The Mac games world drifts ever deeper into the Twilight Zone. It used to be that one of the universal constants was the unflagging Mac hatred of id software's head honcho John Carmack. (Carmack, for those of you who don't follow such things, is the closest thing there is to a celebrity in the games development milieu; he's the one who brought the world Doom and Quake.) Just as light happily never exceeds the speed of 186,282 miles per second, Carmack swore blindly that Quake 3: Arena (the next iteration in the popular kill-your-friends series, which, this time, is multi-player only) would never be ported to the Mac OS, whose admittedly sketchy memory management scheme he considered beneath contempt. In the past several months, however, Strange Things™ have been happening; the iMac revitalized the Macintosh as a viable consumer platform, Apple made games development a big priority, and the weirdness culminated at Macworld Expo in San Francisco last January when Apple announced that it had licensed the popular OpenGL set of 3D APIs from Silicon Graphics-- and trotted out OpenGL poster boy John Carmack to announce the planned simultaneous release of Quake 3: Arena for Windows and Macintosh. (Carmack has stated that he likes OpenGL more than he dislikes the Mac OS.) And then the bottom dropped out of the universe as Carmack gave the world the first public glimpse of Q3A gameplay-- and it was running on a Mac.

As if that weren't bizarre enough, so far it seems that the promise of a Q3A simultaneous release is holding true. Q3Test, the first public release of the game's infrastructure meant to test the multiplayer network code under actual "battle" conditions, has been anxiously awaited for the last few months, and for a while the complete and utter lack of the mention of a Mac version had some people worried. Not long ago, though, id confirmed that there would be a Mac version of Q3Test released, and the world rejoiced. What we didn't expect was to see Mac Q3Test released before the Windows version. It's true; the Mac version surfaced on Sunday, while the Windows version is still nowhere to be seen. There's a test of the server for Win32, but no client. Spooky enough for you?

We don't know what kind of alien mind-controlling parasite Steve Jobs managed to implant at the base of Carmack's skull, but we're happy as clams that the little bugger is doing its job so darn well. Q3Test is here, it's real, and it's sitting on our hard drive unplayed. Frankly, the unprecedented time-sucking factor of Q3Test is already legendary, and we already need a 36-hour day just to get all the "productive" stuff done, so we're more than a little wary of getting hooked on a new obsession right now. But maybe we'll just fire it up for a quick little peek tonight. Uh huh. At which point we strongly suspect that Carmack's own species of mind-controlling alien will probably be taking over our lives.