> ... but I hope one of his enduring legacies will be the amount of programmers he inspired with both the games he helped make, and the code he made available.

> ... but I hope one of his enduring legacies will be the amount of programmers he inspired with both the games he helped make, and the code he made available. It helped many of us to get started somewhere. Never really realized it until now, but this is true for me. The original Quake, in its heyday, is what sparked my interest in Linux. Linux then sparked my interest in, well... more Linux - and gave me a new direction for my eventual shift into engineering. It really shaped my entire career. I had heard somehow, somewhere that you could squeak out slightly better frame rates and ping times in Quake, if you used this alternative OS called Linux (which really wasn't true, in retrospect). And so that began my quest, which triggered a cascade of deep dives into linux and its community for me. Everything from installation issues and troubleshooting, to compiling kernel modules (and everything in between). I even ended up dialoging with the driver developer for one of those modules (not yet in the kernel). A bug had surfaced - he actually fixed it and sent me a patch. So then I learned how to patch a driver too. One of the best "customer" experiences I've ever had, really :) Ironically, I might have ended up in game development had there never been a linux port for quake :P