Quake III Arena

Quake III Arena is like another Doom but 6 years later. Not in terms of gameplay but in terms of importance to the gaming industry. Quake III Arena is the ultimate multiplayer shooter experience and as far as I am concerned the ultimate multiplayer experience overall. For starters it sported the new Quake III engine that became industry standard for countless games. It was first to intruduce curved surfaces and new levels of dynamic lightning and organic surfaces. The soundtrack was mindblowing and the soundeffects were superb. The overall polish of Quake 3 Arenas presentation is unchallenged through history. The game itself is the biggest and most played mutliplayer shooter out there and its a standard in the progaming world where people win huge sums of money playing Quake 3 arena. Quake 3 is another of those few games that I played for years without pausing. I watched replays of the best people in the game, talked to some of them, played some of them and tried to rise up to participate in tournaments, LAN parties and online leagues together with an old gaming buddy. Everything from the estethic design, to the precision of the controls contributed to make a shooter so tight, no, a GAME so tight that it has no equal in the actiongenre. The leveldesign was another factor. The Arenas you fight in are marvels of virtual design and the layout of every arena is worth an award in itself.

Weapondesign: Variations of classic Quake and Doom weapons.
Playermodels: The ability to chose from a huge variety of different playermodels ranging from a big biker chick, a huge robot, a war veteran or a sergeant, to the classic guy from Doom, an eye on legs or a genetic experiment. Quake 3 had a single player mode with AI bots so good you could play that for months but as I said the real meat with Quake 3 Arena lies within its multiplayer that starts to feel like you are really playing a professional sport after youve been playing it for a couple of years.

You really become better when playing the game for a long time on a whole other level than in your standard "game". You start to time spawns, aim in certain ways, mod the graphics, trickjump, bunnyjump and plasmaclimb (all of them things that the players of ID Software games invented in the first place). Its like playing a real sport for a long time. You develop you own playstyle and watching famous players go at it you could easily find a favorite playstyle to watch. At the "peak" of my career I could put on a Quake 3 match between two good clans instead of watching a movie and I marked important games in my calendar to not miss a match. Quake 3 is not only the best actiongame ever made, its really the best sport ever made. ID Software has probably meant more for actiongaming than any other company and with Quake 3 they created multiplayer shooting for a new generation.

The genious minds behind this masterpiece deserves so much praise for what they have done. The game is an inspiration on so many levels and it inspired a whole industry to start creating gaming mice, gaming keyboards, gaming rigs, headsets and energy drinks. It inspired a whole generation of multiplayer gamers to join clans and create movies of themselves playing trying to become the next cyberstar. Quake III Arena is a shining example of perfect programming, perfect presentation, perfect gameplay flow, perfect balance, perfect coding, perfect support from the developers, the perfect community and a shining example of a game that deserves the title "Best game ever made" if someone came up and asked me.