Quake 3 Gold released as hybrid PC/Mac offering

Often when a game gets long in the tooth the publisher looks for creative ways to market it to drum up sales. PC game publisher Activision has caught this bug with a new compendium combining Quake III Arena with the more recently released Quake III Team Arena mission pack. They’ve also taken the encouraging step of bundling the two together as a hybrid package that will work with either Mac or Windows-based systems. The new collection is called Quake III Gold, and it’s available in stores for about US$30.

Quake III Arena is, of course, the popular first-person 3D action game shooter developed by Id Software. Id’s co-founder and lead programmer John Carmack has been seen on stage at various Macworld Expos as he has touted his latest game engine architecture on Apple’s latest and greatest Mac hardware and operating system software.

Activision’s support of the Mac seemed to have waned in recent months — although the company released the Mac version of Quake III Arena in the weeks following the PC version’s introduction, gamers noted earlier this year that supplies of the game had dwindled from store shelves. As a result, Mac gamers may be relieved to discover that Quake III Gold is, indeed, a hybrid CD-ROM that contains installers for both Macs and Windows systems — a point even Apple noted recently on their own Games Web page.

This is the first time that Mac users have been able to buy a package containing Quake III Team Arena that includes a Mac installer in the box. Previously, users had to buy the PC version, extract the data files, then use an updated Quake III Team Arena application made available for Internet download from Id Software themselves.

Quake III Team Arena is a “Mission Pack” which leverages Quake III Arena’s online gaming play with team play elements, instead. Several new game types have been incorporated, along with new weapons, new interface elements, and a host of changes to the core Quake III Arena technology to help improve and enhance the experience.

MacCentral reader Brian K. James confirmed that the Quake III Gold pack works on Macs and PCs alike, but noted some contradictory information. While the package itself indicates it’s a hybrid CD, the Quake III Team Arena CD-ROM inside the box is labeled as a Windows-only CD. James said that regardless of the disparity, the Quake III Team Arena CD-ROM is indeed mountable as a Mac CD and contains a Mac installer application.

In related news, Id Software Mac maven Graeme Devine recently updated his .plan file with news about the latest build of Quake III for Mac OS X — the installer for the latest version, 1.30, is now ready for download. (Separate updates exist for Mac OS 9 and X versions — visit Apple’s Web site at the link above for further details.)

Devine noted that Quake III Arena is best played by Mac OS X users with the new version 10.1 operating system. “Those with a Powerbook and desktop machines with PCI Rage 128 cards will need at least 10.0.4 to play due to a bug in OpenGL on earlier versions,” said Devine. “Under 10.1 this version will always go faster than the Classic build on the same machine.”