Doom was a lot of fun, but it felt more like an animated cartoon. Most of the terrors came from enemies hiding behind blind corners and doors. Quake was a different story. Its real-time lighting helped to set the mood and made it feel endlessly scary and creepy. Rodrigo Feliciano made a flickering Quake lamp to give a room a spooky feel.
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It is impossible to know what is happening with the power grid that Quake uses. However, someone has discovered that the moody lighting in Half-Life was actually created by John Carmack of id Softwares over 25 years ago.
Did Quake's lighting look so real that no one could match it for over a quarter century? Most likely not. It is more likely that the code was used to speed up Half-Lifes developers. The original Quake source code was made available under the GPLv2. Since then, it has evolved into an Easter egg similar to the Wilhelm Scream sound effect, which continues to pop up on TV and movies.
Quake's flickering lighting patterns were defined by a string made up of letters. A to Z represent full brightness and a to z represent no light. A string like azazaz would make the lights appear to turn completely on and off, while in Quake, the string looked more like mmamammmmammamamaaamammma with m being a given lights default brightness setting.
Feliciano was able easily to bring the same code to an Arduino Pro Mini. He wired it to a hack emergency light with an array of white LEDs, which could flicker or dim at will. It produces a flickering lamp which looks almost like it was bought from Ikea in Quake World. It should be trivial to sync it with the actual game, but I can recall many late-night gaming sessions where Quake was already scary enough. I didn't want my entire living room to feel full of creepy monsters hidden behind every corner.
