I have nothing against Quake, it’s also a wonderful game. But Mario 64 solved more complex problems of the 3D nature : huge scenes with a lot of (moving) objects, moving in all directions, complex move set, camera, camera, camera…
Quake is a nice game as it is but it’s much simpler when the player is the camera.
I'm not sure. A sophisticated camera is quite nice, but quake introduced a visibility determination solution that was used in dozens, perhaps hundreds of games afterwards. It also helped pioneer modding (it has a compiled scripting language), and later on had online deathmatch with predictive netcode (so it actually worked over the internet!) and was one of the first games to support hardware accelerated 3d graphics on pc.
It also has lightmaps, all surfaces are textured, and runs in software with no hardware acceleration, z-buffering, built-in perspective correct texture mapping, etc.
Obviously, that doesn't make it more fun to play, but Quake was an incredible technical achievement for the time, I don't think anybody would put Mario 64 in the same basket.
Quake supported cameras, as you put it. People made movies in the Quake engine with literal camera shaped models floating around. Also, Quake levels could be huge, much larger than Mario 64. Take a look at Ziggurat Vertigo [0][1], for example. Mario 64 was much more colorful, though, Quake had an intentionally limited color palette.
Quake is a nice game as it is but it’s much simpler when the player is the camera.