I doubt this will be read by many people anyways but who cares
Anyhow, J3FF here, and unfortunately, by now I am closer to 42 than to 41, meaning my reflexes ain't as good as they used to be 25 years ago
However, even back then I was more of a Unreal Tournament guy rather than Quake (because of shitty intarwebz) as UT simply ran better over a 56k modem and ISDN. I used to be a decent player in UT99 & UT2004 and went to tons of LANs in northern Germany during the early 2000s but deep inside I always loved Quake 3 just as much. I got my first PC in April of 1999 and whilst in the beginning it was all about HL:DM, later on that summer I got my hands on the various q3test versions that id Software had released up until they shipped the game towards the holiday season. And needless to say we played the heck out of those test versions, though not online but in my basement every weekend when the boys came over with their PCs for a tiny LAN sessions. So then by the time 1999 came to an end and UT as well as Q3 were out, it was clear that I would have more fun with UT online, so that's were I stayed.
On and off I took breaks from the arena shooter genre and switched over to sim-racing, also spend about a decade in southern Spain working & chilling in the sun. And for roughly 5-and-a-half years I've been back up north here now spending my time with all sort of games. Over the last 2 decades or so I've often played a bit of Q3/QL online but I never really found my inner passion with what the online world had to offer - strangely though I do admit.
So only very recently when I was bored and had a deeper dive and reading session into all the available Quake3 engine executables I found my way here and read about UnFreeZe. As I said, I was never a Q3 semi-pro by any means but I've been enjoying the unfreeze servers quite a lot recently. Obviously, there is still the same amount of rubbish being writen in chat as was to be expected and experienced 25 years ago but that just makes it feel like home, I guess.
And ever since those early days I have this little shrine in my living room (which luckily also survived the time I was abroad)
You do not wanna know how many girls looked at me weirdly asking what the heck that was...
