OpenArena - The OpenSource Quake III Arena

Guess where did I play Quake III Arena for the first time. Not place, I am talking about the platform/Operating System. Nope! its not windows, its Linux . Surprised, right? I was too when I found this brilliant opensource version of Quake III Arena aka OpenArena.

While looking for a good one man shooting game in the software center, I bumped into this one which says, "a fast-paced 3D first-person shooting game." I decided to give it a try. After downloading around 300 MB of the packages the game was finally installed and while runnning and shooting weird creatures(some almost nude lady warriors too ) I couldn't believe that even such a game could be totally free.

I was indeed dazzled by the brilliance of this game but since I had never played Quake III Arena before, I never realized that it was almost exactly like it. One day co-author Chia saw me playing it and asked where the hell did I get Quake from? Thats when I came to know I had accidently found something really cool.

After gathering a little info about, I found out that it is actually Quake III Arena. Its built upon ioquake3, based on id tech3, the Quake3 game engine which was opensourced by the company, id software, in Aug 2005.

Thats when OpenArena project was established to built an opensource FPS game derieved from Quake III Arena. ioquake3 is a project aimed to improve the opensource engine further.

If you have been a Quake III Arena fan and miss it on Linux then you should give openarena a try. The one thing that sucks is its incompatibility with the propreitary game. I haven't tried coupling the original with openarena but I guess that won't work. However, its being cross-platorm removes most of the hurdles for network gaming. You can find the listing for online openarena servers here.

Install OpenArena

It is available in repos of almost all common distros. You can easily install it using the package manager. Otherwise, try running these commands.

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install openarena     #for Ubuntu or Debian based systems

[root]# yum install openarena    #for Fedora or RedHat based systems