It's unknown if anyone lasted the full 96 hours, though there were certainly a few freakish characters who were keen to try. Numbers in the BYOC are estimated to have topped 2, at peak, the full logistical and hygienic considerations of which are impossible to calculate. Needless to say, the fact that the event coincided with the New York blackout did not escape the attention of worried-looking hotel staff.
However, as a proud affirmation of geek culture, QuakeCon is unrivalled. Where else could one wear a T-shirt bearing the slogan Will Frag For Sex' and still hold one's head high? Respect is key, and it's not just earned on the virtual battlefield.
Case-modding is de rigueur, and if you don't have a neon light shining out the side of yours then you might as well go home. Extra points are given for doing away with the case altogether, to be replaced with a common industrial or laboratory item, ideally combined with a T-shirt that shows your commitment to the cause.
Anything pre-millennium and you're a goddamned Jedi. But the real reason we were there was not to enjoy the delights of a 2,strong man-fest, but to play Doom 3 and collar the boys from id. We managed both, even sneaking in a few hours playing Call Of Duty genius.
The fruits of our labour can be found on the following pages, so saddle up, strap on some chaps and bathe in the 'adrenalinpumping atmosphere' of the hottest event on the Texan social calendar. There's No doubting that in terms of pre-release hyperbole, Doom III is currently the biggest game in development, something which has made id Software worried about overexposure.
So, to ensure the world wasn't swamped with Doom III material, id released a handful of screenshots with the official word that no more were going to be available until after the New Year. Ironically, a few days later an early version of the code was leaked onto the Internet and downloaded by just about everyone with a fast enough connection. The illegal alpha contained three levels and is the same demo that was shown off at May's E3.
You can wander around Doom's trademark pipe-infested corridors, play with a few of the weapons, shoot a few of the monsters that are scattered around and witness some of the physics and scripting that should lift Doom III above being just another shadowy corridor shooter, but of course it was designed specifically to show off key graphical features rather than be indicative of gameplay itself.
As id's John Carmack himself now famously stated: "Making any judgements from a snapshot intended for a non-interactive demo is ill-advised. Spooky, claustrophobic, spiked with scripted shock mechanisms, and generally looking - not to mention moving - better than pretty much anything that's gone before.
Bring it on. Gently Now, don't rupture anything, but let out that breath you've been holding for the last three years: Doom 3 is here and it's magnificently, hellishly great. Before I start up on how and why it's going to blow you away though, we need to spin back three weeks to when I was playing through the original incarnation of Doom in preparation for this review. At that time, a quizzical young work-expenence lad was sitting to my left with a look of undisguised derision on his face.
What do you mean it doesn't look scary? You weren't there! You weren't with us at the start! Didn't you just see those lights going out and those Those Imps! Get out of my sight! But how could he ever know? That ball of adrenalin that used to plunge into your diaphragm every time you opened a door, the spawn-twitch' that would kick in every time a light flickered, the suspicion that arose with every casually strewn key or weapon - it may look ropey by today's standards, but while Wolfenstein laid the foundations for first-person gaming.
Doom created the blueprint for everything that would follow in its giant cyber-demonic footprints. I was so riled by this kid's innocent id-bashing that I didn't stop shaking and muttering until about three days ago - because three days ago I started to play Doom 3.
And I discovered that parts of it are going to eat his ignorant little soul. Fact: Doom 3 is the most polished game ever to be released on the PC. It's so well fabricated that you simply cannot see the seams. But despite the incredible graphical technology, sound effects that will thrill and amaze you, scripting that will chill your spine and the most beautifully animated monsters ever seen, this is a marvel that resolutely looks back to the past of PC gaming.
Doom 3 is id looking back to its roots and saying: What would we have made back then if we had access to the technology, skills and unlimited piles of cash we have now?
So there's no stealth, no leaning round corners, no sniping and no inventory; no RPG elements, no pretend-clever enemy Al, no complicated, open-ended objectives, no alternate firing modes, no drivable vehicles and no mock realism.
Of course, there's story, characters, events and environments that have all the hallmarks of a great contemporary shooter. However, in terms of basic gameplay, the only extra keys added since Quake II are for getting out your torch and frantically jabbing at the sprint button. This is back to basics stuff, but they're basics that still work well.
So then, plot. The UAC is a nasty global corporation that wields so much power that the boundaries of morality no longer act as a barrier to its machinations, with a wipe-clean sheen of rules, regulations, no-smoking areas and safety procedures to protect its image.
Its Mars base is an isolated outpost where the UAC's most brilliant - and most notorious - scientist Doctor Betruga can research whatever he pleases: be it teleportation, strange emanations coming from the depths of the facility or an intriguing mixture of both.
You are a raw marine employed by the UAC, and your first 15 minutes on the base sees you wandering around Freeman-style, gawking at the stunningly presented and realistically grimy military outpost, before being sent off on the trail of a missing scientist. Unfortunately, Betruga has been dabbling in things he shouldn't, and once the game's roaming preamble comes to a close, guess what: all hell breaks loose. And yes - in the grand tradition of Doom reviews through the ages - we do mean literally.
Lost Souls dive in and out of computer screens, your radio becomes jammed with cries of pain and shouts for help, the outpost becomes shrouded in darkness and the civilians and soldiers of the Mars base become mindless automatons who live only to serve the will of hell. Oh, and to eat your brain. Doom 3's action starts as it means to go on - it's brutal, intensely scary and plays with all manner of lighting effects and sound trickery to shock you into a sense of total insecunty.
These opening chapters are as tense as they are technologically dazzling. They set you up as some sort of sci-fi John McLean, with your gruff sergeant barking in your ear while zombies lurch out of the shadows as you get to grips with the amazing interface. When I say that Doom 3 is polished, I don't just mean the lush visuals, id's massive clout means that its come under none of the publisher pressure that usually forces developers to throw barely-working code into the wilderness with a promise that it'll patch the invisible shotgun bug in a month or two.
Five years of tweaking have paid off: Doom 3 not only plays flawlessly, but the way the interface system binds it all together is an absolute triumph. Bear witness to the way in which walking up to a computer console sees your gun lowered and leaves you free to click around the screen in the way that you'd use a real computer.
It's a simple, yet devastatingly effective advance on the normal tap E to turn off nuclear reactor approach. Meanwhile, your PDA Personal Digital Assistant does the job of your normal Tab-located objective screen, but also downloads all the data available on the PDAs of the base's dead and undead.
So, where you once picked up keys, you now download security access passes, as well as viewing UAC infommercials and browsing through personal emails. This may sound strange in a no-holds-barred shooter like Doom, but these emails add a lot of back-story to the locations you're battling in and contain a convenient amount of highly useful codes that help you open lockers of ammunition.
There's also some hit-and-miss laughs to be had lurking in the personal notes of the deceased, and you might even spot a thinly veiled reference to The Office when one Brent Davis gets an email from Finchy concerning an upcoming quiz night. More seriously though, the cleverness of Carmack's code enables you to listen to victims' private Star Trek-style audio logs, and instead of forcing you to stare at a menu screen while you do this , keeps them running in the background while you explore the local vicinity and riddle Satan's minions with bullets.
Doom 3 also holds the record for making me jump out of my seat the most: five jumps, as opposed to Far Cry's three and Thief: Deadly Shadow's two.
This included one absolutely text-book is it dead? It's fair to say, however, that this scary ambience ebbs and flows, perhaps because continued exposure to hell numbs you somewhat.
Personally, I reckon this is a game where you have to give to receive; and whenever I found that I was just going through the motions of running and shooting, I made a policy of saving my game and giving myself a cool-off period.
If you're not in the right frame of mind to play Doom 3, you won't get the best of it - it's a game that must be played alone, in the dark, with the sound turned up and with your full attention.
Then again, even the more cynically minded will at some point come across a corridor that, well, just bodes badly. The background noise subtly changes, the lighting looks slightly different and the walls seem more penned in. It's at these points that Doom 3 hits its peaks, aided and abetted by the worrying fact that you can't hold your torch and gun at the same time - and delivering a demon a quick blow to the head from a plastic light source won't have the same effect as a shotgun blast to the face.
In terms of baddies, let's just say the gang's all here: Imps, ArchViles, Revenants, Lost Souls - it's like we never left! Or rather: it's like we left, watched technology progress for 11 years, came back and then scooped our jaw from the ground before it got eaten by a huge, slavering pinky demon whose animation is the most amazing thing I've ever seen in a PC game.
Call me a fanboy, but seeing Doom's flat poo-brown Imp turned into a wall-crawling, chasm-leaping, fireball hurling 3D works of art is a dream come true. Lost Souls meanwhile, previously the most rubbish monsters in Doom, have become open-mouthed heads of fire that hurtle towards you screaming at frightening speeds.
And as for the new boys - well, the weird spiderhead things are cool - but when you see the Cherubs in action Jesus Christ! Halfmoth, half-baby: all good. Then you've got your bosses, which I won't ruin for you, but suffice to say that by the time you've gone to hell and back, your competition has grown to some quite colossal sizes.
My only complaint here is perhaps that some of the children of hell are a tad too easy to kill on the default difficulty setting, specifically a few of the bosses and the pinky demon.
However, when you're also trying to fend off five headspiders who're trying to bite off your kneecaps, it's not something you worry about.
My main issue about the game however, is the old chestnut of variety. Doom 3 took me around 17 hours to complete - although you could stretch it to Within this, id operates a well-paced dripfeed of monsters and weapons - just as your attention is about to flag, it throws in something new and amazing for you to kill.
This could be a rocket-toting Revenant perhaps or a terrifying Spider Queen; or it could also draft in a collection of badness from earlier in the game that's even more fun to kill with your recently-acquired heavy-duty armaments. This all works well, but the locations you fight in can get pretty samey - it's fascinating to watch the outpost slowly becoming more infected by the tendrils of hell, but the environments you fight in often blur into one another.
Reactors, laboratories, teleportation centres, engineering levels, communication turrets: they all sound different, but I did get lost a few times. Whereas in a game like Far Cry you can boot up a level and instantly know where you are, Doom 3 has so many areas comprised simply of Generic Sci-Fi Corridor and Ducts: model A' that you can grow tired of them. I'd also question how much replay value there is, because Doom 3 couldn't be much more linear or reliant on clever scripting if it tried.
Every now and then you're given a decision to make that shifts the goalposts of the story for a half-hour or so, but any indication of player power on the game is shallow and illusory. As for Al, well, as I've explained, clever-clever hunting and demonic teamwork isn't really what Doom 3 is aiming for.
So, despite delivering thrilling firefights, one bout of violence pans out much like another, and a few villains namely gun-toting zombies aren't half as much fun to fight as you might have hoped. These moans are what make Doom 3, for me, lag just slightly behind Far Cry, a game that offers consistently exhilarating experiences and provides for more variety of gameplay styles.
That said, Doom 3 remains a ground-breaking and amazing piece of work. It's a game that recognises just how many amazing technologies it's running beneath its bonnet, yet refuses to jam any of them in the spotlight. Instead, it meshes them together into an amazingly cohesive whole that reels you in further than you ever thought possible. Occasionally, you just stop the mayhem and stare at the distorted body of a bloody zombie refracted through a bent pane of glass, or listen to the baleful screams of a tortured soul reverberating around the complex.
Sometimes, you just stand open-mouthed over a glistening tentacle while you listen to it oozing through a metal grate: I guarantee you'll have trouble believing that a machine that you own is capable of something so astounding. And when you get to hell itself, here's a tip - look up and watch the swirling skies, then tell me that Doom 3 isn't something special. To be honest, some people may not get' Doom 3 as I did -an awareness of the heritage of PC gaming and an element of fanboyism helps in its appreciation.
The Xbox crowd, for example, may be confused by Imps hiding in unrealistic hidden compartments right next to conveniently placed racks of ammunition, while the cultural significance of the inclusion of the chainsaw may bypass more recent converts to the halls of PC gaming. If you've bought this magazine though, it's a fair bet that you, like me, are going to love it.
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