OpenArena is a free and open-source arena first-person shooter built on id Tech 3 — the same engine behind Quake III Arena, released by id Software under the GPL in August 2005. The project started the day after that release and has been community-produced ever since: the engine, the game code and the game assets are all openly licensed, so nothing in the download is proprietary. If you have ever played Quake III, the muscle memory transfers immediately; if you have not, this is the cleanest way to try the genre for nothing.

Key Features

• A complete Quake III-style arena shooter — fast movement, rocket jumping, weapon pickups scattered across compact maps, and armour/health control as the core skill.
• Nine game modes — Free For All, Team Deathmatch, Tournament (1v1 winner-stays-on), Capture the Flag, One Flag CTF, Harvester, Overload, Elimination and CTF Elimination.
• Bots and a single-player ladder — play offline against computer opponents, work through a tiered series of deathmatches that unlock new maps, or set up any mode as a skirmish.
• Fully open source — the engine (a fork of ioquake3) and the game logic are on GitHub under the GNU GPL v2, so you can read, rebuild and modify the whole thing.
• Free assets, no non-free content — weapons, player models, maps and sounds are GPLv2-licensed, and the community mappacks are maintained to stay 100% licence-compliant.
• Runs on ancient hardware — only the OpenGL 1.x API is required, so it plays on hardware that modern shooters cannot touch, including decade-old laptops and single-board computers.
• Online and LAN multiplayer — browse public servers or run your own dedicated server; a LAN game needs no account, no login and no internet connection.
• Community-made modes and mods — the open codebase has produced mods such as RatArena and OmegA, plus years of custom maps and player skins.

Why Use OpenArena?

Arena shooters have largely moved behind storefronts, accounts and battle passes. OpenArena keeps the original bargain: download it, run it, host it. There is no store, no advertising, no telemetry and no server you have to ask permission to use. Because the engine only needs OpenGL 1.x, it starts instantly and runs on hardware you probably already have lying around — a good fit for LAN parties, retro gaming nights and machines that cannot run anything modern. Version 0.8.8 (February 2012) is the current stable release, with the 3.0.0 content reboot in long-term community development.

Use Cases

• Reviving Quake III Arena deathmatch nights on hardware that no longer runs modern shooters.
• LAN parties where every player can be up and running from a single free download.
• Running an open, community-hosted game server with your own map and mode rotation.
• Learning game engine development on a complete, working id Tech 3 codebase.
• Practising arena fundamentals — movement, map control and weapon timing — offline against bots.

Platform

Windows · Linux · macOS — official builds. Third-party ports exist for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Android, iOS and the Raspberry Pi.

Licence

Open source — the game is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2 or later (GPL-2.0-or-later). Engine source and game code are published on GitHub, and the bundled assets are free of non-libre content. Free to play, share and modify.

Alternatives

• Xonotic — a modern free arena FPS on a Quake-derived engine, with 16 weapons and a much larger online player base

Website

openarena.ws — source code at github.com/OpenArena/engine and github.com/OpenArena/gamecode

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