Another week closer to E3, and the major shocks to the gaming industry just keep adding up.

　　Quake-related news rocked our house late last Friday when id's big kahuna John Carmack announced that his company would be giving up on designing an id-made add-on for Quake II and begin work on Quake III. The only hitch is that you'll need a 3D accelerator to play it once it hits shelves.

　　Earlier that same day, we discovered that American McGee had been fired from id. Word on the Web in some interviews has said that he had already begun to build a company that would design Intel-based casino machines. Quite a change from designing Quake III levels.

　　On Monday, id officially released a full Quake II demo (the first one was only a technology demo of sorts). If you don't have Quake II already, you'll want to download this demo.

　　Also on Monday, Activision showed up in the GameSpot offices to show off its Quake II expansion pack. The pictures included with the story really don't give one a true sense of how great this demo actually looked, the team at Xatrix hopes that this pack makes some waves in the Quake II community.

　　One of the trends occurring now in the gaming world is the high number of designers and programmers who have been leaving big-name game companies (or getting fired from same), most often to start their own businesses, or, in the instance of those getting canned, maybe looking up the number to the closest unemployment office.

　　On Friday, after hearing about American McGee's departure from id, GameSpot News was informed that Crack dot Com's Trey Harrison had also been let go.

　　On the brighter side, ex-Iguana employee Rob Cohen announced at South by Southwest his publishing union with Mike Wilson's Gathering of Developers. The Barbie Rules in Austin story will give you an idea what's behind the mass departures.

　　And who could have guessed that Chris Taylor of Total Annihilation fame and Ingar Shu from the Jedi Knight team would strike out on their own.

　　After hearing that Diamond was introducing a lower-end sound card, the Sonic Impact S70 (its current product for sound is the Aureal-based Monster Sound M80 card), we got word that the Creative was suing Diamond. Apparently, the SoundBlaster folks at Creative Labs sent ESS and Diamond a pretty little lawsuit where Creative claims that ESS used patented PCI technology in its Maestro-2 - and that Diamond used the processor in its Sonic Impact S70. It does seem strange that the suit came right around the time that Diamond's card was introduced. But hey, we're not lawyers. The Maestro-2 was announced with the alleged patented technology on October 14 of last year. Hmmmm.... This is definitely not a case for Judge Judy.

　　In other hardware news, Diamond announced even more support for AGP with its latest member of the Stealth line, the Stealth II G460, powered by the Intel740 graphics chip. Read on.

　　Sierra and Dynamix have been getting set to make a big leap into the market with Earthsiege III. On Tuesday, Dynamix announced that the title had gone so far ahead of the series that it warranted a name change. The title has been rechristened Starsiege.

　　The very next day, Wednesday, GameSpot News discovered that the lead programmer of Starseige had decided to support OpenGL instead of Microsoft's competing standard, Direct3D. An announcement like this reopens the OpenGL vs. Direct3D can o' worms that has gone on since id decided on using GL in Quake. The fight will probably go on for a while. Interestingly, this morning, Dynamix released a press release to the media saying just what our story said days earlier.

　　That was the big news last week. Who knows what to expect tomorrow.