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Vol.
2, Issue 2
November 15, 1999
End
of the Line
A report
by Russell "RadPipe"
Lauzon
adPipe
has a vision. It's the id Software annual marketing meeting, where
all ideas for the coming year are discussed and hashed around.
There's a big table. There's lots of chairs. The owners of the
company are there, as well as the biz and marketing people. Perhaps
they're having danishes and coffee. Perhaps not. Anna Kang is
talking.
<Anna>
It'll be great! We'll buy a big bus, design it up all cool like
with big Quake III logos everywhere, we'll put really fast
computers on it, network them up, and drive the thing from city
to city and let people try the game. It'll be a big roving lan
party! It'll be great! Why is everyone looking at me so strangely?
I haven't
a clue who was the first to propose the idea of the Quake III:
Arena bus, but Anna sure deserves credit for making it happen.
And seriously, I bet whoever came up with the original idea got
some strange looks before the dream was finally realized. (Personally,
I like to think it was my Road To QuakeCon series on QuakeCon.org
that brought it about, but I'm told differently. But that would
have been cool.)
I had
the wonderful privilege of doing interviews for the Quake
III Arena site. Which was rather odd, because I never got
on the bus until the final stop, in LA at Activision HQ. It was
there that I finally played on those very cool Athlon machines
with the flat screen monitors, and I kicked me some Activision
employee butt. Ok, some of them had never played before, and they
were having problems getting the controls just right, and I kept
kicking people behind me, and most of them had never played any
sort of FPS game before, but I still won myself a glorious battle
and smack-talked them into oblivion. When in Rome, do as the Romans,
right? Of course we were nowhere near Rome.
At least
half the id Software folk were on hand and we retreated to a secret
Activision room where more machines were setup and a special build
of Q3A was loaded and raring to go. So what did I do? I
sat down at one of the machines and we played on q3test2, The
Longest Yard. Not the brightest thing considering we had new levels
to play with, but I wasn't about to stand up and suggest we do
something else in a roomful of id and Activision people. Someone
else soon stood up and suggested we play a different level and
everyone applauded and commended his initiative. I was tempted
to throw something, but I didn't. (And by the way, it was Christian
"Disruptor" Antkow of id.)
We dropped
into one of Disruptor's maps and he proceeded to mop the floor
with us. I got my first look at both the Klesk and Orbb models.
I got fragged a few times trying to check them out, especially
when I was laughing my ass off at the "testicle on arms"
model (as described on Blue's msgboard one day). Don't get me
wrong, it's definitely a cool model once you get used to the obvious
strangeness of it. Paul Steed did an excellent job animating it,
which leaves me to wonder who at id he used for the motion-capture
filming. I can see it now
<Paul>
Hey Tim, can you walk on your hands? Great, now can you do it
holding this basketball between your legs?
No, that's
not a quote. That's my cracked mind creating reality out of fiction.
Cool huh.
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