[dasil003]

Internet play wasn't important when Quake was released. Serious gaming was pretty much LAN only, and Quake was the epitome of serious gaming. At the time the graphics and 3d environments alone were the big selling point.

I remember playing that first version over a modem, and indeed there was no client prediction at all. Not just shooting, but every single thing. You press forward, wait 300ms before anything happens, you switch weapons, wait 300ms. Even basic things like running and timing a jump over a small gap were extraordinarily difficult. But it was still kind of fun for the novelty of it, at least until somebody on a T1 or ISDN joined at which point you simply died before you even saw the enemy (ie. you saw them before you saw yourself die, but by then you had in fact already died on the server).