I don’t know about quake, but in quake 2 it consisted of a big list of:

    else if (strcmp(cmd, “somecmd”) == 0)
        somecmd()

I remember reading it at the time and being inspired by the simplicity of it. It didn’t need to be more complicated than it was, and so Carmack didn’t make it more complicated. That was in stark contrast to a lot of the object oriented c++ design stuff that I was also reading at the time.

So much of the quake 2 game source was like that. Beautifully straightforward code.