Mario 64 was two years ahead of its time, at a time when two years was like 10+ years now. Hardware acceleration, colored lighting, skeletal animation, free camera*.

Quake (World) was a huge achievement graphically but I feel like its real contributions to history ended up being internet play and WASD

Both games were mind-blowing then and are still fun now.

* It's nuts to me that we had to wait until 2004 with San Andreas to get a modern "left stick moves, right stick looks" in third person games. The N64 was 90% of the way there, but didn't stick the landing for whatever reason.

Is that from San Andreas? I’m sure it was around earlier than that.

I think PoP: Sands of Time has that kind of camera control, and apparently that was 2003.

I always assumed it was even older than that. If it wasn’t GTA or PoP, who did pioneer that camera control style?

I’d say it’s just about the only (arguable) flaw in the Mario 64 controls, everything else is absolutely spot on.