Quake is also responsible for changing my life: after years of muddling around in BASIC and LOGO I started writing mods in QuakeC, which required me to write code, design a website, design and build models, and test and test and continually tweak and iterate on the experience. For the first time I was writing large code and doing serious graphics work, and I loved it deeply.
It lead me towards building websites and writing about games, and out of the Quake community I met people who ran Unreal websites - they gave me a copy of their CMS, and I ended up learning PHP/MySQL from it and building and designing bigger and better websites.
I dropped out of my Mechatronics/CS degree to pursue programming for a living - which lead to my first exposure to the then-revolting idea that programming and design were different disciplines. I spent years bouncing back and forth between the two, never quite fitting in, but learning a ridiculous amount along the way.
Now I'm at Google, technically employed as a software engineer but leading the design of a large product. I probably would have ended up somewhere in the software industry anyway, but I believe that I'm in this exact position, the best job I could possibly imagine, because of a chain of coincidences that were kicked off by Quake and its modding tools.
The quake community and game changed my life. Of course, when I started, it was mplayer. I had just traded my Playstation 1 for a 486DX, a huge mistake in everyone's eyes. I used my rich friend's grandmother's AOL login to get online. (This continued for 3-4 years, my mother still wonders what the "weird noise" was on the phone lines past midnight).
The broken physics and quirks of Team Fortress in QuakeWorld is what really caught my eye. I was hooked like a fiend. I was recruited by many guilds and known for my 9600BP lagging , teleporting and fragging! Not to mention my 1MB cirrus logic integrated video card, it chugged along at ~12FPS in 320x200(?).
I got interested in manipulating Quake. Living in MS, there were no mentors for learning to program or script. I went in blind and came out with a few mods.
Years later, I ported team fortress with quakeworld physics into Enemy Territory, (Feb/Mar 2004?), but never found anyone interested in doing the sound or graphics.
Obviously, my original endeavor into quakeC led to a whole new world of coding and languages!
At this point, I had a few life changes. I made a handful of lifetime friends from IRC and my old clans.
Now, looking back, it was Quake and my natural ability to tinker that led to my pursuit of a degree in computer science/bioinformatics. I am currently in my junior year.
I emailed John Carmack a few times asking for legal advice regarding using shareware Quake 1 models in a development version of my port of QuakeWorld to ET. He gave me good advice and has been a great influence.
Oh, and trying to figure out how to make VIS run faster on a BSP map was the end of me. VIS took forever, and I mean forever, to run on my 100mhz computer.
<< At the end of all this, it wasn't just Quake that really changed my life, my wife did. Quake gave me a direction to point in, and my wife picked me up and pushed me forward when I thought the road was closed to me. >>
However, Quake awakened these passions. Yes, he's very fortunate to have such a loving wife. And that should not be downplayed. But I do think Quake is still a big part of the equation here.
I like how he didn't even get started till he was about 24 and had no head start from previous work. It seems rare to read a success story that doesn't involve people getting obsessed with an activity in their mid-teens (often building on a good academic performance in maths or something like that).
Quake also changed my life. I bought my first computer to play Quake which got me into scripting and making video game websites. That got me interested in programming and lead me to getting a masters in CS and programming jobs while in school. Now I'm at Amazon thanks to John Carmack!
I wouldn't say it changed my life, but the first pretty serious piece of software I ever wrote was a game loader for Doom/Doom II/Heretic/Hexen. You could select which game you wanted to play, and which WADs you wanted and if the WADs were originally created for a different game it would run them through a conversion script for the game you wanted.
Later on I added support for DeHackEd so you could modify the exe to change things like weapon speed power. Pretty sure I had support for setting up multiplayer games as well.
It was all written in Turbo Pascal and had a really nice GUI where I programmed all the primitives (radio boxes/check boxes/scroll boxes/buttons/etc) myself from scratch.
I really really wish I still had source code to the thing, but I lost it years ago. I was really proud of it.
Quake changed a lot of people's live. I don't think there is a single game out there that created jobs for so many people as Quake, the two most largest examples being Valve and Gamespy. Quake also pretty much single handedly got the the 3d video card revolution started.
http://gamessavedmylife.com/ is a growing collection of stories about how playing games has helped people emotionally, often in ways their creators probably didn't envision.
But of course, games and game modding has had a profound impact on a lot of technical folk. Many late nights bending BSP trees to my will in Valve Worldcraft ;)
Pretty inspiring story but this really made me laugh:
"The kind of stuff that most people think is really cool now, but would immediately relegate you to punching bag status, and honestly not very cool with the chicks back then."
I think you probably just started spending a larger proportion of your time with people who share your interests. Fantasy novels are still not cool in high school. :)
I started out with tools like Deluxe Paint and Animation and QBASIC. I learned 3D modeling long before I touched a level editor, using tools like POVRAY and some crappy Windows 3.1 3D rendering/modeling package. I think the first level editor I used was Ken Silverman's for Duke Nukem 3D. But if I had to point out a game that really changed my life, it was Ultima 7 - it inspired me to learn art, programming, design, etc. It was so far ahead of its time and even was more interactive than many games are today. It was the closest thing to a "sandbox" game at that point in time, I think.
I bought my first computer to play games. I thought I could do better, so I started modding games (X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter). I got tired of fighting other people's game ideas and wanted to make my own. And the path to that lay through a BSCS. Then I realized that there were more interesting and fulfilling aspects to programming besides games.
But my story isn't as awesome as the author of the article's.
A rotating clown's head changed my life. I think it was 20 years ago. I would love to see that animation again. I think it was a FLIC file.
The beauty of the lighting started the (3D) programmer / designer in me.
Just have to chime in with one more "Quake changed my life", though perhaps even more so than most - loving Doom to death, I was _utterly_ obsessed with Quake modding and map making. Then I sensibly dropped out of college in 1997 and went to Raven Software to work as a programmer, where I got to work with the Quake engine while its paint was still wet, and even more so with Quake 2 while it was being developed. The amount of brilliant co-workers I had who came up through the mod community at that point is actually pretty astonishing, in hindsight.
Ah, Qoole was the first level editor I ever tried. What I vividly remember about Quake 1 though was all the mods! I spent hours tying up the phone on a 14.4K modem hunting for new stuff to try.
Grappling hooks, bots, friendly attack dogs, Quake Rally which converted it into a racing game, Air Quake which added pilotable helicopters and tanks... I didn't get into coding until UnrealScript, but Quake 1 definitely got me into the internet.
For me it was Team Fortress Classic. I was in between A-Levels and University, not entirely sure what I wanted to do with myself and working a boring job in Office World (UK equivalent of Office Depot) - but in the evenings I was running a TFC clan, then later running a TFC news website. I ended up being hired by an online gaming dotcom which is where I realised that web development was what I wanted to do.
Quake reignited my passion for computers after I spent several years off focusing on automobile related hobbies.
I had been exposed to Linux before but Quake was what caused me to run it on the desktop at first. The networking stack was significantly better than on Windows. It also caused me to learn scripting in a unix environment to parse logs on the server we placed at my brother's office.
Count me as another. Quake was a huge part of why I loved computers. I also created and published a number of maps and seriously considered trying to become a pro level designer. Linux and web progrmming eventually became more interesting but that inspiration was critical.
Those who are against gaming are the ones who really need to read posts like this. Mario Bros for NES changed my life forever and it's wonderful reading about how others are affected. Even more interesting is how age is completely irrelevant to these experiences.
Computer games are what dragged me into programming in the first place. Later, Quake II source code, Unreal Tournament headers for native development and UnrealScript taught me lots of valuable lessons about game code design and programming in general.
I believe Quake had a big impact on the growth of my technical ability at a young age. Tweaking config files, creating maps, setting up game servers, messing with skins and mods. I cherish those days.
Similar story in a way, games like ff7,8 and 9 got me into RPG game making, which then got me involved in community websites which then lead to me learning PHP to help improve these websites.
It lead me towards building websites and writing about games, and out of the Quake community I met people who ran Unreal websites - they gave me a copy of their CMS, and I ended up learning PHP/MySQL from it and building and designing bigger and better websites.
I dropped out of my Mechatronics/CS degree to pursue programming for a living - which lead to my first exposure to the then-revolting idea that programming and design were different disciplines. I spent years bouncing back and forth between the two, never quite fitting in, but learning a ridiculous amount along the way.
Now I'm at Google, technically employed as a software engineer but leading the design of a large product. I probably would have ended up somewhere in the software industry anyway, but I believe that I'm in this exact position, the best job I could possibly imagine, because of a chain of coincidences that were kicked off by Quake and its modding tools.