What is a former q3 champion doing these days? I'm genuinely curious. Since you are on hacker news I assume you do something with software. Any skills that you picked up back then that are useful today?

Do rocket jumps and strafing count? :)

I’ll credit Quake for helping/exposing me to networking, filesystems, and shaders at a young age - one of the few games that truly encouraged (à la Quake Console) making modifications and setting booleans to configure settings. That was enough at the time to encourage me to teach myself JavaScript, PHP, and SQL - as I had some web projects in mind that I needed to execute on for the Quake clan I founded. This later became freelance, which later became a side gig through school. I was also grateful for the various sponsorships and earnings at the time so I could keep my equipment up to date and pay for storage.

Fast forward a bit, and I’ve mostly worked in SecEng at a number of great companies, most of them popular FinTech and FAANGs..I’m extremely fortunate and have been able to work at all my favorite companies. I’d like to think at minimum, Quake prepared me professionally be meticulous in my craft, study human pattern behaviors, and know when to take risk.

Lastly, I can (hopefully) better answer your question in a few years as I am just now working through switching careers completely to become a Motion Designer. There’s something extremely appealing to me to be able to work with 3D + Engineering, while still being able to solve problems AND feel creative at the same time.

..maybe this desire stems from Quake, maybe not. Either way, Quake has a permanent location in my heart.

I think early pc shooters (doom, quake, unreal, etc) had a whole legion of kids learn the basics of computing. typing commands in a console. Understanding latency, what servers meant. Installing mods and drivers. It was a fantastic, motivating introduction to system administration.

UT99 did it for me. The game had a built in IRC client. That exposed me to the community outside of the game itself. And then once I heard the game ran better under Linux… my fate was sealed.

What’s the story around the Unlagged mod was that a mod you remember? It was mentioned in the blog post curious if it was popular and if it eventually got iD's attention to implement something similar officially?

Unfortunately I am not familiar with this mod.

One thing to keep in mind is a lot of mods were frowned upon or flat out not allow at all, especially as you can imagine with playing competitive. Once PunkBuster did finally get release for Q3, there was also a bit of hesitation from ranked players on making any non-typical modifications to the game out of fear of being banned. That said, aimbot was a huge issue with Q3 and rarely did I witness PunkBuster do its job.

iD tends to be very tight lipped about things from my limited interactions with them, even in person at Quake Cons..but I do know they were all hanging out on the same forums and places the players were at - so my hunch is they were aware of it.

I mostly lived in modded Q3A - held a few world records in DeFRaG from time to time, but none that were important. I miss those days, they were the best of times :D

PunkBuster was a PITA, but there were popular mods like DeFRaG, CPMA (Pro Mode), and RA3. There were also other full on games built like Urban Terror by Sandstorm.

Most of the popular mods were rolled in as game modes though.

I have been playing Quake since Quake World and dial up. For Quake Live I was ranked highly for a while in RA. It's true that if you were close enough to the server you could get a better experience, but in western Canada servers were limited. In the past though, even with a good ping, rails were much more likely to hit on LAN. The changes to the net code in Quake Live were a welcomed change for myself.

As a note, I recently played for the first time in over 10 years. I got banned until 2029 from the main RA3 sever most people play on because I achieved 60%+ accuracy in a match and people thought I was cheating.

I also got the aim bot achievement from Steam as a result, which only 3.6% of other players have.

Back in the day I had a very tiny sponsorship with HyperGlide where I tested their products before the launch. They are credited for making the first hard surface mouse pad. I only received mouse pads, but I was happy to receive this.

https://www.hyperglide.net/