Quake II was the highly anticipated sequel to id Software's revolutionary Quake. As with the first game, a technology demo was released prior to the commercial release, on October 19, 1997, at an unannounced online IRC party. The demo contained the first set of levels from the single-player game, and contained no multiplayer support.Quake II's game engine was once again far ahead of anything else commercially available, and the full version of the game was released to the public on December 9, 1997.While a sequel in name, Quake II's story had little to do with the first game in the series. You play a space marine very much alone on the Strogg's home planet after a massive troop drop goes horribly wrong. You'll battle through Stroggos until you finally meet the leader of this relentless race, the Makron face to...face? Another Quake means that the FPS online scene got another boost with more raw Deathmatch action as well as the now offically supported CTF mode.
Quake2 has mastered. (Dec01,1997) Where we go from here:Point release. We should have a Quake 2 point release out shortly after the game gets in your hands. We intend to fix any bugs that turn up, improve the speed some what, and optimize for internet play in various ways. We will also be making several deathmatch only maps.Deathmatch in Q2 has gotten a lot of lan testing (Thresh, Redwood, and Vik Long helped quite a bit the last week with tuning), but not much in-ternet testing. There are probably gaping holes in it, but we will address them soon.The deathmatch code in the shipping Q2 is also not designed to hold up against malicious users - there is no protection against clients being ob-noxious and constantly changing skins, chat flooding, client-side cheat-ing, or whatever....BIG BUG IN Q2 NETWORKING! (Dec09,1997) If you run multiplayer servers, download:ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/q2_306.zip...The Quake 2 public code release is up at (Dec11,1997) ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/source/q2source_12_11.zip This source code distribution is only for hard-core people that are going to spend a lot of time pouring over it. This is NOT a how-to-make-levels-for-q2 type dsitribution!This should keep a bunch of you busy for a while.
I went looking @ PQ's news archives at the time:*Q2's EU release day was 12/12/07*Q2's US/Canada was 12/09/07 (I was at EB games that day, btw. )*Denmark was selling it in 12/7/07*Q2 copies available at the release party on 12/05/07link: http://planetquake.gamespy.com/show_archives.php?month=12&day=7&year=1997So, 12/9/07 was official, Google is wrong, Wikipedia is wrong, IGN is wrong.PQ was right.
Yeah, 97 not 07. Oopes.Where do you get US release on the 6th? December 6th, 1997 was a Saturday, games are normally released in Tuesdays, movies Thursdays in North America.
releases weren't as big a deal back then. It could very well of been sent to stores, but it didn't come out until the following Tuesday. If it were then PQ would of said people were getting it three or four days ahead of time. The first patch was released on release day, but since it's '97 I'm betting 95% of the buyers didn't even know as internet wasn't that prevalent and bbs's wouldn't of had it yet.