After two decades, first-person shooters were beginning to mature, both in design and technology. Rapid breakthroughs had been made in textures, lighting, sound, compression, rendering and more.

But the real battleground would become the internet, and having led the way once, id Software happily took the reins again in 1999.

Being the chatty fellow that he is, John Carmack, one of the founders and lead programmers of id, gave regular insights into the development of Quake 3. In one interview, he decided to "risk his neck" to explain the merits of developing on Windows NT.

"[NT] offered quality 3D acceleration on intergraph hardware, a stable platform, a good user environment, apps for basics like mail and document editing as well as high-end media creation tools, and a good development environment," Carmack said in a Q&A with Slashdot. "I made that decision over three years ago, and I think it has proven to be the correct one."

"NT is definitely going to be the primary development platform for our next project, but I will be evaluating alternatives for a possible transition after that. The contenders will be linux and MacOS X. None of the other Unix workstations would be competitive for our purposes, and I don't think BeOS will offer anything compelling enough (they can always prove me wrong)."

In another interview, Carmack talked about how the team tried balancing the weapons to prevent duels from being too one-sided. "A lot of people in Quake liked the kind of "blow out" matches where you get control of the level, and it's not even a matter of fair fights, it's just a matter of maintaining your dominance, and you get scores of 50 to 1. Some people really enjoy that, but I don't think that in general that is a fun game for most people. We have tried to build in changes that prevent that from happening."

The real value in Quake 3, however, was the strength of the engine. Raven Software, who used id's engines for the original Heretic and Hexen games, built several games on id Tech 3, including: Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force; Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix; Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, the follow-up to that, Jedi Academy, and the original Call of Duty.

Carmack's insights can be fascinating; it's one of the reasons why people are happy for him to deliver the keynote presentations at Quakecon each year. Most of the time, he doesn't even sit, too engrossed in all the little details and turmoil involved in creating a AAA title.

It also helps that he's brutally honest. In the opening of his keynote last year, Carmack openly apologised for the poor state of Rage on the PC. He then gives, as only a "archetypical graphics geek" can, an exhaustingly thorough overview of the current state of gaming from a technical aspect - for three and a half hours. If you have the time, it's incredibly enlightening.

iD, however, weren't the only competitors in the field.

After betting the bank and saving the studio with the success of the original Unreal, Epic turned its attention towards what Cliff Bleszinski (who recently left the company after two decades) described as "an add-on pack".

"It was called the bot pack initially, named after Steve Polge's Reaper bots," Bleszinski said in a video detailing the history of Unreal Tournament.

The Reaper bots were a fan-made addition to the original Quake; they weren't something programmed by iD themselves. Their level of sophistication and intelligence was so impressive, however, that Epic offered Polge a job.

"After I released the Reaper bot for quake, Epic offered me a job working on Unreal. After we shipped the first Unreal game, we realized we wanted to go farther into multiplayer," Polge said in an interview on Epic's website.

http://epicgames.com/community/2012/12/the-longevity-of-unreal-tournament-part-one/ "The bot AI I was developing gave us the opportunity to make a multiplayer-focused game that could also be enjoyed stand alone, which was important at that time when not everyone had good internet connections or experience with multiplayer gaming."

Tim Sweeney, the co-founder of Epic, revealed to Gamasutra that one of the strengths of Unreal Tournament was the organic process behind the game's design. "With Unreal One, I was in Canada, it was freezing cold, and I was walking along, and there was a heavy haze everywhere," he recalled.

"There were these streetlights with big globes of fog illuminated around them. I was saying, "Hey! I could program that!" So, we had diametric fog as one of the big features of the Unreal One engine."

Alex Walker is the regular gaming columnist for ABC Tech + Games. You can follow him on Twitter at @thedippaeffect.