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Yes, anyone can learn quake enough to run trough the levels and kill some bots.

Good luck trying to do same vs online players, at this point everyone in Q1 community has been playing it for 10+ years, some of them even more. It would take you 6+ months of hard grind to start winning against low tier players (given that you have talent for AFPS games)

To play well at high level - for Quake (or Doom before it) this meant learning all sorts of details and tricks about how the engine operated and how to deal with it - and those people would be less inclined to change to a new version.

But the mods are the more important reasons - and even now we see that in Minecraft which has very increments upgrades; many modpacks are still on the version of Minecraft that came out when they were released.

It's hardly a binary thing, people put a lot of time into becoming good at games to the point where they can almost compete with pro players. Switching to a new game is a major setback in that regard.

At the time, Quake used or introduced a ton of new game mechanics that are ubiquitous these days.