I remember the gamespy stats charts having Quake 3 around 3k players which was indeed huge in it's day but absolute chump change now. Quake 3 was always eclipsed by Half Life on the stats though because of CS. Once CS came out it was just a downward trend for all Quake games.

It's honestly insane how big gaming is now compared to then, so it's hard to call something really popular when the numbers were so small, but in comparison to other games it was quite big yes.

I have the time but it doesn't help you through never ending why

Brian Molko, Battle for the sun

the idea i want to express and communicate it may disappear in a couple of seconds. Your question of how popular lost its importance just within a minute

yes, it was glorious

The first big competition I went to was in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2000. There were 512 entrants for Quake 3. It was big.

That said, a year later, the entrants were down to 24, and it was counter-strike that was huge. Still, it had it's time in the Sun.

your lg is nothing on lan

"your lg is nothink on the lan" -cooller

Fixed

https://www.esreality.com/post/731732/best-cooller-quote/

1 or 2 played it

Before QC ever came out, Quake was very much more alive in it's hey day. there were more active players back then.

True, QC splitted the community and failed to deliver, the duel format was bad, the meta champions adds even more depth, the netcode was bad. I was hyped and played for some time, but it still feels so floaty compared to Quakelive, which is a solid game.

Initial D Arcade Stage version 3 was a two third majority of Hong Kong players. But this Segarosso product found its rivalry with Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune then launched by Namco in 2004. The community of such plural racing games lacked an effort to documentation of a good English standard

Yes, Quake was definitely popular in its peak era. Compared with today?s huge player numbers it may seem small, but back then it had a strong competitive scene, LAN events, and a dedicated community.

It was a "large" community from 1996 until about 2001. I've put large in quotations because at the time PC gaming was still quite niche and internet infrastructure was still being setup but Quake had a good chunk of those players. Even then, it had competition from other PC franches like StarCraft, WarCraft, and EverQuest. Back then games like CS were groundbreaking and once it got some traction, it simply steamrolled Quake. During this era we also so massive franchises like Halo and WoW. It was over by that point, a lot of Quake players had already transitioned to other games. If you look at the early rtcw and cod tournaments, they were filled with former Quake players.

quake wasn't a competitor of starcraft. quake 3 peaked at around 3000 concurrent players according to the master server (this is a distinct memory, not a citable stat). starcraft was on the order of tens of thousands of concurrent players. there's an esr thread for quake live steam release peak of around 5k. quake multiplayer is, and has always been, incredibly niche, even when quake and quake 2 were dominant. the internet was smaller then the mp gaming options were much more constrained, and id tech was still meaningfully interesting in pc gaming pop culture (which, itself, was incredibly niche compared to console gaming).

there is an esr thread about quake live peak that i won't link (seems to trigger post review process, which can take days for approval), but search for 'peak went from 2k to 5k' and you can find it. in an era of huge population of gaming, quake actually lost (extremely lost) per capita share of multiplayer interest, even with advertisement on the steam store landing page.

but the scenes back then were much more alive and 'local' to each country, there was scene in germany, there were scandinavians, uk etc. and also US of course

Nice to see esr comeback! Thanks for all those years.
final standings predicts:
1. agent
2. cypher
3. pavel
4. k1llsen
PS. i'm trying to leave comment under https://www.esreality.com/post/2974908/250-fp...aug-29-30/
but it gets redirected here wtf

I have very distinct memories of around 20K+ players around 2000-2001.

I must recall the clans of this first person shooter in Hong Kong then y2k, but the community in Hong Kong didn't have the resources and incentives to a LAN party to live up to standards of QuakeCon

The first three Quake games were the definition of mainstream. Eagerly anticipated, hyped and almost every gamer wanted to try them out. They all also sold extremely well for their time.

Quake 4 was a completely different story.
The market in mid 2000s was pretty straight foward - consoles saw rapid growth and all the most popular shooters (Halo, Cod, SW, MoH) were basically the same game - a story-driven SP fps where the player fought side by side with ai crew. So naturally, people at idsoft said fuck, if shit like Halo 2 can sell 8 million copies on consoles, so can a new Quake.
There was a small problem, though: idsoft wasnt capable of making such game. John Carmack certainly was a genius when it came to technology, coding and engines, but quite the opposite when it came to managing the company or people. Between 1999 and 2005, he got rid of at least 10 extremely talented employees who all later had incredible careers - and that included all sorts of positions, creative design, sound design, writing, art, coding, you name it. Adrian Carmack left id in 2005 and said in an interview the company was no longer about making games but rather constant corporate powerplay and infighting.
So they passed Quake 4 development to Raven Software.
The game was shit since its first teaser until its very release. It felt like a cheap Halo clone and had nothing to do with Quake. It was buggy, crashed all the time and the PC multiplayer was extremely underdeveloped and locked at 60fps. People hated Raven for it, but as it later turned out, idsoft kept whipping them into oblivion and rushed to release the game asap.
Quake 4 sales were so underwhelming that idsoft cancelled their already announced expansions and that was it.
Quake 4 had one positive impact anyway - it brought back many pros from slumber and people gathered around Quake 3 CPMA. The game wasnt only active, it was probably the peak of Q3 popularity and got it back to big lans such as ESWC or GameGune, no thanks to id.

after all these super creative people left, id software games had as much creative value and fun as the number of hair on tim wallets head

Quake 4 was a terrible game, Doom and Quake IPs should have never been ousourced. SHAME! SHAME!

if I liked Nvidia geforce hardware accleration it might not be Hewlett Packard recommendation they don't quite sell PC gaming.

Gfx cards good chance of overheating and being in market of over the top cooling solution HardOCP