Quake finally makes it into the World Videogame Hall of Fame

My first thought upon learning that Quake had been inducted into the World Videogame Hall of Fame was that it was very weird Quake wasn’t already in the World Videogame Hall of Fame. I mean, you’ve had Halo in there since 2017, and not Quake? What? What are we even doing here? It’s the sort of thing that has the potential to start fistfights in sketchy sports bars—or heated arguments on social media, at least. But never mind, it’s all water under the bridge now, as Quake was one of four HoF inductees for 2025.

“Quake was a first person shooter built with the mouse in mind,” its newly-minted Hall of Fame page states, and it might seem weird now but that was actually kind of a big deal back in the days when a lot of us were still playing exclusively with the keyboard.

Quake was indeed a huge technical leap over Doom, its groundbreaking predecessor (which, for the record, is already in the Hall), but it wasn’t just the move to real-time 3D that made Quake such an influential game: Extensive mod support gave Quake life far beyond that of most videogames, its server-client architecture revolutionized online gaming, and it laid the foundation for esports as we know them today.

“Not only this, but Quake’s code is a literal legacy,” the Hall of Fame wrote. “The Quake Engine Family Tree, as it is called, has dozens of branches interconnecting different IPs with Quake through its legacy code–franchises. Represented among these are Heretic, Hexen, Doom, Call of Duty, and many more.

“Quake has been influential in nearly every category a game can be influential in, but of few games can it be said that its bones—its code—continues to be present in modern games, more than twenty-five years after its release.”

Quake co-creator John Romero was pretty happy about the whole thing, saying it was a “huge honor” to be inducted:

Quake was joined in the World Videogame Hall of Fame class of 2025 by the 1981 arcade standup Defender (man, I pumped a lot of quarters into that one), the N64 shooter GoldenEye 007, and the virtual pet Tamagotchi.