Before Quake3 was released, there were a number of Q3Test releases.
It was an exciting time in 1999 from about May to about December before the final demo and retail release.
Q3Test releases were made for win32, linux and mac. I was mainly a win32 and linux user at the time and getting GLX/OpenGL working on linux at that time was hard work.
Anyway, during this time many mods and hacks were developed for the Q3Test.
Id Software was not happy, and worked hard to remove them from the net.
Nevertheless, underground communities persisted.
I played along and mainly focused on the bots, e.g. see Q3Test Bots.
Anyway all of this niselega has pushed me to develop a Q3Test Addon Archive that collects all of the maps, mods, cracks, tools, etc. developed during this time.
Here’s the prokecT:
As I said, most of the content, specifically maps, were wiped from the net as soon as they popped up. Therefore, they were not archived by the wayback machine.
Getting files from this time is very hard.
I am having better luck finding what existed though, so the archive is basically long lists of known files.
Maybe some troves and middens will surface the files in the future. Not sure anyone will care :)
Fun fun.