20 years of ioquake3

On August 25th, 2005 the initial commits were made using svn to icculus.org for the earliest version of ioquake3 based on the Quake 3 source code id software generously released for free to the public under the terms of the GPL version 2 license. As of today, August 9th 2025, the project has reached over 3,600 commits.

On August 25th, 2025, please join me live to celebrate 20 years of ioquake3 on Twitch and play on our game server then and any time by typing /connect xaero.ioquake3.org in the ioquake3 console. People will be on the server all day on the 25th. Get started setting up ioquake3 now with the Player’s Guide. Ask questions on our Discourse and I hope to frag you on the 25th.

There have been countless different kinds of contributions to ioquake3 and over the years we’ve achieved many of the early goals that seemed impossible. As I write this Tim Angus is putting the finishing touches on a developer-focused goal that’s been internally wishlisted since at least 2014. ioquake3 is an incredible cross-platform achievement that wouldn’t have happened without the work of so many individual contributors.

Thank you for contributing to, hosting, supporting, sponsoring, developing your own mods and games, and playing ioquake3.

Big thanks go to Tim Angus, Timothee Besset, James Canete, Zack Middleton, Ludwig Nussel, Thilo Schulz, Tony J. White, the folks at id software who worked on the original engine, and everyone who has been a contributor to ioquake3.

Thank you to Discourse for sponsoring ioquake3 with hosting for our Discourse! If you want to host a community, you should choose Discourse. They’re open-source just like ioquake3 and even before we were sponsored we switched to Discourse way back in 2013. Discourse is just that good!

Thank you to Digital Ocean for sponsoring ioquake3 with hosting for our website and other functions. Sign up for Digital Ocean now and you’ll help support ioquake3. Digital Ocean has been hosting and sponsoring ioquake3 for 5 years, they’re great!

Thank you as always to Ryan C. Gordon for being the biggest inspiration for ioquake3, hosting the project for years at icculus.org and still hosting many of the services that the project depends on, and dropping in large commits that come out of nowhere to surprise us.

Get involved with ioquake3 here!