As a former QuakeC hacker and id engine spelunker, I think this is great. A parsimonious codebase here is to be welcomed. The original engine was littered with globals and cruft. Reasoning with the original implementation took considerable effort.

Unless you were playing the game at the time, it’s impossible to comprehend how important QuakeC was. It lit afire an ecosystem of modifications, some of which became full-fledged independent franchise of their own like Team Fortress. If you ever played with DOOM’s Dehacked, QuakeC is absolutely next-level.

For me personally, it amplified my interest in programming in a way nothing before it had. And that’s not counting the number of people who used QuakeC as a way to develop their own skills and create their own names for themselves in the game development industry.

1996-7 represents a golden period of hacker innovation and exploration.