Once your key bindings, character name, skin, and other settings are set to your liking, you're given the option to partake in a training session while the game continues its rather laborious installation. Quake III veterans will find themselves face-to-face with crash, the original game's first opponent. The opening tutorial, in which Crash introduces you to mysterious items such as weapons, health, ammo and armor, will be quite dull for anyone who has ever so much as touched an FPS. But what else are you going to do while the installation finishes? Run around, frag Crash, and wallow in your shallowness as your marvel at how sexy Quake Live looks.

Yes. Well, the current Quake project is Quake Live, and we're actually doing that internally as well. But that's multiplayer-focused, obviously. In terms of what happens next with Quake, a lot of that will depend on how the reception for Quake Live goes and whether that team continues to invest in building that out. That would be what we're hoping for, and then [we'll] figure out where we go down the road with that.

The Quake Live team is smaller. We're still not fully fleshed out [with] three teams that can work on three projects simultaneously. Even then, then you've got Doom, Quake, Wolf, Rage -- it's like there's still an odd franchise out. Plus Enemy Territory, which would lend itself with working with an external party.

"Imagine if somebody gave you a copy of the original Q3A," suggests id Software co-founder John Carmack, "and asked you to come play with them online. You'd have to install it, download the latest patch, figure out what mods people are playing, figure out how to find the servers - that whole long rigmarole that the game conventionally requires. The whole point of Quake Live is to bypass all of that."

How will mods work with Quake Live?

JC:The answer is that, in the classic mod sense of being able to hack whatever you want, they don't. We've incorporated a lot of the things that have been popular in mods, we're working with mod teams on there, but it is essentially a controlled system. We're in no way shutting down the original Q3A scene, so anybody who wants to build things with the open-source code is still more than free to do so. That may even become a proving ground for moving things into Quake Live.