I appreciate what you’re getting at, but I also think you forget how grey Duke 3d was.

I agree Quake was too brown and grey, but the idea it was ‘visually hot garbage’ is definitely an outside take. We finally had 3d models that weren’t sprites, not to mention how impressive prerendered Lightmaps were for the time.

I will agree that GLQuake was when the graphics really were at their best.