QUAKE

You step into a dark corridor, a Nine Inch Nails ambient drone booms from the speaker, and a knight with an axe comes roaring at you from around the corner. This is Quake — the game that pushed shooters from half-3D into the real thing and changed what action looked like on a PC.

It came out in 1996 from id Software, the makers of Doom, and went a step further: this time the whole world is genuinely three-dimensional — corridors, stairs, bridges and enemies are polygonal models, not flat pictures. You can look up and down, jump across chasms, fire at your feet. The atmosphere is dark, gothic, Lovecraftian — you wander slimy castles and dungeons, and slipgates hurl you into alien dimensions.

It plays raw and fast. You pick up a shotgun, a nailgun, a grenade launcher, a rocket launcher and a lightning gun, and punch through hordes of knights, ogres and monsters that surround you before you know it. Over it plays a soundtrack by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails that underlines the darkness so well it raises goosebumps — even the nailgun ammo boxes carry the band's logo.

But Quake became most famous for multiplayer. Network deathmatch, rocket jumps, mouse-and-keyboard controls that became the standard for the next two decades — the whole competitive shooter culture was born here. Add a moddable engine by John Carmack, on which the community built countless games of its own.

From today's view the graphics are brown and rough, the level design mazey in places and the singleplayer shorter than you'd like. But the feel of the movement, the weapons and the speed has aged surprisingly well — and in multiplayer Quake is still razor-sharp.

If you want to see where modern 3D action and competitive deathmatch began, this is the source. You can play it online free right in your browser, no install.