Not everyone knows that Dallas is one of the hub cities that shaped modern video gaming. Pong started in a tavern in the heart of Silicon Valley; Pac-Man was put together by a team of programmers in another country; but here in Dallas, we gave gaming something it didn't even know it needed at the time: blood, beasts and balls.
Outfits like id Software brought some good, old fashioned digital violence to video games just as the industry reached adulthood, with the classic games Doom, Wolfenstein-3D and Quake. These bloody shooters not only gave the industry a harder, deeper edge than it thought it could go but it also ushered in a new wave of multiplayer interaction and competition that inspired QuakeCon, one of the longest running video game conventions in the industry.
Another QuakeCon is upon us and this one is promising to deliver something that fans has been clamoring for for a long time: Doom 4. The long awaited sequel to the scary good first person shooter series made a brief appearance in the form of a teaser trailer at E3 but the organizers of QuakeCon are promising to deliver the first, exclusive sneak peak of the game during the con's annual welcome on Thursday, July 17 at the Hilton Anatole Hotel.
The rest of the convention running through the following Friday and Saturday will be full of competitive tournaments in games such as Battlecry and Quake, panels and keynote speeches about game development and demos of upcoming games such as Bethesda Softworks' new survival horror title The Evil Within. We would say that it's gonna be a bloodbath but that might be understating it a tad. Check out the full weekend schedule at quakecon.org.
