At about the same time that Quake III came out, it was directly competing with another game with roughly the same premise: Unreal Tournament. It came from the Unreal series of games that I never did play, but instead of focusing on some kind of single-player story, this installment was all about the multi-player deathmatch.
In fact, this game is a lot like Quake III. The main differences are that the characters look less ‘chunky’, the selection of weapons is different, and the physics are a little different. Superfans of each game might tell you that there’s more differences than that between them, and they’d be right, but the other differences aren’t really anything you’ll probably care about unless you’re one of those superfans, so they’re really not worth mentioning here.
What I found that was kind of weird was that the people in my area that liked First-Person-Shooter type games would divide themselves into two camps, the UT crowd and the Q3 crowd. I’d go to one LAN party (Pr0ject-X) and Quake III would be the game everyone would be playing, then I’d go to another (AsylumLAN), and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who wasn’t playing Unreal Tournament. Well, either that or Counter-Strike, which was kind of popular no matter where I went.
But I never really saw the point of being a rabid fan of either game. I liked them both. They were each different enough that I could enjoy each of them in their own way. Which was actually pretty nice since one or the other seemed to rule the roost at the various LAN party events that I would go to.
And even though I played a fair bit of both games, my aim never really appreciably improved. I don’t really know why, but I suspect that, while I played each game for several dozen hours each, had I played each one for several hundred hours, I would have noticed some improvement. But I just didn’t have it in me to invest an amount of time that would qualify as a full-time job to get better at some game, when I had piles of other games sitting around waiting for me to play them.