Quake

• The first game engine that I was aware of was the Quake Engine.
• Quake was a first person shooter game for the PC. It came out in 1996.
• The game was pretty popular, but the game engine was abstracted out.
• This was the Quake Engine.
• This had a few advancements (from the wiki), including polygonal models instead of sprites, prerendered light maps, and allowing user mods.
• It also lead to a lot of other Engines a lot of other Engines.
• These were largely first person shooter engines.
• It also gives you an entry into virtual worlds. This promoted the development of things like half-life.