This is a copy of the first Phantom Interactive press release about
Quake Forever.  It's just the raw text from the copy on the web site.

On June 6, Andrew Walbert had a vision: "Make Quake more realistic..."
Now, July 5, his vision is nearly realized.  On June 15, he created
Phantom Interactive as a group organization to expand upon the Quake engine
and help him see his vision through to completion.  After developing
a solid weapons code base, he began to look towards monsters and additional
features. Among those already developed are Capture the Flag, Bots
(computer-controlled players), and a special movie camera.

In the following month, his plans go even farther and begin to get
complicated as he pushes the engine to its very limits.  "The idea is
to take what Quake has to offer right now, and make it as realistic as is
possible." Walbert said to a group of prospective Quake Forever modelers.
 After monsters, Phantom Interactive as a whole will develop "real
multiplayer".  Codenamed "Hiroshima", the new multiplayer system will
involve "roles, tactics, leadership, and pain thresholds...".  It is
intended that you won't just be doing cooperative play anymore; you'll be
one of several people in a squad of marines fighting to take back
Earth.

After the new storyline was written and the level format choosen,
Walbert suggested making cooperative play more closely connected to the entire
story.  Now if you have 8 or more people playing, you can assign someone
to be the Seargent, and then that person chooses who will be in the other
roles, such as scout. It's very similar to Team Fortress in the roles or
character classes, but it is more developed than that. Cooperative play isn't
very popular, but this is an attempt to revitalize it.

Cooperative play isn't the only thing affected by Hiroshima.
Teamplay also gets changed a bit.  Now, if you take a hit, you'll
drip blood and won't be able to go as fast if you got hit in the legs.
You'll be able to call for backup or other things and have it playback
a sound clip of that thing being said.  For example; you see someone
on the enemy team get the Quad Damage, rocket launcher, and a bunch of rockets...
You'd normally type to your teamates that an enemy had "quad, roc laun, lots
rocs".  Now, just press a predefined key, and it will send the message
to your teamates, "Enemy has quad, launcher, and rockets" and at the same
time, it would play back a prerecorded message "WARNING!  Enemy
has Quad Damage, Rocket Launcher, and multiple Rockets".  This is just
one example, however.  "This may sound crazy, but we're thinking of
adding up to 30 prerecorded messages.  Maybe more if we develop co-op
play further..."

File size will determine if we add that many messages.  We'd
like to keep Quake Forever's zipped file size down to under 10 megs, but
that's not a guarantee at this point.  Since co-op will be so intricate
to the mod, many additional things will be added that are hard to explain.
For example: Pain Thresholds.  If you take a certain number of
hits, you'll eventually collapse.  No matter what health level you get
back to, you'll collapse from pain eventually if you take to many hits.  A
direct shotgun blast will take out a limb, and that can't be replaced.  If
you lose a leg, you're just about dead.  You'll be able to crawl, but
you'll lose blood quickly and eventually blackout.  You can only be
revived if you can get to a hospital in the city you're in and a teamate
can take the time to get you a mechanical limb hooked up.  Hiroshima
is going to make multiplayer more realistic. Also, there are some other things
about the pain thresholds that can't really be explained without taking up
several paragraphs.  If you've ever studied the human mind or been in
real combat, you might know enough to understand what we're trying to do
here.

Deathmatch?  We haven't forgotten deathmatch, but that will be
talked about at a later time.  For now, this information is here for
you to digest.
