Do rocket jumps and strafing count? :)

I’ll credit Quake for helping/exposing me to networking, filesystems, and shaders at a young age - one of the few games that truly encouraged (à la Quake Console) making modifications and setting booleans to configure settings. That was enough at the time to encourage me to teach myself JavaScript, PHP, and SQL - as I had some web projects in mind that I needed to execute on for the Quake clan I founded. This later became freelance, which later became a side gig through school. I was also grateful for the various sponsorships and earnings at the time so I could keep my equipment up to date and pay for storage.

Fast forward a bit, and I’ve mostly worked in SecEng at a number of great companies, most of them popular FinTech and FAANGs..I’m extremely fortunate and have been able to work at all my favorite companies. I’d like to think at minimum, Quake prepared me professionally be meticulous in my craft, study human pattern behaviors, and know when to take risk.

Lastly, I can (hopefully) better answer your question in a few years as I am just now working through switching careers completely to become a Motion Designer. There’s something extremely appealing to me to be able to work with 3D + Engineering, while still being able to solve problems AND feel creative at the same time.

..maybe this desire stems from Quake, maybe not. Either way, Quake has a permanent location in my heart.

I think early pc shooters (doom, quake, unreal, etc) had a whole legion of kids learn the basics of computing. typing commands in a console. Understanding latency, what servers meant. Installing mods and drivers. It was a fantastic, motivating introduction to system administration.