LAN parties were the best. Such great times. The convenience of online gaming is great, but nothing like the feeling of everyone bringing their setups together and staying up all night eating junk food and laughing and yelling at each other.

Unreal Tournament was not just a regular game, it got alot of generations into drum and bass, it was a culture. And they killed it over a soulless game.

On of the things I miss as much as arena shooters was touched on very briefly in this video. The simple phrase "join a server". Joining a server meant you got to know people, because we'd join the same few servers every day. From that, forums and communities grew and friendships were made. Some of my best friends today are people I met in 1998 playing Quake 2. Even as recently as 2016 TF2 still had this. These days it's all matchmaking, and we seldom see the same people more than once, let alone often enough to form a relationship. I've played Overwatch for nearly 8 years now, and I've made zero new friends from it, compared to the many I made from playing Quake 2/3, UT2004 and TF2.

My problem with modern shooters is too much "down time." With arena shooters, you have nice short respawn times so even if you're not doing well, you're still "in the action" for the majority of the time. Because of that, deaths aren't frustrating, they're just learning experiences.

Something I thought was important to bring up is that Splitgates popularity was seemingly influenced pretty hard by Halo infinite's hype cycle, and that at least my friend group played it as a temporary Halo 6.

I think something that really didnt help the genre was the dropping of single player. older arena shooters had single player modes/campaigns that, although basically just botmatches, allowed players to familiarise themselves with levels/modes/mechanics.

Man, I can remember playing Unreal Tournament back in high school. Our computer sciences teacher was a dedicated gamer, and he had a hidden file on his computer with UT in it. After school, a group of six or eight of us, including the ComSci teacher, would head to the computer lab and play UT, Quake, or 007 for a couple hours. UT was definitely my favorite, and I spent hours between 2001 and 2003 playing it with my friends at the school. That first year after I graduated, I'd still go back and play from time to time. I miss it

Unreal Tournament is what got me into game development. We would make skins on Paint Shop Pro, maps on Unrealed, the music was awesome, the multiplayer mode was awesome, the maps were out of this world... and all that on my Pentium II 300 Mhz with 64 mb of RAM and a 16 mb graphics card with 3dfx. Man, we had the time of our life.

Unreal Tournament 1999 will always hold a special place in my heart and will always be my favourite game. My sister and i grew up playing it, not necessarily together all the time, but a lot, nonetheless. We would watch dad play it a lot and I got into it from a young age, though at that age not very fond of the gore, I loved the game regardless and I still do. When UT4 came out years later, I introduced my partner to the game and we would play for hours, I taught him everything I knew about the game, from strafing, to shock rifle combos to capture the flag. We had so much fun, and we got our other friends to play with us. It was the closest we'd ever get to playing unreal tournament together. We play splitgate occasionally now, but the game is just dominated by bots and there aren't that many maps either. It is still fun to play with friends and the portal mechanic is really fun, yet can be hard to get used to. The music from Unreal Tournament has always been my comfort soundtrack. I owe a lot to that game.

The arena shooters were a lot more fun when you could go to a particular server that was operated by a particular clan or individual in the community. They would have a huge variety of maps and mods loaded that would always offer something new. Not the same tired map rotation over and over again that would be provided on one of the public servers. I remember playing Unreal4Ever mod with all sorts of wacky weapons (shrink rays, exploding nuke dolls for example) with a huge variety of maps and just having a LOT of fun.

I think the killer of the Arena Shooter is over saturation and expectation. It feels like there's so much available now that there's not much that keeps you to one game anymore. The last Arena Shooter I enjoyed (before it died) was Tribes Ascend. There was a skill to be learnt in playing the different weight classes and learning to skate around the map using your momentum to its peak was fantastic once you got into it.

About 15 years ago, I managed to convince the IT Technician to hide Quake 3 on the schools servers for year 10/11 students (my year), so we could play it on lunchbreaks, LAN games across a school was something to see.

I graduated HS in the early 2000's - my senior year I took a vocational Cisco networking class. The class was new so it wasn't really fleshed out too well and for a few weeks we didn't have the networking hardware to carry on with our lesson so we just turned the computer lab into a LAN and played Q3, UT and HL Op4 for weeks. I miss that class.

I think Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal show that arena shooters could have a chance. Multiplayer will still be incredibly difficult to pull off while maintaining that classic Arena shooter style, but Doom''s campaigns have astounding gameplay that I feel a game like Unreal Tournament could take notes from. I don't know what to do about multiplayer, but you could absolutely take Doom'16/Eternal's gameplay style and roll with it into Unreal Tournament to some degree while building a cool new story with all of the characters, lore and whatnot into it.

I didn’t grow up on arena shooters, and basically the first one i played was splitgate. It instantly hooked me, and no other game has come close to the pure fun of splitgates gameplay. I find myself experimenting and finding new insane stunts and killing methods all the time, and thats probably why i still play it semi regularly, largely depending on if ive got someone to play with

I'm hoping that when ID software eventually decides to make a proper Quake reboot they will revive the arena shooter genre in the right way. They are the only studio I believe that can do it.

I liked them because you could, just on a whim, load the game, connect to a deathmatch server with the lowest ping, and play a couple 10-15 minute games. Newer online FPS games seem much longer, slow-paced,/tactical, and depend on high team cohesion (which isn't really possible unless you coordinate your game time with your friends).

So much nostalgia here. Unfortunately my age has put me in a position where I really cannot compete like I used to. I miss it though. Such good times.

Awesome video. Made me very nostalgic for the old days of UT99, CS1.6, TFC, etc. Definitely spent a ton of time with movement on TFC with rocket jumps on soldier, tons of maps doing concussion grenade jump practice with scout and medic. So many awesome memories, thanks for the vid!

I really did love Lawbreakers it was the first game since UT that captured that true arena feel to it. Sad it didn't flourish.

Thank you for talking about this, it's a real tragedy. I grew up with Unreal Tournament. Recently re-downloaded UT2004 and have been having a blast!

I was at precisely the right age for Quake to become my first gaming love - the baseline upon which I compare all that followed. The hours I spent exploring that game's weird, surreal worlds feel like they are written into my soul, and the mods - oh my gosh, the mods - encouraged me to get into coding and mapping. When the demo for Unreal Tournament arrived in September 1999 I was right there in the download queue. The visuals, the frantic energy, the bright colours and the mindblowing soundtrack - aw hell. I didn't think it could get any better. To be honest, I still don't. When I think 'FPS' I think rocket launchers, fiends, shamblers, super nailguns and eldritch nightmare labyrinths; I think flak cannons, shock rifles and miniguns, spaceships and green slime. They were the worlds I escaped into when everything around me seemed insurmountable. They gave me space to think, and an excuse to stop thinking when that became too much. I found my adult self there, in those gloomy netherworld catacombs and grimy steel complexes, and when I emerged, it already felt like the genre's Golden Days were beginning to pass. It's strange - I just can't muster the same love for anything that followed. There is something about that era - the raw, simplistic, often highly abstract or surrealist environments that broadly communicate what they are trying to represent but which have a particular utilitarian and dreamlike sparseness to them - that gives it a low-distraction flow perfect for intense multiplayer. Even just with the addition of Static Meshes and 'busier' maps in the UT sequels, it felt like something pure and raw had been lost in the visual noise. Counter-Strike, while not an arena shooter, retained a measure of that raw, barebones low-distraction environmental simplicity; it was already starting to feel like a throwback by the time it had reached its first 'full' version, and that was oddly comforting. It also had immense longevity. Meanwhile, the next generation of arena shooters grew and iterated with new game modes and ever greater graphical fidelity, but their long-term staying power always seemed to be somehow lacking. Too busy; too easy to get lost in the noise. I can go back and play UT for days; I get bored of most new arena shooters within hours.

I think the level of entry and skill-ceiling in an arena shooter is very high. It makes it hard for newcomers. The only people who are playing the genre these days are highly skilled veterans. I have seen it firsthand when new players try to play but have no chance to learn. I was new at one point but when I entered the genre, I was fortunate to have many others in my same position. I then learned from what high-skilled players did that was correct, added it to my own skills, and grew from there. New players get smashed and then run out of the server if they perform too badly. It sucks.

I certainly miss the days of the LAN and my obsession with level design at the time. Things were much simpler back in the days of compiling your .bsp . I hope someday we can see a comeback of the deathmatch, instagib and CTF style arena shooters. Hell, the years I spent working on my strafe jumps in Quake 3 on the trick jumping maps, good times...

A large skill gap is an issue for arena shooters too. I tried getting into Reflex, but the lobbies were often reduced to 1v1s and I would get my ass handed to me every time. Often difficult to find players of similar skill to grow with, while being destroyed constantly just drives people away. This paired with lack of meaningful feature innovation probably killed off the genre.

I was introduced to arena shooters in 2016 coming from CSGO and I really fell in love with it. It felt like the highest display of skill in a video game, and dueling felt like a chess game, where brains would always be the most important aspect. However, learning how to play arena shooters (movement, mechanics, learning how to duel) was the most difficult part to achieve and understand, and I think it's why it fell off in the modern era. Spending time just to focus and learn how to even stand a chance in a duel is a process not many would want to go through when there are a lot easier games to get into now. Learning arena shooters took me a hundred hours of just getting destroyed to learn anything lol

I loved one arena shooter as a child, and it was Unreal Tournament. At that age the dark and doom-y corridors of Quake spooked me, so I enjoyed the brighter colors and lighter hallways of Unreal Tournament. I played pretty much every mainline PC game up until Unreal Tournament 3. Nowadays, I still revisit the old UT games, but for online play, Quake Champions. I made it full circle :)

I'm 36, I played the arena shooter at it's peak. It was amazing. Today, every time I get on something that fast pace, I become shat on with a quickness. I simply don't have the speed and dexterity. No matter how good you think you are, there's a 14 in Singapore that will beat you every time. Despite loving these games in my youth, today I get destroyed my 7 year olds. For me SBMM would have to be strong for me to ever get back into this genre.

I'm so happy I was able to experience this part of gaming at its peak. Unreal Tournament 99, 2003, 2004, Quake 3 Arena etc - It was a special time and there were so many custom maps and mods. We even had Parkour maps in Unreal Tournament 99 called bunny trax. It was such a cool time in gaming. And that isn't to say games today aren't entertaining, they most certainly are.

I'd argue that the FPS genre gave way to *simpler* concepts, not bigger ones. Slow movement, hitscan weapons - these things are not complicated. Anyone can cotton on to the core mechanics pretty quickly. But Unreal Tournament 2004, for example - you have high jumping, double jumping, dodging, dodge jumping, wall dodging, rocket jumping, lift jumping, jumppads, jump boots... About a dozen weapons that can be carried simultaneously, all with alt-fire modes... Several powerup types distributed around each map... Numerous gametypes, some with vehicles... Dozens of hugely different maps loaded with sci-fi concepts... What results is a much more complex core dynamic in which you have a lot more to learn, and utilise a lot more skill to master. Combat isn't a split-second react-first-to-win, it's a joust in which you dodge each other's projectiles or strafe around each other's hitscan until you've whittled the other player down to 0. So what hurts these games' popularity is that they have a much higher entry bar. They represent a higher point in a gamer's evolution that most don't put the time or grey matter in to get to - many UT players don't even realise you can dodge, which is the core gameplay mechanic. So what's really needed is to take these concepts into singleplayer, where players can learn these concepts in an easier environment tailored to helping them learn. Doom 2016 and Eternal did this excellently, and consequently have become some of the most iconic games of recent years. Unreal Tournament's biggest mistake was dropping the singleplayer-focused Unreal games that they were based on. Introduced the core of the game in singleplayer, then build a multiplayer focused game based on that, and you have a fully schooled playerbase ready to go.

I miss Command and Conquer: Renegade multiplayer, one of the most chaotic and fun games I still ever played. Map control similar to Battlefield conquest with Arena style fighting in pockets around a large map with vehicles and attacking enemies bases to win the game. Was great honestly for a RTS in first person format.

I agree with the sentiment of skill ceiling issues. The last thing as a dev that you want is to make your new players feel alienated like they need to study a master's degree in your game before they can even remotely stand a chance in the game. Back in the 90s due to the fact that getting games was more difficult it meant that people wanted to squeeze as much enjoyment out of a game as possible and had time to learn. But in our modern Era like... if I'm not having fun in one game literally nothing is stopping me from opening another game. Hence why some more high skill ceiling games like Titanfall 2 is now almost dead with a small player base. Nothing stopped those players from just playing a different game if they didn't want to spend hours learning grapple hook tech on each map just to have a chance at having an even match. Some of course do. But not everyone. It's why even fighting games are losing popularity. An inability to draw in new audiences without the hard-core fan base who took that master's degree getting upset at them losing their advantage.

I feel like arena shooters will come back when the time is right. Like myself, there's OGs out there who miss the good ole days of arena shooters. All it takes is one company to innovate on the concept. With the amount of creative minds out there, I'm sure they'll make a comeback because the BRs just don't do it for me. I maintain some of the best memories I've ever had when Unreal Tournament was just a game mode in the original Unreal.

Not quite an arena shooter, but tribes ascend was such a great game, loved the crazy speeds

I'm watching this video and you're basically talking about my teens going into adulthood. Feeling old when something's I used to do is talked about in a historical fashion.

Remember kids: because of Fortnite we lost Unreal Tournament 4

My sister was the one that got me into shooters, I was a JRPG guy before then. We played so much Unreal Tournament back in the day, it's not even funny. And when UT 03/04 came out, we just couldn't get into it as much as we did back then, and we both had moved on to other things. I went into the military shooters CoD and Battlefield like Level did, as well as horror. She went into the more things like Hitman/Manhunt or sandbox style like GTA and Mafia. But we did have a lot of fun.

I was addicted to Split gate when it came out. The only issue after a couple months was at that point people were getting so good that I couldn't keep up. I didn't have the time being in my upper 30s with kids to commit myself to trying to stay competitive. If I was younger I would've probably stayed into a lot more competitive gaming. I still do competitive gaming but not super serious, it's more just about playing with my friends online than to get a win.

you know, i`m not an old fan that played Quake and Unreal Tournament back in the day but when i discovered the Arena FPS, i fell in love with it, i love the fast paced movement of Arena FPS games and i play old Unreal Tournament and Splitgate, but seeing this fall of the genre gives me an absolute heartbreak because it is a genre that deserves more atention

I was introduced to FPP shooters genre with Heretic and Duke Nukem 3D but my first online arena shooter experience was Unreal Tournament - from day one as it was introduced in late 1999. All I needed to enter the world of death-dealing and flag-stealing was a Pentium II 233 with a Voodoo Graphics card and a 33.6K modem. It was wild! And guess what, the very same demo I used to play in 1999, installed from literally the same gaming magazine CD I got it from back then, still worked online up until January of 2023!

As someone who lived through the birth and development of the arena shooter genre, I loved every damn second of it but I've come to realise that the era of the Arena Shooter is only nostalgically special to us as it was pioneered during "our" time, we should accept it and be grateful to have experienced it without trying to re-create it. The classic arena shooter served its purpose and despite still being popular in small dose indy recreations, its existence succeeded most at the time of release and then later in building pathways into other now-evolved shooting genres. In this day and age, the classic arena shooter will never be as big as it was, the peak of this genre is not meant to be recreated, it's meant to be remembered ♥

Back in the day, the maps, abilities, and weapons worked harmoniously. Now, it feels like they don't keep each other in mind while being designed

I grew up with Arena Shooters and CS 1.6 / Source. I also played other genres regularly but FPS was my best field also because of my insane reaction and my love for precision. I also think that the time is simply over for very simplistic games like these, but naturally there will always be gamers that come back to them. The raw skill, the fast, rythmic, trance like gaming sessions are just something different and offer an uncomplicated experience. In 2013 Nadeo launched Shootmania, a clean e-sportsy Arenashooter with looots of different (custom) modes. I was tryharding Trackmania for a while back then, and I was there right at the beginning of SM. I was completely hooked and after some months I was part of the creme de la creme in 2 of the game modes. Unfortunately it was already a gamble to bring out a new arena shooter at that time, and combined with a few bad decisions by the developers it died very, very fast. After focussing more on RTS games in the last years, I come back to SM every now and then for casual fun with the last remaining nerds ^^.

These were the games my friends older siblings would play when I was over at their house playing Pokemon or Mario. I've gotten really enamored with them in the last few years, and even though I'm not very good at them there's something really mesmerizing about the endless fragging and crazy strafe jumping, the edgy futuristic arenas and weapons and the hypnotic late 90s rock and electronica. A large part of it is probably nostalgia, but to me it's like a pure distillation of everything that action games are about, and playing a round of deathmatch in QL, UT99 or Xonotic is an adrenaline rush like no other.

I grew up slightly ahead of the arena shooter days, starting from UT2004. Probably still an all time favorite for me given it was my first fps on my first computer (not counting having played quake/doom/wolfenstein on my dads computer as a child). I got really hooked into the scene of competitive quake starting around the end of quake 4 going into quakelive which carried on to be my #1 fav game that I played for nearly 10 straight years. I immediately recognized the instagib ctf map I’d play all the time in unreal tournament from your video pic and knew exactly what this was going to be about. Thanks for stepping some of us older folks back down memory lane. I still attend quakecon every year with my wife!

Lawbreakers is to this day one of the most fun shooters I have ever played. The movement mechanics were perfect and the weapon and character variety made it so fun to replay. It's criminal that it didn't survive the way it ought to have

Great video !

Was a early adopter of high speed internet back in the day. That, coupled with sli'ed Voodoo II's made for a great online experience in Quake 2, Unreal Tournament etc. I still remember having trouble cooling the sli setups. For a while I took the side cover off my case and had a house fan blowing on it lol. Eventually I figured out I needed more case fans

Thanks for the spotlight. I grew up with UT and UT2004 then moved onto Halo and nothing has ever really come close to the enjoyment I got out of arena shooters and LAN parties. I was hoping they might make a comeback but might be wishful thinking at this stage

I absolutely love movement shooters, titanfall and quake are some of my favourites, I'm still waiting for a decent game like those. Something that has lots of depth in its mechanics, a lot to learn overall that can keep me hooked for hours on end. I adored splitgate, it was a great challenge and offered that depth but everything is just dumbing down movement mechanics which simply makes them less enjoyable. Battlefield and cod being the biggest offenders.

Loving the finals, it takes a lot from arena shooters like jump pads, an emphasis on movement and twitch gameplay, high risk weapons,/@@ combined with great destruction. Reminds me a lot of my time playing unreal tournament but has a lot of unique charm due to its game modes and of course nearly every surface being destructible.

Q3A 1vs1 was really a unique thing. Graphics turned all the way down and zero textures for maximum frame rate, customised FOV... I loved it so much.

I'm 22 so I didn't really play arena shooters back in their prime, but I have always enjoyed them, any fast paced movement shooter really. It's a shame that they don't do well nowadays, as they are by far the most fun imo. A fun Quake style arena shooter is Diabotical, very clean and polished, lots of fun.

A friend of mine is still running a dedicated server for UT04. At LAN parties, which we still have occasionally, we always make a note to jump into UT04. I remember playing UT 1999 a TON when I was in middle school and high school. I would love a comeback but the reality is, we can still find games if we wanted to. We can message some friends an join a game anytime, a lot of us still do.

I just want a modern TimeSplitters/Perfect Dark, split screen, bots, online, this is all.

Being 40 years old, I have very fond memories of LAN parties. Every other Friday with 10 or so friends, and here and there the really big ones with hundreds. I was never good at the arena shooter, but boy, did I have fun with them. I've tried playing them recently, but I just can't get into them anymore. Rekindling this flame is very difficult...

Pretty much my favorite genre... So many of the games I grew up with. A bit sad they aren't as popular anymore.

It's a shame that LAN multiplayer is almost dead, used to be awesome bringing your rig and hanging out with a bunch of mates and having < 1 ms pings and just fragging for hours in dozens of different games. I used to play UT2004 for a while back in the day and UT3 as well as quake 2 and 3 and Counterstrike. Last year I played the heck out of splitgate for quite a while but haven't been much of a gamer since I have kids and I generally don't have time for games much, and when I do I am usually playing single player or something I can easily walk away from or pause

Unreal Gold INF mod was my jam. It was definitely a slower arena shooter but it had nice strafing and jumping abilities that werent "too wild". It emphasized accuracy and grenade/mine placement more than rush-ins.

Which game and maps are that at 7:29? They look great!

I started playing shooters in 1996 and my first MP shooter matches were around that time. To me it is mostly not about the game modes but about the movement and time to kill. So many games today feel slower and have very short TTKs while back in the day, with high speed and longer TTKs it felt like every kill was truly earned.

When Quake was released as a playable demo it completely changed gaming. It captivated me beyond any game I had seen previously. Then came Quake 2, Half Life, the mods like CTF and Rocket Arena. Set up LAN parties that became an annual event for a number of years until high speed internet became more common. Unreal Tournament playable demo with 3 maps and set to Instagib was by far the most played game on a few of those LAN parties.

Quake 3 area was my first experience with online multiplayer gaming and it really was mind-blowing

Golden era for these arena shooters meant a hundred people playing at any one time... They have not lost popularity as far as I can tell...

Thanks for making me feel old af. I think you pretty well nailed it. Arena shooters became stepping stone for more complex game design. As a more casual gamer today, ex hardcore gamer I think the speed and competition make it hard for people like me to enjoy.

to be fair halo infinites multiplayer got super stale because it launched less than half finished with less than a handful of maps and modes - people dropped it an never bothered to pick it back up. It also has major matchmaking issues for anyone not in the US (can't join games or d-sync) or anyone who's on either extremes of ranking (Unable to find games). It's currently in a downwards spiral where new playas can't join and old playas are getting board which drops the payer count and makes both issues worse.

Someone in the comment section already said but I'll say it again; it was the lack of single player. I use single player has a way to test myself/ have fun with the mechanics; a lack of being able to sit down and learn the mechanics does hurt a game.

I've had Unreal Tournament 3 installed on my computer almost continuously since it was released in 2007. It visually holds up really well and the gameplay is as tight and satisfying as ever. Any time I make a major parts upgrade I play UT3 first as a sort of basic stability test I don't mind the vehicles much

oh gosh, thanks LVLCAP for bringing back the needed attention to the best genre ever!

Longtime oldschool FPS enjoyer here; Quake is one of my favorite games ever made. I wasn't huge on the multiplayer side until much later, as I didn't have consistent internet access until maybe 2005, but I played more than the average bear. Played at dozens of large LANs, all of which in the last decade. Won some tournaments here and there (the PC I'm typing this on is housed in a case I won :D). I think there's several reasons why none of the revivals work, and frankly I agree that it will never be as big again. The main one is the skill required/the skill gap between players/the skill ceiling. You cannot deny that playing Quake 3 at a high level (ie: CPM or something) requires a ridiculously high amount of skill. A level of skill that is often honed through lots of practice and dedication, due to the high ceiling. On the other hand, you have people who just wanna pop on a video game after work and unwind for a bit; shoot some people, maybe play some objectives, nothing serious. When you can have such a huge degree of variance in skill between players, it can often turn into an absolute roflstomp, which isn't fun for anyone, especially the loser. I have friends like this, who didn't grow up playing these games, and trying to get them to play any AFPS with me is like pulling teeth, and I don't blame them. They never, ever win, which isn't fun. Because of a lack of more casual gamemodes, and the emphasis on skill, people leave. Then you have this vicious cycle of people getting matched with those way more skilled than them, then quitting, which only further shrinks the playerbase and increases the chances for this to happen. It's kind of a shame, because when you get a deathmatch game going between people of all roughly the same skill, it's so insanely fun and chaotic. Especially at a LAN party; speaking from experience. Another one is just that it's not really on kids' radar. There's an entire generation of young adults out there now who weren't even a glimmer in their parent's eye when the AFPS was big. I suspect a large, large portion of these people don't even know what Quake or UT is, and what it offers. They just play whatever their favorite streamer does, or whatever's popular (Fortnite I guess?) Third, and you said this already, they are pretty simplistic games when not considering competition and/or the meta. We've made way, way, way more intricate multiplayer games since then with a bajllion times more modes of play, lots of depth, progression, customization, etc. Sure, you can do some of this with mods and mutators and stuff, but lots of games have that baked-in. Finally, the market is just way, way more crowded now. When Quake came out, it was basically THE game to play. There was literally nothing else even remotely like it. Now, we have Call of Doody games that are basically all the same every year. People will play that for a while, then move onto the next thing. Which, of course, feeds into problem #1; they don't get the practice required to whittle down that skill gap that made them quit in the first place. long comment, I know, but hey, you asked what my trilobite ass thinks lol

Even today we meet on regular UT99 once a week. I played mostly UT2004 but I love every Unreal game. Sad what happenednow, yet comforting that community managed to avoid master server shutdown with own master server.

Great historical retrospective ! I was an Unreal Tournament player !!!

I actually miss our LAN parties. We never had breakers being jumped, we prepped for that. We would have like 20 of us. We would meet in the morning , 7- 9 am , and start gathering and unpacking and setting up. Those that got done first would go get food/cook food( 10 am 12 pm), both would take place, we were heavily multi cultured, we had - literally- the world covered in dishes. We would take a break , eat , smoke, drink, etc. for about an hour to 2 hours, so we would start about 2pm at whatever games we were in too. We would play , most of us, for 2 days straight ( taking naps and sleeping of course , all going out to dinner/breakfast too ) We were a LAN community really. We all had nicknames for various reasons, form in game stuff to real life interactions, etc. And we all shared those moments. OUr most played arena shooter was of course Quake and Quake 2 . We loved the modded rooms. We would play for hours- Mountain Dew and Doritos meme was created by this generation of LAN partyers, for we *lived* that lol! We needed those extra calories to go for hours, until the next "break" we would all take. It was a special time. And like Croven said the arena shooter was developed in *OUR* time. And it is to be remembered, not recreated. Artifacts are amazing, but because they are from a different time and era. Arena Shooters are now - artifacts- as they still live on in spirit in other FPS games.

Great video and very relatable. I'm a Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Unreal and later Quake 3 and UT99, UT2003 and UT2004 kid. Played some Counter-Strike (also at school lol) and later CoD in 2003, but I was totally hooked on Wolfenstein Enemy Territory. Still the best shooter imo. I shifted more towards CoD in 2005 when CoD2 came out and got hooked on CoD4. Haven't played CoD3 at that time, because I was more of a PC Gamer back then. UT3 was indeed a very nice game, but had no players really fast. I also played the latest UT from Epic, Lawbreakers, Quake Champions, Toxikk, Splitgate and I liked all those games, but they had no player base or couldn't keep my interest that long. Last year I was more into Halo Infinite and lately I'm Valorant and continuous MW2. If Lawbreakers would come back, I would definitely play it. I would really like to see Treyarch or Infinity Ward give it a go with a game in the Halo Univserse. Maybe like hundreds of years after Master Chief or something like that.

UT99, that map with the subs where you had to swim to the bases, so good

Lack of bot support is what killed the genre, Quake 3, ut99/2004/3 all had great fun bots that meant that anyone could learn and enjoy the game in thier own safe way before jumping into multiplayer where the skill gap can be insurmountably huge. A robust singleplayer experience is important for these kind of games.

I think the arena shooter style is just one of many styles that came, grew, informed their genres and gaming as a whole, and then died out as the later generations of games stood on their shoulders. Multiplayer games have never been more compelling to more people than right now, and without arena shooters they wouldn't have gotten to where they are now.

One nail in the coffin of Arena shooters was the rise of online console gaming, due to the slower response time with controller inputs compared to mouse-and-keyboard. This is also contributed to the rise of slower-paced cover-based shooters.

Im old enough to know TF was originally a Quake mod, and playing on a 14.4 modem. As well .. I remember a huge LAN party with the release of STEAM (steam also being just a launch pad for HL mods) and HL2 with 50+ people at our clan leaders house. (ARS CLAN) It was the REAL glory days! Great vid!

Thx for the trip down memory lane.

I feel like the old Direct X9 graphics of UT2004 have a crisp simplicity to them that's lost to modern flashy graphics, and also has locked in solid movement and gun play mechanics on fun and interesting maps. Miss those days.

Facing Worlds in UT with low grav playing CTF was so amazing. So many great memories, but I can remember how frustrating it was when someone would “beep” in and knock me off the internet lol.

Had a small LAN party with my dad and family friend when I was younger and that was fun. But my intro to gaming was Unreal 2004 and I've always had a sweetspot for arena shooters since.

I got into arena shooters pretty late. I was 6 was Quake III and UT came out and wasn’t a PC gamer at the time and my parent wouldn’t let play violent video games (though that didn’t stop me from playing Duke Nukem 64 and Turok with my older cousin lol). By the time they thought I was old enough to play M rated games, Call of Duty 4 had just come out. I loved the COD titles but I also loved playing Duke and Turok way back when. When I played DOOM (1993) when DOOM 3: BFG Edition came in 2012, I was hooked. Soon I rediscovered my love for older shooters and now I love arena FPSs

My first fps was unreal tournament on a LAN my junior year in highschool. A+ computer repair was my favorite class. Seeing the gameplay brings back memories for sure

I'm actually surprised that the arena shooter hasn't made as big an impact in its comeback the way that fast-paced run-n-guns like the new Doom games have. Perhaps Multiplayer games are still dominated by certain genres/mechanics, while Singleplayer games seem to have much more variety? I am excited however that the RTS genre seems to be having a gradual comeback, which was a king genre alongside FPSs in the 90s and early 00s.

i started pc gaming in 2002. medal of honor allied assault and counter strike were the first two fps i really played. i was familiar with unreal tournament, but the way the characters moved really took the immersion out of it. when im sneaking around in a more grounded game its easier for me to feel like im inhabiting my avatar

I do remember playing the old Unreal Tournament games (back in the mid 2010s era) as I found them through the old Unreal 2 game. Whilst I never played co-op; I tend to play more casually and giving the generation that grew up with these type of games will most likely be working full time, the genre is more a casual player base where people may only have a few hours to chill to play them. Compared to some who are more dedicated to playing these games, it rather kills the enjoyment of playing them for fun and causally in a co-op game as sometimes you feel shunned to one side. The paywalls feels like more the heart and soul of most of these types of games never helps either. It turns people away from these games as it seems you have to heavily rely on loot boxes to get the better equipment to even compete in a "casual" game.

I still play splitgate daily. The game isn’t being updated as much anymore but I still thoroughly enjoy it. The smaller playerbase is nice because you meet the same people a lot and you often know who you are fighting, however it would be nice to have the old massive playerbase back.

Takes me back. I still recall getting a demo disc from a gaming magazine that had UT04 on it. played the hell out of it until a year later when I had my first job and got it. Hell, I recall the original steam with the tan background.

got into arena shooters with Half Life, back in 1998. It was before the age of internet so we were playing at the cybercafé right outside of school. Then we also played some Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament. I remember that what started killing arena shooters was the arrival of CS in 1999. In the early 2000s when Wolfenstein : Enemy Territory and Battlefield dropped, we would barely touch Quake 3, we still played a bit of half life but we would ultimately go back to CS or BF or Wolfenstein ET. As a millenial from 1987 I often feel like I m from the luckiest generation in terms of gaming. I got to experience the early days of eSport games, LAN parties, and the early days of the DSL. Best memories ever. Most of my best friends today are ppl I've bonded with at the cybercafé 20-25 years ago. The fact that CS is still top3 esport games 24 years later, shows how much it was a killer for the arena shooters back in the day. Funny considering it was a mod of Half Life developed by only 2 dudes who were recruted by Valve only years later.

Every single gun had two forms. Right click left click. The fast movement and acrobatics movement, teleportation, long jump in the space. Damn we want these games back!!!!!!!!!

I remember being 13 back in 1998 when my mom said she'd get the hardware to let me game on the PC. The PC was a new 400mhz Pentium 3, which wasnt bad back then. I stuck a VooDoo3 3000 gfx card in it. I remember getting the 3000 instead of the 2000 because the 3000's box advertised "3D gameplay at 60fps" lol. I went home with that card and Unreal that day - best birthday ever, because it was the only point in time when my family could afford to get me anything like it. The arena shooters looked ad played like a dream on that rig. I found myself playing more GTA and GTA2 than anything though back then, introducing me to making mods.

Ahhh yes... Quake III Arena. I was 5 or 6 when i played it the first time. I ran around empty padman levels. It was fun.

it baffles me since the whole mindset on gaming has shifted towards the more elitist, skillbased, esport gamebrain yet the games where all of this shines the brightest out of any game gets abandoned, sad really

Wolfenstien 3d and doom were my first fps ❤’s but arenas never grabbed me. Battlefield 1942’s huge online battles were what grabbed me after that. Always sad to see a genre die though as I’m sure a lot of people enjoyed them and have fond memories of them.

I think omitting 343's and Microsoft's failures in developing and delivering halo games after bungie equates to not giving the games a fair shake in this video. Myself and many people I know want halo infinite to succeed but month after month there continues to be no meaningful development, just backtracking on promises in favor of greedy monetization or core features of previous titles being delivered incomplete and delayed far behind expectations

You touched on a lot of what I would have said as an explanation for why that particular style of FPS fell by the wayside. I've been playing FPS games on PC since Wolfenstein 3D came out, so I was fortunate to be right in the thick of it in terms of the rise and fall of the arena shooter. I have vivid memories of playing and watching others play Quake, Unreal Tournament, and Counterstrike (obviously not an arena shooter, but I'll get to that) throughout the latter half of my childhood. DOOM multiplayer was probably the progenitor for this style of FPS, although by the time I was a bit more aware of what was going on it had been supplanted by the aformentioned titles. If I had to offer a summary of what happened, it's that gaming changed A LOT from 1995-2005 both technologically as well as with the kind of games that were being made. Arena shooters were more or less a product of their time and what was possible with those earlier FPS engines, but players were looking for more as things started progressing and allowing for more intricate and (possibly arguably) fulfilling styles of gameplay. Half-Life and its various mods probably represent the flash point from which the next evolution in FPS games began. In terms of multiplayer, Counterstrike really redefined what was possible for the genre, even more so than base Half-Life; and here we are almost 25 years later, where the game has seen a number of rereleases and still has one of the most active communities in gaming. Arena shooters were a lot of fun, but I don't think they'll have a resurgence in any meaningful capacity. Outside of the non-Warzone COD games of the world and the odd TDM mode in any given game, simply running around and fragging people isn't really that satisfying for most people these days when they have so many other options for games that offer more substantial experiences. It's like giving a young person these days an Atari 2600, Commodore 64, or something from the pre-NES/Genesis era; they likely wouldn't "get it" because they didn't grow up with those games and in general they haven't held up by modern standards particularly well. They might play with them for a bit, but I expect they'd be looking for something else to do before long at all. And I can't really blame them for that, lol. Why play Combat or Archon (one of my favorites on the C64, for the record) when they can play the latest Mario or Zelda game? Bit of a tangent, but hopefully it made sense 😅

i cut my teeth as they say on Unreal Tournament (1st one). man that was a steep learning curve. i actually have some content on the game of the year edition as i did some work on a few mods for it. the fact the devs game so much extra content and were always active in the community was a huge bonus. modding allowed us to play all kinds of games. amazing times.

I miss the simplicity of the old arena shooters, where everyone was on a level field, gameplay-wise. Go in, grab whatever tool of destruction you fancy, and proceed to mow down the opposition. Now you have big catalogs of different characters, each with their own set of abilities, focus, gameplay mechanics, etc.