I always thought Quake I had the most interesting visual style of any of the classic FPSes.

I'm with OZ on this. Graphically, Duke Nukem had a disgusting skew effect I couldn't get over and Doom never had the whole immerse environment. Visually, it was eerie.

Also, the gameplay; the nailguns were by far the most obnoxiously fun guns in history and the axe was a chart topper.

I also find there is a big gap in how games are played now vs back in the day of Quake. Even the SP campaign on CoD (or whatever children are playing these days) requires some sort of teamwork interaction with your annoying AI partners. Quake was a strategy based on how aggressive you could play.

It's Marathon (1, 2 and Infinity (and the fan-made total conversion Rubicon)) series for me. All the QT events in the world can't compare to an actual story.

Does Half-Life 1 count? It was a couple years later than Quake 1 but that's my winner. As far as not-of-this-earth type atmosphere, I'd say Quake or Unreal 1. Never played Marathon because I didn't have a Mac, or know anybody with a Mac, except the one kid in school who had one, and bragged about Marathon's greatness superiority over our stupid little FPS' for IBM (yeah we still said IBMs back then) and nobody wanted to hang out with him.

Sucks that he had such a personality flaw.

It has to be trolling to say Quake had the most interesting fps visuals, and nothing topped the nailgun as a weapon or the single player for gameplay.

It HAS to be.

Truth be told, I don't actually know which video started the stencil buffers joke and it's always felt like an inside joke I wasn't part of and I just desperately want to be included.

http://onlinetonegenerator.com/

Looks like a sine wave to me. I'm amazed at the draw distance the got out of that thing. It's like what the virtual boy was trying to do.

Like many tags, it was started because someone tried acting like a bouncer (of 3d game modeling) and there was a long and stupid argument.

Doesn't it predate PoeTV?

It does. IIRC it was a poe-news thread where Alfred Shitcock was trying to act all impressive about graphics programming, in a thread where plenty of professional graphics programmers were already talking.

Oh and @maggotbrain I assume that the sine wavey artifacts are just because of the fact that DACs have various output filter passes and that adds in some odd oversteering. But what I meant by what it sounds like isn't just "what fundamental waveforms is it made out of" because when you break it down far enough, EVERY sound is made out of sine waves (for all intents and purposes). I just want to hear a recording of the 96KHz DAC output that was used to render the display, because I'm sure it sounds neat, or at least interesting.

Ah, original site has recordings, at the very bottom. http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/oscilloscope_quake.html

It sounds neither neat nor interesting. Oh well.

It was a thread about Team Fortress and the merits of culling back-facing polygons and not-necessarily-appropriate use of a stencil buffer.

I think Tribes was also involved in some way.

POE had an IRC?

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=27081

Easily the best thing I've heard out of him. It's the soundscapey kind of stuff he was goos at with almost none of the cheesy guitars, drums, vocals and songwriting.

TYPO, YOU PIECE OF GOOS

Woah you're not kidding. At first I thought that high pitch frequency was the sound of the oscilloscope, but I think that was part of the in-game music.

Totally agreed O.Z. I think his soundtrack stuff with Ross comes close, but really Quake and *most* of the Downward Spiral were his magnum opus in my eyes.