It was late in the summer of 1996. For gamers, especially first person shooter players, it was a both a happy and frustrating time. The original Quake shareware release from id software had been available for several weeks via download and people who had ordered the full game directly from id were beginning to receive their copies in the mailboxes. Yet all was not completely well for gamers when they played either the shareware or the full version in multiplay deathmatch mode on the Internet. Complaints came from all corners, as modem users on a dial-up connection said the game was unplayable on the net. High latency, excessive packet loss, and other problems kept the vast majority of net players from getting the best gameplay experience in multiplay Quake.

The complaints had not gone unheeded by id, especially the company's lead programmer John Carmack. In his .plan file on Aug. 2, 1996, Carmack announced his new project to improve Internet play for Quake, a project that would eventually set the standards for net play gaming and opened the door to a whole new audience for first person shooters. The name of the project was equally ambitious in its terminology: QuakeWorld.

In his original .plan file announcement of QuakeWorld, Carmack admitted that when he developed the original net code for Quake he didn't have the best understanding of latencies for modem users on the net (Due to his schedule involving the completion of id's latest game Quake 3: Arena, Carmack declined to be interviewed for this article). "While I can remember and justify all of my decisions about networking from DOOM through Quake, the bottom line is that I was working with the wrong basic assumptions for doing a good internet game," Carmack wrote. "Unfortunately, 99% of the world gets on with a slip or ppp connection over a modem, often through a crappy overcrowded ISP. This gives 300+ ms latencies, minimum. Client. User's modem. ISP's modem. Server. ISP's modem. User's modem. Client. God, that sucks. Ok, I made a bad call. I have a T1 to my house, so I just wasn't familiar with PPP life."

So Carmack wrote that he went back and scraped the entire net code and started again from scratch for QuakeWorld, which was developed strictly for Internet play. Carmack wrote that he would improve latency for modem users on the net for and also implement client side prediction in the QuakeWorld net code. "I am now allowing the client to guess at the results of the users movement until the authoritative response from the server comes through. This is a biiiig architectural change," Carmack wrote.

The result: a game that, in theory, would allow a player, even with a 200 ms ping, to play competitively with a player with a 50 ms. ping in Quake DM on the Internet. The QuakeWorld system was divided into a client package for the players and a separate server package for the machines that would be running the actual games. Another change in the net code for QuakeWorld was the use of a master server, located at id's offices in Mesquite, Texas. The idea was that whenever a QuakeWorld server started, its presence would be registered by the master server and logged. With the help of fellow id software programers John Cash and Christian Antkow, Carmack began to develop the code for QuakeWorld.

He also decided to use a third party program as the QuakeWorld client: QuakeSpy. The server browser program was already becoming the de facto method of finding Quake servers on the net. So why did Carmack chose this as the QuakeWorld front end? According to Jack "morbid" Mathews, one of the original developers of QSpy, (which has now morphed into Gamespy 3D) the reason was simple. "Because John thought it was cool," QuakeWorld was not just about better net play, however. Carmack wanted to also support the developing clan community that played Quake in teams, so he placed custom skin support for players into QuakeWorld. The new QuakeWorld code, however, took a bit longer to implement than first planned.

The first version of QuakeWorld was supposed to have been released on Sept. 19, 1996, to coincide with a QuakeWorld launch party in New York City. Although QuakeWorld itself was not released that day, the big party in Manhattan became legendary in the history of Quake as the first major gathering of players and id employees in a single location to play Quake (but that, as they say, is a story for another day). After months of private beta testing, the first version of the QuakeWorld server was released on Dec. 13. with the client package following a few days later on Dec. 17. The response was, for the most part, postitve from players and server operators.

"My first reaction was, "Wow." I was just amazed at how well the prediction worked.," said Richard "^Drag0n^" Brewer, one of the beta testers for QuakeWorld, maintainer of the web site QuakeWorld Central, and writer of the online documentation for the end users of QuakeWorld. "You could actually move around intuitively, without having to accommodate for the latency between you and the server," Brewer adds. One move in particular made both Brewer and Carmack take notice of what players could do in QuakeWorld: rocket jumping.

"One time that I remember being particularly impressed was when I was able to successfully use a rocketjump alias I wrote on the client, which was just something you couldn't really do in Normal Quake over the net," Brewer said, " John said something like "That move is going to be particularly effective.' Looks like he was right. If memory serves there's a whole webpage dedicated to the art of rocketjumping."