Linux

Quake III: Arena

Trivia

In the German gaming magazine GameStar (issue 03/2000) Quake III: Arena received a special award for the "Best Graphics in 1999".

The game appears in the fifth episode of the first season of the US HBO TV series Six Feet Under. The character Claire is shown playing it, doing rail shots with the quad damage activated.

Contributed by Sciere (119238) on Jul 24, 2009.

On January 12, 2000, Quake III: Arena was put on the infamous German index by the BPjS (confirmed on March 31, 2000). For more information about what this means and to see a list of games sharing the same fate, take a look here: BPjS/BPjM indexed games.

Some of the features of the Quake III engine:

• Bump mapping instead of mip mapping: Mip mapping rescaled a texture for several different sizes. Bump mapping actually applies per pixel light calculation for each texture. The trade off is processor speed vs realistic lighting.



• Curved surfaces: Quake III will interpolate the position of a point by doing real time calculation, based on the curvature of a surface.

Contributed by Santa (847) on Sep 18, 2005.

While this game was in development, it was referred to as Trinity. This was an obvious reference that it was using the third and possibly final Quake engine.

Contributed by Santa (847) on Sep 18, 2005.

On August 19th, 2005, the full (GPL'd) source code to the game was released.

Contributed by Sciere (119238) on Aug 20, 2005.

In an interview on Gamasutra, designer Tim Willits called Quake III his biggest failure: "The game offered perfect multiplayer for hardcore players. In fact, they're still playing it. But the more casual gamers, and other people who actually have money, found playing next to impossible." This hints at a commercial motivation, and not the quality of the game itself.

Contributed by Sciere (119238) on Jul 14, 2005.

The game contains a reference to a popular online comic called User Friendly (www.userfriendly.org). When playing on q3dm19, pick up the fly power-up from the top of the level and fly all the way down until you’re below the final platform. Look up at the central floor and you’ll see an image of the Dust Puppy, as featured in the comic.

Contributed by Sciere (119238) on Aug 18, 2003.

A downloadable add-on map pack is available on many Quake 3 sites on the 'net, which contains all the maps from the Dreamcast release of the game. This add-on pack allows players of the windows/linux version to play on servers with Dreamcast players. This makes Quake 3 one of the first games to support transparent Internet play between a game console and the PC!

The opening movie can be a little confusing if you haven't played the game. The best bet is that the "Sarge" used a teleporter to escape the masses of enemies he was facing... or perhaps the "player" of the character decided enough was enough and jumped into the bunch of bad guys and then exited the game.

"Quake III Arena" presents some of the heroes from previous Id games as playable skins, including the Space Marine from "Doom", the marine from "Quake", and a few of the different marines from "Quake II". All of these models and skins have both male and female counterparts, and different color variations.

The Linux release of Quake III can be converted for use with Windows. An instruction sheet with the Linux release says that this can be accomplished by...

1. Simply downloading the Windows point release from http://www.quake3arena.com/

2. Copy the pak0.pk3 file from the CD's baseq3 directory into the baseq3 directory of your Quake III installation.

Why would you want to do this? Perhaps because some mall software stores have been unloading tin box editions of the Linux release for as low as $8 US.

After finishing the game, watch the credits roll. After the Credits show "THE END", the character with the hoverskates will skate around the screen like he's just learning. It's pretty funny to watch.

Contributed by Chris Martin (1116) on May 04, 2002.

id Software released a technology demo of the game, called Q3Test, in early 1999. In the following five days, 2 million Quake 3 Test internet games were started worldwide. That works out to around 4 games every second.

50,000 copies of the game were sold within the first 3 days of its release.

As Half-Life, the game shipped with a very controversial multiplayer cd-key check. (The key was printed on the case of the cd-rom)

This system reduced piracy, but also introduced several other interesting issues: several people who had bought the game were unable to play it online because their cd-key had already been "stolen" by people who used key generator programs to find valid multiplayer keys. There are also numerous reports of Quake3 boxes being opened at the store by dishonest people wanting to get a valid cd-key.

Contributed by Cochonou (1021) on Nov 20, 2000.

There was a limited-edition run of a "tin" game box instead of cardboard ... 2000 or so I believe. The only difference is the box itself, nothing else extra is included.

This game gives one of the most interesting skin models of all time, The Orbb, which is a single eye with two limbs :)