See Stuart Clarke's interview with Tim Willits and Paul Steed:
Quake III Arena barely made it into the stores in time for the Christmas rush but that didn't bother the fans too much. The game has been riding high on sales charts ever since.
Not that its popularity was ever really in doubt. Thousands of players queued up to test the game after selected levels were released online in mid-1999.
Quake developer id Software has been at the forefront of game design since its epics, Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom, ushered in the first-person perspective revolution in the early 1990s. Going against the trend of the games industry, where development teams of more than 100 people are not uncommon, Texas-based id Software has remained a tight operation. Just nine people produced Quake III Arena in an intense 18 months they called "the lock-up".
Coming out of that lock-up, lead level designer Tim Willits and lead artist Paul Steed headed straight for Australia to launch the game and take some much-needed R&R.;
"We basically sacrifice our bodies and lives to get this done," says Steed. "You spend the night at the office or you go home, shower and come back, and that's what it takes to be at the level that we're at."
Quake III Arena is a change in style from the first two games. It is a more refined deathmatch experience, with players taking on other intelligent gladiators in spectacular arenas rather than solo adventuring through more linear levels. The single-player game simulates the human-versus-human deathmatch experience, and the game's engine has been optimised for multi-player games on the Internet. Willits says the development of the new technology was tough.
"There's a new graphics engine, new networking, new editor tools, we developed curved maps - I wouldn't say it was painful, but we definitely had to evolve with the technology," he says.
Steed was responsible for the character modelling and animation, an area where there was also a lot of work done behind the scenes.
"We experimented with the head, upper torso and legs being separated so that we could make sure that we didn't have the 'skating' characters and the unrealistic motion of Quake and Quake II," he says.
"The technological leap with Quake II was not as apparent or as profound as with Quake III. Quake III required every single aspect of the code to be tweaked and rewritten and experimented with."
Willits's job as a level designer was also altered with the change in focus.
"Quake I and II were more the classic single-player style, where exploring and discovering were very important and you didn't really revisit the maps too much," he says. "With Quake III, you need a free-flowing map that allows lots of replayability and has good strategy in terms of item and weapon placement. It's just as difficult to make a good deathmatch level as it is to make a good single-player level."
Both designers say the public beta-testing process was a mixed blessing. While some features were added to the final release after public pressure, there were also many unachievable requests and divided opinions.
"The game fans these days are getting so demanding, so sophisticated," says Steed. "Before, it used to be, 'Ooh-aah, things are moving on the screen, shoot 'em!', but now they are picking up on nuances of game development. Everyone wants to be a back-seat driver when it comes to making games and we just can't make everyone happy. In the end we put in what we feel is right."
id Software is successful enough not to have to meet a publisher's strict delivery deadline, but Steed says that even though there's no pressure from an externally imposed date of release, "There's internal pressure because we're sick of working on it. We could just keep working on it forever, but you have to let go. If we sat and worked on it for another three months, like some people have suggested online, then we'd have all gone postal."
Both are highly enthusiastic about Australia and the Quake-playing community here. "The Quake community in Australia seems to be a little more mature, maybe a little smarter, more hard-core [than in the US] - they're real good fans," says Willits.
Steed seems particularly enamoured with the Aussie game scene.
"It's rabid here, it's great," he says. "It seems like it's much more organised here. Sure it's huge over in the States but it's also much more scattered. I'm not dissing the fans in America, but it seems that Australians take it so much more seriously. I'm always impressed by the legitimacy that the whole of game entertainment gets here. In the United States, it's still sort of the red-necked stepchild of entertainment."
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