lighting is simply too ugly and limited to match the precomputed methods. 

would like a word with you, if Gears of War is anything to go by (hint: it is) 

it would just be sick and perverse to develop a Quake game on Unreal technology. :P 

was Quake really that good or exceptional or innovative??

Some aspects I really liked, like many nice textures and the nimbleness of the hero. But overall Doom was more compelling as a single player experience.

Was the environment of quake really that special?.. I don't know. Maybe it isn't so relevant.

post scriptum to lun: at least you have a point in your negativisms, it isn't just some pure emo. 

One thing I really love in Quake is the movement/feeling/"physics". It's easy to learn, feels 100% fast and immediate, and yet offers so much to learn and improve (for speedrunning things). 

i think one of the things that makes the q1 single player experience special is that, somehow, it convincingly pulled off a wide variety of different environments -- and had a simple yet compelling explanation as to why they were that way.

compared to modern games, quake map styles (in the original game) changed suddenly, and got continually more evil as the game progressed. maybe, to force some reinvention, we just need to destroy the base and temple stereotypes...?