At the beggining of december in 1999, IDsoftware released Quake 3. For at least one year everybody was waiting for it and as soon as someone would get a screenshot it would make the front page of many videogames website. During that year (1999), I, as many people, was just waiting for Q3. I would browse the web to see if any news about the game or any screenshot was released and when I had a screenshot I would save it and sometimes put it as my wallpaper.

I remember one time that I found an alpha version during the summer before Quake 3 was released. So I downloaded it right away, (I honestly don't remember where I found this) but I was skeptical if it would ever work. It's a zip file of about 16 megs. So I unzipped and try to start the executable. It crashed right away giving me an error about the 3dfx.dll or someting like that (I can't remember :P ). Anyway to finish this. I burnt the .zip file on a cd along with some others stuff for Quake 2.

Just this night, right now, I found back the cd in my stacks of cds and I remembered that I burnt on this cd the patch 3.20 for Quake 2. So I was in need of it, pop the cd in my cdrom and there I found back the old Quake 3 alpha zipped on the cd.

Of course I try to install it back to see if it would still crash.

Well? It didn't! The quake3.exe is dated from 1999-02-12. The 12 of february 1999.

So I load the game and it gave me right away the console (the version displayed is 4.01). I've got only 4 maps with it and they're all small and not finished. But enough talking here's all the screenshots that I took:

Note: If someone has ever seen the alpha version, could you post your comments (I never heard of someone having played this verion).

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DGhost

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DGhost

I especially love the big mouth with red tongue, that seemed to have been used as a model in (eek, do I remember it?) the first map of the first tier (Q3DM1).

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DGhost

hehe! Me, I remember everyone of my friends talking about that Q3, and how it was about impossible to make work with the (then) current drivers of most display adapters... and that it took forever to load, and it was running at half the fps of every other games, and and and... everyone drooling on it!

Am I just special?

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DGhost

[ 02-08-2002: Message edited by: DGhost ]

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DGhost

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DGhost

The bots would walk straight, and unless they saw something to shoot at, the would just keep walking straight. If they saw something to shoot the would strafe left and right and fire, but once you left their field of view they would move forward again and forgot about you.

The one level it had was very incomplete, a revolving 3 sided mirror (just like in the promo video early on), a teleporter which teleported you into the room with the bots. This room was VERY dark, and had only light in a small section of the room. In the center was a giant Quake 3 symbol if I remember correctly. The bots would move torwards a wall and then just keep walking into it until they were killed. The bots I don't think even turned around if you shot them from behind. Once they died they'd spawn in the middle of the room and walk towards the wall again. I remember one corner of the room had a hole in the floor which lead to a completely black room with nothing in it that I could find...core dump.(j/k)

[ 02-08-2002: Message edited by: TheKiller ]

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DGhost

Other people weren't seeing what was all the fuss about having a fully-3d video game when you could have a really great approximation using semi-2d (à la Doom).