Like visiting your Grandpa and finding out exactly why your family is fucked up in the ways they are. For its slight imperfections and occasional frustrations, this is the ooze I crawled out of, the reflection staring back at me when I look in the mirror. The incoherent but indelible monsters, that soul-pounding Reznor score, the gorgeous industrial-gothic landscapes, the goofball chapter-ending paragraphs, these are the neurons that intertwine to create my mind. Quake is too definitional to what I love. It barely registers as a game. This is a divine manuscript by which the heavens bestowed onto us mortals a most holy of artefacts, the rocket jump. John Romero may be chained to a boulder, destined to have his spleen devoured by an Emu every day for the rest of time, but it is a small price to pay for such enlightenment.