Quake 3 Arena being shown at MacWorld in March of 1999.

I remember finding this footage on a CD-ROM packaged with a PC games magazine, probably in the summer of that year. To me this low-quality, mute video is a perfect relic of its time and culture. Rather than detracting from the experience, the blurriness and graininess leave room for interpretation, keeping the possibility space rich and open somehow. Gamers could take what little information they had and project their imagination into it, in their mind constructing fragments of games much grander and deeper than anything that would ever actually be released.

Quake 3 looks much darker and redder here than it would actually turn out to be - more like a smooth, crimson-toned version of the original Quake than anything else. The version being demo’d would later leak out to the public and become known as the IHV Leak.