My Quakecon Journey

My Quakecon Journey

By Michael Knutson

August 16, 2002

Since it was a
slow day at work, with nothing of major importance to do, our boss told us we
could leave a few hours early.  Lucky for me since today was the first day of
Quakecon, which from where I work is
approximately twenty minutes away.  Once I arrived I walked into the hotel

(The Hampton Inn & Suites
Dallas/Mesquite Convention Center)
and went up to the registration table, which takes
around fifteen minutes to get signed up, and to receive your one ticket to see
the Doom III trailer.

Inside the main
auditorium you will see the BYOC (bring your own computer) part, there are
literally thousands of computers hooked up to one another. You could see all the
effort that people put into their computers, some had big cooling fans on them,
others had decorated the cases, and a few had neon lighting inside the case.
Everyone is hooked into a huge LAN, sharing all sorts of files, and playing many
different games against each other.

The next room held a variety of things such as an entire
Macintosh section, ATI demo room, and the section where all the tournaments are
held.  In the ATI demo section gamers had the chance to see some effects that
the new RADEAON 9700 Pro card could do and enter in a drawing for a chance to
win one.  You could also watch movies
they had set up on big TV’s on really comfortable couches, making the gamers
feel cozy and trying to entice them to purchase their latest video card.

The Activision
area of the vendor’s room had some early builds of both the Xbox and PlayStation
2 versions of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The Xbox version was looking good,
but the PS2 version was not as sharp looking in comparison. They said that
before its release date the PS2 version will be optimized more and will stand up
against the PC counterpart.  I didn’t get a chance to view the Doom III
trailer as all the tickets for it were either very late that night, or the
following afternoon, but some friends that saw it said that it is the same as E3
with few changes, but that game still looked incredible!

Quakecon has the reputation for being the biggest and
best LAN party in the nation, and considering the things that were shown today,
it lives up to that title!  With two major tournaments (Quake 3 and Return
to Wolfenstein), and prizes totaling over
$100,000 dollars up for grabs, it is a gamers dream. Too bad that I forgot to
register earlier, or else I would have had the opportunity to test my skills
with some of  the best people in the world.

On a final and
very shocking note, John Carmack gave his keynote
address and confirmed that Doom III will be heading to the Xbox, but will
not be released until the PC version is completed. He said that one advantage of
the Xbox version over the PC version is that it will have hardware acceleration.

If you leave near Mesquite, Texas I suggest that you
drop by and see all what is happening, as you will not regret it.

August 15-18, 2002
Mesquite Convention Center
Mesquite, Texas