/vr/ - Retro Games

>>10191676
it's because on one hand, AD makes it obvious that it is: big, detailed, varied, non-linear, old-school. especially at the time it came out it was like a declaration of war against AAA trends.
and on the other hand, it is normie-friendly. very polished, all rough edges filed off, evenly lit, with barely any more fiends in the entire mapset than just E4M4 in the vanilla game. high-profile enough that it got picked up by journos.
both of these taken together make it easy to bring up AD in whatever context, compared to trying to explain why some obscure difficult wad is something other people should care about. plus the wow factor, of course: "Quake ONE can do THIS?!"
>>10192019
>rare albums that you can call "all killer, no filler"
that's because AD is more like a greatest hits compilation of maps across 5 or so years, with a bunch of covers on the B-side