#quake maps

Color #255 on the palette is often used for transparent textures such as grates, chain-link fences, vegetation, decorations, and lettered signs. Most modern Quake source ports will ignore this color if the texture starts with the "{" character.

You may have noticed that right around the halfway point of the palette, the pattern of dark-to-light colors switches. Nobody knows why this happened.

"It is important that the latter 8 palette rows are 'backwards' (light-to-dark instead of dark-to-light). It appears that the ID artists did this for no good reason in the original Quake palette, and the engine programmers were forced to add a hack to accommodate it (along with the comment "the artists made some backwards ranges. sigh"). The only area this affects is player shirt/pants color translation (where one palette row must be mapped to another)." - The Quake Wiki

Having several different variations of the same color in a palette meant that Quake could easily reuse textures by recoloring them. You can see this being used in the Multiplayer config menu, where you can change the player color. Every time you change the player's color, it's actually cycling through a row of the color palette!

While Quake's colors are often laughed at for being overwhelmingly brown, you can pull off some pretty impressive stuff with them. The texture artist and environment designer Makkon has released several truly incredible texture wads for Quake that really show how much detail you can squeeze out of a limited color palette!