Comment by amatecha
1 day ago
hell yeah, my first real LAN game experience on Windows was the Quake test/alpha that preceded the release of the game (IIRC?), when I was at a local tech school for a class. We weren't technically allowed to load the game on the uni PC's but like.. yeah... it happened. And we did zero work for that day (or days). (Prior LAN experience was Marathon and Bolo in the Mac lab which was insanely awesome too, and a year earlier lol)
Quake came out just before I started high school and I played it a lot in those three years. I remember playing quake 1 in the LAN in university around 2002 because it was easy to share the 50MB of portable files. Things moved so fast back then that it already seemed like a retro game. I didn't realise at the time that it was a timeless classic and I would still be playing it 25 years later.
There was a way that you could trim the files just right that you could fit the Quake executable and a single multiplayer map onto a floppy disk. Those things were treasured as you could easily just hide them wherever.
Definitely made high school much more fun.
I remember the days where our data center PC had CDROM drive so someone installed Quake (can't remember II or III) and we would play while the overnight multi-hour batch jobs were running.
You can go download it again here:
https://archive.org/details/q3DemoTEST
There were multiple test releases. You can find the older ones out on the web.
Honestly the best of times. I wouldn't be able to pay rent were it not for videogames which inspired me to work in the software industry.
I wish we could get those days back. Cars loaded with CRT monitors and big machines and bags of all sorts of stuff.