Development Originally, Quake II was supposed to be an entirely new game and IP; titles like "Strogg", "Lock and Load", and even just "Load" were toyed with in the early days of development. But after numerous failed attempts, the team at id decided to stick with 'Quake II' and forgo the Gothic Lovecraftian horror theme from the original in favor of a more sci-fi aesthetic. The game was developed with 13 person team. Activision obtained the worldwide distribution rights to the game in May 1997. Artist and co-owner Adrian Carmack had said that Quake II is his favorite game in the series because "it was different and a cohesive project". This is also the last id Software game to feature American McGee before he was fired shortly after its release. Unlike Quake, where hardware-accelerated graphics controllers were supported only with later patches, Quake II came with OpenGL support out of the box. Later downloads from id Software added support for AMD's 3DNow! instruction set for improved performance on their K6-2 processors, and Rendition released a native renderer for their V1000 graphics chip. The latest version is 3.21. This update includes numerous bug fixes and new levels designed for multiplayer deathmatch. Version 3.21, available as source code on id Software's FTP server, has no improved functionality over version 3.20 and is simply a slight modification to make compiling for Linux easier. Quake II uses an improved client–server model introduced in Quake. The game code of Quake II, which defines all the functionality for weapons, entities, and game mechanics, can be changed in any way because id Software published the source code of their own implementation that shipped with the game. Quake II uses the shared library functionality of the operating system to load the game library at run-time—this is how mod authors are able to alter the game and provide different gameplay mechanics, new weapons, and much more. The full source code to Quake II version 3.19 was released under the terms of the GNU GPL-2.0-or-later on December 22, 2001. Version 3.21 followed later. An LCC-friendly version was released on January 1, 2002, by a modder going by the name of Major Bitch. Since the release of the Quake II source code, several updates from third-party projects to the game engine have been created; the most prominent of these are projects focused on graphical enhancements to the game such as most