Rocket Arena was originally a mod created for Quake 1 by David ‘crt’ Wright. It saw a new and much-improved version after Quake 2 was released, and reached near-perfection with the version released for Quake 3 Arena. The final version released by David Wright was 1.76, and later development was carried on by Patrik ‘ElQueffo’ Persson. (A version for Quake 4 was begun by crt, but abandoned early in the development process.)

Rocket Arena was created to address some weaknesses of conventional, vanilla deathmatch. Rocket Arena’s objective was to level the playing field by giving reincarnated players full health, weapons, and armour right away. No further pickups were available, and (with default settings, which can be changed through the voting interface) no self-damage is inflicted through actions like rocket jumping, so each player’s condition decreases through the round based only on damage dealt by opponents, until they are fragged. Multi-arena maps are designed — surprise! — with multiple arenas, so 1 versus 1, 2 versus 2 or team games can be happening simultaneously in separate areas of the same map, and players can choose which area to fight in (going into a queue or playing right away depending on the number of players and slots), or just spectate various matches in progress.

Each Rocket Arena game consists of one or more rounds in an arena (one of, generally, 4 to 8 different arenas in a given multi-arena map). Each round begins by spawning players randomly throughout the arena. Once a player is fragged, he or she is removed from play, and allowed to spectate. When one team has no more players in the arena, the other team wins the round and the next round begins. The team (or individual, in the case of 1 vs 1 arenas) that wins the most rounds wins the game. Games are played continuously until map change (set at 30 minutes, by default).

Rocket Arena 3 includes more than 100 arenas in 20+ multi-arena maps.

You can read much, much more about it and how to get it running in stavrosthewonderchicken’s post on Full Glass Empty Clip, This Is A Post About Rocket Arena 3.

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