Before Quake3 was released there were public test versions. And before that there was a leaked IHV version.

I acquired and played all of them.

I remember spending a lot of time trying to get bots working with one of these releases.

It may have been the q3test v1.05.

We had to run a program that modified the game, then we could use commands in-game to spawn bots. The fun was figuring out what all the bot commands did.

The bots were no good, but we had a lot of fun with it all.

I remember chatting in the shuga shack forums about all of this at the time. The specific threads may not have been archived sadly.

Let’s dig in.

I found q3tbots.zip that contains q3tbots.txt and q3tbots.exe:

-rw-rw-r--  0 0      0        2564 31 May  1999 q3tbots.txt
-rw-rw-r--  0 0      0       32768 31 May  1999 q3tbots.exe

Here’s the header of the readme:

05/31/1999
================================================================
Title                   : Q3Test Bots Galore
Filename                : q3tbots.exe
Author                  : YoGrE
Email Address           : yogre@hotmail.com
Description             : Enables Bots in Quake 3 Test
================================================================

...

That’s right…

YoGrE figured it out and we were all chatting on the shuga shack messageboard.

It says it was for the Q3Test and is dated May 31 1999.

I suspect that this was the Q3Test v1.05.

It seems that this patch was replaced by an easier method:

Thanks to YoGrE, we don't need this exe patching thing anymore.
Just rename your demoq3 folder to baseq3 and put this named
productid.txt <http://quake.at.frob.org/files/misc/productid.txt>
into baseq3 .

– Unofficial Quake 3 Arena Test FAQ, alt.games.quake3, 4 Sept 1999.

I also found this:

Bots are back!

Bots dont work on 106/7/8

so you need to get 105 from the Q3TESTfiles page first

Then get the q3bots 1.1 here..

q3bots1.1

– http://www.moneychair.demon.co.uk/quake3/qbots.htm (archived)

I found a working link for v1.1.

Here’s the content:

-rw-rw-r--  0 0      0        3305  1 Jun  1999 q3tbots.txt
-rw-rw-r--  0 0      0       32768  1 Jun  1999 q3tbots.exe
-rw-rw-r--  0 0      0         248  8 Jun  1999 Readme.txt.txt

It seems Readme.txt.txt was added by whoever hosted the file.

Here’s the truncated file header and changelog:

05/31/1999
================================================================
Title                   : Q3Test Bots Galore
Filename                : q3tbots.exe
Version                 : 1.1
Author                  : YoGrE
Email Address           : yogre@hotmail.com
Description             : Enables Bots in Quake 3 Test
================================================================

...

* History *

Version 1.1
- bots.cfg now loads correctly. Bots still use only MG as far as I can tell. Maybe
  someone can mess with the bots.cfg parameters a bit. As far as I can tell, these
  are the possible params a bot can have:

        model
        reactions
        aim
        move
        aggression
        intelligence
        hfov
        vfov
        healthMethod
        armorMethod
        ammoMethod
        weapons
        snd

  Let me know if you figure something (other than the obvious) out so I add it to the
  txt file.

- The "nav gen" doesn't need to be repeated if you already installed the old version
  and did it once.

- New version can be used against patched dll. File is backed up as extension b11
  (instead of bak) to avoid loss of original file.

For future reference, here are some historical locations for q3tbots.zip (some were archived):

Here are some historical locations for q3tbots-1.11.zip (some were archived):

Some discussion here:

Interestingly, an alternate version (ripped off?) was shared here:

Here’s the readme header:

29/Aug/99
================================================================
Title                   : Q3Test Bots from quakemania
Filename                : q3tbots.exe
Version                 : 1
Author                  : Locutus[x]
Email Address           : quake_mania@hotmail.com
Description             : Enables Bots in Quake 3 Test
Web site                : Http://www.quakemania.freeserve.co.uk/
================================================================

...

Finally, I created a Geocities site to document all my findings for how to get bots working and how to configure them correctly, and shared the link on Usenet:

What do you think?, 4 Nov 1999

Check out my webpage, what do you think?
Do I need to change/add/remove anything?
BTW there is a lot of info on q3bots!
http://geocities.com/q3bots/
-ChoppeR-

– alt.games.quake3

Sadly, it was not archived.

Update: See here for an archived version of my old site.

Update: See here for a list of all q3test versions. The above mod was for Q3Test v1.05.