Reaction was originally called Reaction Quake 3 which was a "total conversion mod" for Quake III Arena based on action and realism with a specific emphasis on action over realism. Reaction is a port of the classic Action Quake 2 (AQ2) mod. AQ2 still enjoyed great popularity in online gaming even 4 years after it was initially released and on an "obsolete" game engine as well. Many people attribute this lasting popularity to both the unique gameplay and the AQ2 community. At the time Reaction Quake 3 was first released, AQ2 was still more popular than any other Q3 realism mod and any other Quake 2 and Quake/QuakeWorld mods. Reaction Quake 3 aimed to bring the gameplay of AQ2 to a new, more modern game engine. This mod is made by AQ2 fans and players specifically for those who love the fast and furious AQ2 gameplay and also to hopefully expose a new generation of players to this unique gameplay.

Reaction will never be an exact duplicate of Action Quake 2. That is not our goal. We want to duplicate AQ2's gameplay as much as possible. We will be unable to make a 100% copy and that's not our goal anyway. We just want to be "close enough" for most AQ2 fans and improve on things from there. Already we have, standard, a decent ignoring system for in-game spammers, a built-in matchmode, and pretty good bots that are as good or better than most of the bots in AQ2--we'll leave William van der Sterren's excellent AQ2 CGF bots out of this comparison since that is unfair to not only us but also 90% of all professionally-made commercial games.

Reaction has already surpassed many facets of the last official release of Action Quake 2, 1.52, and is catching up to some of the latest AQ2 variants. Considering that AQ2 has had over 4 years of development time and the bulk Reaction's teamplay, matchmode, and bot development was done in less than 6 months, this is a pretty exciting project. What started out as a project by part of the AQ2 community who wanted someone to make "Action Quake 3" has turned into a well-received and pretty solid and fun standalone game.

The creators of Reaction, Boomstick Studios, has always intended on releasing the code for free. In addition, id Software's gracious release of the Quake 3 engine source code has allowed several projects to blossom, all of them centered on improving the core Quake 3 game engine. One in particular, ioquake3, has been outstanding in its extension of the capabilities of the original Quake 3 game engine. While it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of some other Quake 3 source projects, it has a very wide platform support and still has many improvements on the original Quake 3!

Reaction is built by blending the original RQ3 mod code with the vastly improved ioquake3 engine code to create a standalone multiplayer game. Most of the time spent since the last release of RQ3 leading up to Reaction 1.0 has been in eliminating any content that we needed to use from the original Quake 3 game, such as map textures and player models. Since we want to release a completely free game, we needed to have all original content. And because we have all original content, we also have taken this opportunity to offer as much of our content for free as possible! Where we can get permission from the original content creators, we are licensing their content under a specific Creative Commons license so that fans of the game can use our work in other non-commercial projects. And not only are we offering the finished content, but also the original source files where available! This means original .map files before being compiled into .bsp form and original .3ds models and animations before being exported into .md3 form! We really want to give back to our fans and to those who have supported us over the years. We feel that this is one of the ways we can say "thanks"!

Hang on, it's going to be a fun ride!