Good, Clean Quake

The splatter game is back--recast as fun-for-all sport. I got an exclusive look behind the scenes.

By Chris Taylor 	 Monday, Dec. 13, 1999

Behind the door of suite 666 in the black-glass Towne East Tower in Mesquite, Texas, Miss Donna is treating me to a real drubbing. In reality, she's sitting at the next computer, every inch the quintessential Texas mother, all big hair and rouge. Onscreen, I never see her until it's too late. "I'm a-coming to get you!" whoops the fortysomething office manager and designated mom-in-residence to id software's 13 staff members, as her footsteps grow louder. A burst of green plasma fire frags me, and I have to respawn. To frag is to kill, which Miss Donna does a lot of; to spawn is to be reborn, which I do a lot of. On the one occasion I manage to frag her, she taunts, "Oh, so your gun actually works, then?"

What Miss Donna and I are, er, testing is Quake III Arena--the hottest, most anticipated PC game of the year, if not of all time. It's set to hit store shelves Dec. 12, and TIME got the first peek at the finished product. id, the guys who brought you the highly successful and controversial first-person shooter games Doom and Quake, have been working on this sequel ever since they wrapped up Quake II in 1997, and it shows.

The game has effectively transformed into a sport, with 30 lovingly crafted arenas and 32 crafty computer opponents, a.k.a. bots. Previous id games always had some narrative device, but Quake III abandons all pretense of a plot. It's nothing but networked death matches, played by individuals or teams, against the computer or over the Internet. It's wise to practice on the bots firt and avoid the humiliation I suffered against veterans like Miss Donna.

The matches are held in some of the most meticulously rendered backdrops ever presented on a computer screen. I found it hard to play without gawking. The lighting! The mist! The way bullets whiz through water! It feels like you're reliving the first half-hour of Saving Private Ryan--except, surprisingly, it's not as gory.

As fans of boxing discovered a century ago, games become more socially acceptable when they're confined to arenas and given rules. And the new, paintball-like feel may even improve Quake's reputation in the eyes of teachers, parents and legislators in the post-Columbine era. "We are sort of a poster child for violence in video games," says John Carmack, id's founder and owner, "but when people sit down and have a good time in Quake III, it's hard for them to think this is a bad thing."

At the request of its publisher, Activision, id has included a bloodless game option that turns off offensive splatter. The interface is simple enough for anyone to learn in five minutes and play for five minutes at a time, and it doesn't take a Ph.D. in rocketry to get your head round such scenarios as Capture the Flag. "People will view it as a casual thing," Carmack told me, "a pastime."

Not that the id gang sees it that way. There's little time for pastimes at a company where you live most of your life in the office--20 hours a day, seven days a week on average during the late stages of Quake III's development, when almost the entire team spent nights sleeping on couches or the floor. The offices are pretty well lived-in, judging from the scattered remnants of takeout dinners and the small home gym.

"Your spouse has to know that id is the center of your life," says designer Christian Antkow, who is agonizing over whether to tie his girlfriend to this grueling lifestyle by marrying her. "It takes a special someone to deal with us nerds."

Then again, there are compensations aplenty. Four of these long-haired, T-shirted guys are millionaires; most own Ferraris (Carmack has too many for his garage), Porsche 911s or large houses built on the success of previous games. Take them to a tony restaurant, and they will casually debate the merits of vintage wines.

Then there are the intangible benefits of having, well, a more childlike outlook on life. During the final week of coding, veteran designer Graeme Devine noticed that nerves were fraying. So he went to the local Toys "R" Us and cleaned them out of Nerf guns--$280 worth of the rubber-shot geek toys. What followed is still spoken of in hushed tones: an epic 3-hr. Nerf war. "It was good for the team," says Devine. "By shooting each other, we saved a possible blowup in the company."

Of course, it's these guys' jobs to shoot at each other. Now that coding for the PC version of Quake III is finished--it wrapped up at 4:30 a.m. on Thanksgiving day--all that's left is tweaking for Mac and Linux versions, and plenty of play testing. Last week the only thing you could hear in Suite 666 was resounding cries of "Dammit, get out of the way!" and "I've picked up the shotgun. I'll cover you!" Carmack, described reverentially by a team member as "an evil genius," is not playing. He's already hard at work on his next project--and no doubt his next million.

And Miss Donna? She's hooked. Just ask the mail-delivery guys who wait in line while she finishes fragging her opponents. "It just intrigues me," she smiles. "I think the guys push us women away from the computer 'cause they don't want us to see what we're missing." With Miss Donna in the arena, we guys had better get ready to respawn.

You can download a demo at www.quake3arena.com And you can e-mail Chris at cdt@well.com