Yep. Had the disc from Walmart. Found the crack and had the full versions of pretty much every 3D id game up to that point. It was a great time for 11 year old me.

I thought this was a well known thing. well at least it was back in the day. you'd get the CD and then get the crack off like a warez site or IRC and you were off to the races.

I mean id games were always easy to copy/crack even up to Q3A. Q3A was painfully easy as all you needed was pak0. it's even easier to play a full copy of Quake 3 Arena on Linux today then ever before. most distro package managers have ioquake3 and then all you need are the pak files which are on several git repos.

hell, here you go: https://codeberg.org/rozodru/q3a

That was a fun read. Thanks for sharing it.