Game:

Quake III Arena (1999)

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Quake III: Arena is a first-person arena shooter made by Id software and published by Activision. It was released in 1999.

Unlike its predecessors, Quake III Arena does not have a single-player campaign. Instead, it simulates the multiplayer experience with computer-controlled players. The game's story is brief: "the greatest warriors of all time fight for the amusement of a race called the Vadrigar in the Arena Eternal." The introduction video shows the abduction of such a warrior, Sarge, while making a last stand. Continuity with prior games in the Quake series and even Doom is maintained by the inclusion of player models and biographical information. A familiar mixture of gothic and technological map architecture as well as specific equipment is included, such as the Quad Damage power-up, the rocket launcher, and the BFG.

In Quake III Arena, the player progresses through tiers of maps, combating different bot characters that increase in difficulty, from Crash (at Tier 0) to Xaero (at Tier 7). As the game progresses, the fights take place in more complex arenas and against tougher opponents. While deathmatch maps are designed for up to 16 players, tournament maps are designed for duels between 2 players and in the single-player game could be considered 'boss battles'.

The weapons are balanced by role, with each weapon having advantages in certain situations, such as the railgun at long-range and the lightning gun at close quarters. The BFG super-weapon is an exception to this; compared to other similarly named weapons in the Doom/Quake series, Quake III Arena's incarnation of this weapon is basically a fast-firing rocket launcher and it is found in hard-to-reach locations. Weapons appear as level items, spawning at regular intervals in set locations on the map. If a player dies, all of their weapons are lost and they receive the spawn weapons for the current map, usually the gauntlet and machine gun. Players also drop the weapon they were using when killed, which other players can then pick up.

The game comes with several gameplay modes: Free for All (FFA), a classic deathmatch, where each player competes against the rest for the highest score, Team Deathmatch (TDM), where usually two teams of four compete for the highest team frag (kill) total, Tournament (1v1), a deathmatch between two players, usually ending after a set time and Capture the Flag, which is played on symmetrical maps where teams have to recover the enemy flag from the opponents' base while retaining their own.


The id Tech 3 engine is the name given to the engine that was developed for Quake III Arena. Unlike most other games released at the time, Quake III Arena requires an OpenGL-compliant graphics accelerator to run. The game does not include a software or Direct3D renderer.

The graphic technology of the game is based tightly around a "shader" system where the appearance of many surfaces can be defined in text files referred to as "shader scripts". Quake 3 also introduced spline-based curved surfaces in addition to planar volumes, which are responsible for many of the surfaces present within the game. Quake 3 also provided support for models animated using vertex animation with attachment tags (known as the .md3 format), allowing models to maintain separate torso and leg animations and hold weapons. Quake 3 is one of the first games where the third-person model is able to look up and down and around as the head, torso and legs are separate. Other visual features include volumetric fog, mirrors, portals, decals, and wave-form vertex distortion.

Source: Wikipedia