Thread:Vorknkx/@comment-3547390-20150204202730/@comment-1496755-20150323115651

There was effort in the making of this level? Gosh, this is an affront to the sacred tenets of Q2! You are right, this map is more like Dark Hour. It just needs a cage with a few monsters and a water elevator and it will be perfect :P

Some oldschool manuals are real masterpieces... my favorite example are Infocom's games from the 1980's. The games themselves are fairly simple - text only, no graphics whatsoever. But their packaging and manuals were amazing. They could come in many forms - reports, booklets, letters, travel guides, magazines, postcards, or other similar stuff (which cleverly reveals details about the game world). They would often be accompanied by small extra objects - e.g. a coin, an insignia, a map or a pin. The developers put a lot of effort to create some truly high-quality materials, even if the games themselves were so simple.

Imagine the Quake CD being accompanied by an actual Lovecraft novel (which is also a disguised game manual), a replica rocket launcher and some Enforcer figurines...

This is another of those things that show how games were perceived as works of art rather than commercial products back then.