Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1915529-20120712125232/@comment-1496755-20120908190029

It is true - after Tom Hall left, the more technical team members remained. They could produce an awesome engine, but had difficulty filling it with the best possible creative content. Then, there were even some disputes among them, which led to Quake's mixing of hi-tech and medieval styles... though it turned out pretty nice :)

Quake's engine was quite revolutionary for its time - I guess they didn't want to experiment too much, so that it could be stable. Besides, they had to make sure it works fine on as many computers as possible. That was one of the trickiest things in the DOS age - getting your game to be compatible with the various sound and video cards and the various drivers for them. If you read system requirements of games from that period, you will notice they usually mention "100% compatible video/sound card" - apparently, that was a big issue back then, the coordination between hardware and software makers.

And as if that weren't enough, DOS could have different configurations, which made things even more complicated. I remember we had several configs - one game would work with one of them but not work with another. Or it could work, but certain features (e.g. loading a saved game) wouldn't, due to the config's memory limitations :P

Memory was another important factor - you had 640k conventional and then Expanded and Extended. Managing memory was very important... and not very easy.