I've been working with the leaked wipEout source code for a while[1] and I can assure the quality of the Quake source is absolutely stellar in comparison. While Quake's source may not be up to modern best practices, the overall architecture certainly has a lot of structure and thought put into it.
Modifying Quake to run on the Occulus Rift was a breeze[2], compared to the mountains of garbage I have to wade through with wipEout.
Sure, but there's a big difference between leaked code vs. code cleaned up and officially released over 3 years after launch. Who knows what the Quake source looked like on the date they initially shipped. Quake also remained in development for quite a while, with the latest patch released ~March 1997 (original release June 96), and QuakeWorld last released end of 1998.
That's really cool, will you share your efforts anywhere? Love a bit of anti-gravity racing myself. I recommend you listen to the OST whilst coding it for maximum immersion.
The unlicensed source makes this difficult. My current plan is to trim the game to a demo with one race track, compile it to WASM, put it on my website and get Sony's attention (maybe through Nightdive Studios?) for a proper re-release.
In the likely event that this fails, I'll just YOLO it and put it on Github. After all, Sony didn't care that I published[1] all of wipEout's assets seven years ago.
That's class! Would you object if I typed up a quick review and listed it on my Well Made Web gallery? I'd slot it in under Artistic https://wmw.thran.uk/artistic/index.html