There were only two years between Quake and Half-life so they clearly have a very narrow view of their tech-generation!

Yeah, I was about to say they came out around the same time. Even Doom and Quake is only three years apart, but I feel like it was much more. Maybe because I was younger at the time.

He must be 34 by my calculations :)

He must be 37, because I think he is me..?

My guess would be 38

How can possibly Quake be too old then? It's from 1996 [1], which would make them 14y old at the time which is a perfect age to play Quake.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_(video_game)

But it's possible they did not get online until much later.

My dad did get us dial-up internet in 1995, but he was a uni professor doing stuff with computers for a long while (we've had a Novell Netware network at home in 1993).

But basically nobody I knew was getting online too, and BBSes were still a thing for older beards.

I didn't get online until 95-96 I think, I'm just 2 years older and for example I completely missed the BBS thing because living in a small town phone costs were prohibitive but by the time dial-up became a thing there were the first nightly flat-rates (like from 8PM to 8AM at an affordable price) so we went online almost daily. But online gaming wasn't possible anyway, I remember throwing some LAN-party with my closest friends to multi-play Quake but that's it. But I didn't feel I was too old for Quake at all