The only success the drivers had were the lock-in they created to the hardware with Glide, which itself was a thin layer on the underlying hardware. Many games

The only success the drivers had were the lock-in they created to the hardware with Glide, which itself was a thin layer on the underlying hardware. Many games used Direct3D or OpenGL without Glide support and worked just fine. Hell, Quake itself was written on miniGL which was a subset of an abstraction layer built (IIRC) on top of Glide. And really, OpenGL at the time was simple too. [Check this OpenGL 1.1 reference](http://www.talisman.org/opengl-1.1/Reference.html http://www.talisman.org/opengl-1.1/Reference.html) which also includes GLU and GLX function and even with those, the number of calls is very small.