Quake · PC (MS-DOS / Windows) · 1996
The final boss of Quake is revealed to be a hidden idol containing a digitised, impaled head of id Software co-founder John Romero.
In a dark joke at his own expense, John Romero had his head digitised and texture-mapped onto a spike at the centre of Quake's final boss arena. The entity "Shub-Niggurath" that the player defeats is mechanically a telefrag trap, but the boss object itself — the spike on which Shub's corruption is anchored — was revealed by the community to contain Romero's face when the texture was extracted. The joke took on additional cultural weight a year later when Romero's post-id studio Ion Storm released the infamous "John Romero's about to make you his bitch" marketing campaign for Daikatana, making the self-impaling head retroactively read as prescient.
Complete the game normally to reach the Shub-Niggurath boss arena in the final level (E4M8, or accessed via the END map). Defeat Shub-Niggurath using the telefrag method. The central spike object, when examined with a texture viewer or during the death sequence, reveals Romero's digitised face.