MESQUITE, TEXAS -- It's 11:30 on Saturday morning at the convention center next to the rodeo. This is the temporary home of one of the most fanatical hard-core gaming cults.

A couple of young men are sleeping on the couch. Another is sprawled out facedown in the alcove with the pay phones. In the cavernous center, the lights are turned down to preserve power. Outside, a semi truck trailer with a gigawatt of power -- enough to light up the entire city of Mesquite -- is pumping juice into the facility, where 1,400 makeshift computers are lined up in neat rows. The truck is out there because the network has already brought smaller power systems down four times. At the computers, bleary-eyed players wear headphones and "frag" each other with rocket launchers, chain guns, lightning guns, and grenades. They've been up all night playing Id Software's Quake 3: Arena.

Welcome to QuakeCon 2001, where 3,000 hard-core computer game fans gathered this past weekend to compete in a massive tournament for $50,000 in prizes. The rich purse drew folks like Jonathan "fatal1ty" Wendel, a 20-year-old from Kansas City, Missouri, who made $100,000 in prize money as a professional gamer last year. He dropped out of college and trained eight hours a day on Quake 3: Arena to practice for the tournament. He fell victim to John "zeRo4" Hill, a 16-year-old high-school junior from San Diego, California, who took home $30,000. But the QuakeCon attendees also came to catch a glimpse of the future of gaming at the first-ever press conference by publicity-shy Id Software.

That future was encapsulated in a two-minute video put together by the game development company, based here in Mesquite. Id gave the gaming world the pulse-pounding thrills of multiplayer first-person "shooter" combat in 1993's Doom and 1996's Quake. Now they're going back to the future with an as-yet-untitled new version of Doom.

SO REAL, IT'S SCARY As depicted in the video, the creatures from the original Doom have returned with a nightmarish new realism. Demons and zombies bare their ugly fangs and rip bodies to shreds. It looks not like a bunch of pixels on a computer screen, but like a horror film in a darkened theater. The monsters jump out of dark shadows, and the realistic lighting makes them come to life.

These demons look so real because Id cofounder, owner, and lead programmer John Carmack has come up with a new game technology. As he steps onto the stage to talk about the game, he is greeted with thunderous applause. Camilo Ernesto Rodriguez Perez, a 33-year-old programmer from Bogota, Colombia, has come thousands of miles to see his idol.

"I play Quake every day," he says. "For the last ten years, I have thought about John Carmack every day."

Mr. Carmack says that game technology is getting so good that animated films and Hollywood special effects will be made with game technology in a few years. Some of the characters in the new Doom will consist of 250,000 polygons, compared to only 10,000 or so in the latest version of Quake. That's closing in on the characters in the latest animated movies like Shrek, whose main character consisted of 1.5 million polygons. Mr. Carmack says the game will focus on demons and zombies because the technology still can't render human faces correctly. But the technology doesn't seem all that far behind the animated film Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within, which debuted this summer.

"We went to the trade show in May and we found that nobody was doing something like this," says Kevin Cloud, an artist and one of the owners of Id. "We were pretty happy about that."

NO CONSOLATION FOR THE DOOMED The computer industry should be grateful for Doom's evolution. Id insiders estimate the next version of the game will require the latest Nvidia GeForce3 graphics unit at a minimum, as well as a microprocessor running at speeds of 1 GHz or more. It will give hard-core gamers a reason to upgrade their systems and get the economy going again. Of course, the launch date hasn't been scheduled yet. With the technology delivering a much better canvas, the labor for the artists is now a huge task; Mr. Carmack joked that it would take several "man-millennia" to finish the game.

"Now we're unleashing the ability of the artists to really create things you've never seen before," he said.

Activision (Nasdaq: ATVI), the Santa Monica-based publisher of Id's titles, will get its unfair share of the benefits of Mr. Carmack's technology. While Id hasn't yet chosen a publisher for the next Doom, Activision gets to publish many of the games that license Id's technology. Id has worked out deals with several developers to make games with its technology, including a version of Doom for the Game Boy Advance handheld player; Return to Castle Wolfenstein, developed by Gray Matter and Nerve Software; Quake 4, by Raven Software; and an untitled game being developed by Nerve.

Despite all the hype of next-generation consoles, PC-based games like Doom 3 are going to keep hard-core gamers very happy.

"Doom 3 should be fantastic," says Charles Nachala, a 21-year-old student from Plano, Texas. "I think computer games are going to blow away the consoles, and this shows it's going to be way ahead."

To get Tech Soundings sent to your inbox, subscribe to the e-newsletter.

MESQUITE, TEXAS -- It's 11:30 on Saturday morning at the convention center next to the rodeo. This is the temporary home of one of the most fanatical hard-core gaming cults.