When playing Quake over the net, the connection only has to synchronize the players positions etc. And Quake was pretty clever extrapolating the players motions, so even when packets were slow, they seemed to behave naturally. This frequently caused them to jump, when the positions were updated by real data.

With Stadia, the whole gaming graphics are streamed to your local client, so when the network is slow, the graphics will lag. And of course, it takes magnitudes more of data to transmit.

QuakeWorld did. They original was not so clever about networking. Much like streaming games.

I know you're joking, but serial line afaik has lower latency than the USB stuff being used today

It was actually Heretic, now that I think of it, which had a SLIP networking capability for two-person duels. Those were the days.

Maybe not, routers could have serial interfaces back in the day. They were way slow. Maybe they even ran frame relay.

Pretty sure routers still have serial interfaces today, for when everything goes to shit.

They don't. I'm not talking about console ports but interfaces for forwarding.

In the snow!