My personal take on who the strogg really are

Please don't take this seriously. This is just my little funny headcanon about the lore of Quake.

So, the strogg have always intrigued me. They are supposed to be an alien species completely unrelated to Humanity, right? Well, i wouldn't say so. Despite most sapient alien species from late 20th century sci-fi being humanoid or literaly identical to humans in various cases, i have a feeling that the Strogg, or at least its founding race, might not actually have been aliens at all, but perhaps humans from a different timeline or dimension. Quake does explicitly or in a subtle way imply, especially in the new expansion packs, that different dimensions inhabited by different civilizations with suspisciously similar architecture to humans have once existed, but with the invasion of those dimensions by the armies of Shub-Niggurath there was nothing left but empty ruins. Inter-dimensional travel through slipgates was used by humans, aswell as the Shub-Niggurath's minions and aparently the Strogg as well from what Quake Champions and even Quake Wars implied.

Stroggos is surprisingly very similar in appearence to Earth itself safe for the fact that it's surrounded by a massive asteroid belt and three moons, but what if that asteroid belt and its moons are all that was left of the actual moon? What if there is a grain of truth in the theories of those 2 Quake 4 marines and there was indeed a massive war that devastated the strogg to the point it left them almost unrecognizable? Perhaps, in that war the moon was obliderated and it's remains were scatered across the planet's orbit and a lot of it crashed into the planet. It could be even said that the crater in which Cerberon was built inside of was caused by massive collision from chunks of the moon.

Apart from the planet itself, Strogg aesthetics also raise some interesting aspects. Their emblems often depict some sort of eagle or griffin like animal and a human like skull and their banners resemble those of Earth's empires of the past. Technically the probability of there being life forms identical to earth life, not to mention similar aesthetics to human empires, on completely unrelated planets would be next to 0 and i know that Quake 2 wasn't made with realism in mind, but that along all the other aspects I mentioned above is enough to raise suspicions about what Stroggos really is. To make things better, their language is structured very similarly to human indo-european languages such as english, but with almost indecifferable words to the vast majority of humans trying to understand it. Some words however, like "Strogg" itself is nearly identical to the serbo-croation wrord for "strong" which is oddly fitting for what strogg civilization is.

It could have been that Stroggos was indeed Earth from a different timeline than the one from which the human protagonists/militaries from Q1, Q2, Q4 and ETQW originated and at some point, Stroggos was literally just like Earth, but then a war broke. No one knows who the earthlings of that timeline fought. It could have been an unknown alien civilization which is the most likely, but it could have also been an eldrich invasion or even a Human civil war either within the planet or maybe, they had also colonized Mars at that point and then the "martians" decided to completely obliderate Earth by blowing up the moon, but to the shock of whoever caused it, Earth survived and its people were angry and with a single purpose in mind: to crush their enemy. They rose from the ashes like a phoenix and perhaps that's exactly what the avian creature in their emblems represented. Their leaders rallied the surviving people along the lines of "Earth is stronger!", "We are strong!" which soon became "EARTH IS STROGGOS! STROGG! STROGG! STROGGOS!". I would even say that in their quest for revival and to avenge their weakened civilization, their leadership, whether they wanted the best for their planet or not, let themselves be influenced by Gods as old as existence itself in an attempt to gain forbidden knowledge or power, but the tradeoff was the complete oblideration of their humanity and thus, the Strogg were born. They began draining their planet's resources and pushing for hyper industrialisation, even when life was already on thin ice after the bombardment of the planet by shards from their moon, which turned the once lush planet into an endless wasteland. During that process, they fused themselves with machinery believing it would give them an edge over their sworn enemies and in the end, it worked. Over time, in order to achive absolute efficiency for their war machine, they centralized all of their decision-making into a single massive organic computer, the Nexus which slowly but surely took control over every single individual, except perhaps for the elite in which the Makron was included.