Good, Clean Quake

Behind the door of suite 666 in the black-glass Towne East Tower in Mesquite, Texas, Miss Donna is treating me to a real drubbing. In reality, she's sitting at the next computer, every inch the quintessential Texas mother, all big hair and rouge. Onscreen, I never see her until it's too late. "I'm a-coming to get you!" whoops the fortysomething office manager and designated mom-in-residence to id software's 13 staff members, as her footsteps grow louder. A burst of green plasma fire frags me, and I have to respawn. To frag is to kill, which Miss Donna does a lot of; to spawn is to be reborn, which I do a lot of. On the one occasion I manage to frag her, she taunts, "Oh, so your gun actually works, then?"

What Miss Donna and I are, er, testing is Quake III Arena--the hottest, most anticipated PC game of the year, if not of all time. It's set to hit store shelves Dec. 12, and TIME got the first peek at the finished product. id, the guys who brought you the highly successful and controversial first-person shooter games Doom and Quake, have been working on this sequel ever since they wrapped up Quake II in 1997, and it shows.

The game has effectively transformed into a sport, with 30 lovingly crafted arenas and 32 crafty computer opponents, a.k.a. bots. Previous id games always had some narrative device, but Quake III abandons all pretense of a plot. It's nothing but networked death matches, played by individuals or teams, against the computer or over the Internet. It's wise to practice on the bots firt and avoid the humiliation I suffered against veterans like Miss Donna.

The matches are held in some of the most meticulously rendered backdrops ever presented on a computer screen. I found it hard to play without gawking. The lighting! The mist! The way bullets whiz through water! It feels like you're reliving the first half-hour of Saving Private Ryan--except, surprisingly, it's not as gory.

As fans of boxing discovered a century ago, games become more socially acceptable when they're confined to arenas and given rules. And the new, paintball-like feel may even improve Quake's reputation in the eyes of teachers, parents and legislators in the post-Columbine era. "We are sort of a poster child for violence in video games," says John Carmack, id's founder and owner, "but when people sit down and have a good time in Quake III, it's hard for them to think this is a bad thing."

At the request of its publisher, Activision, id has included a bloodless game option that turns off offensive splatter. The interface is simple enough for anyone to learn in five minutes and play for five minutes at a time, and it doesn't take a Ph.D. in rocketry to get your head round such scenarios as Capture the Flag. "People will view it as a casual thing," Carmack told me, "a pastime."

Not that the id gang sees it that way. There's little time for pastimes at a company where you live most of your life in the office--20 hours a day, seven days a week on average during the late stages of Quake III's development, when almost the entire team spent nights sleeping on couches or the floor. The offices are pretty well lived-in, judging from the scattered remnants of takeout dinners and the small home gym.