Gladiator Bot for Quake II — Restoration Project

First released on December 8, 1998, the Gladiator Bot — created by the Dutch programmer Jan Paul "Mr. Elusive" van Waveren — gave Quake II its first taste of intelligent computer-controlled opponents. Suddenly, single-player Quake II felt like a LAN party. Eighteen named bots with their own personalities, voices and play styles roamed the maps, fragging each other and trash-talking in chat.

The Gladiator Bot was groundbreaking. It was the first bot able to navigate any Quake II map automatically, without a level designer hand-placing waypoints — a technique Mr. Elusive later refined into the bots that ship with Quake III Arena. For many players, this is the bot they grew up with.

But there was always one catch: the Gladiator Bot's brain was closed source. While Mr. Elusive released the source code for the game module, the actual intelligence — the navigation, the decision-making, the chat system — lived inside a sealed binary called gladiator.dll. As the years go by, that binary becomes harder and harder to keep running on modern systems.

This project is an effort to bring the Gladiator Bot back from the brink by reconstructing its source code from the original Windows binary, function by function, line by line. Once complete, the Gladiator Bot will be open, modifiable and portable — playable on Linux, macOS and modern Windows for as long as people want to play Quake II.

Sister project: If you're after a more advanced bot, see q3a_bot_backport_for_q2 — a Quake II adaptation of the Quake III Arena bot, the evolved successor to the Gladiator Bot's navigation technology.

What's in the box

This repository bundles everything you need:

• The reconstructed bot brain (botlib/) — the work-in-progress port of the closed-source gladiator.dll
• The original game module source (game/) — Mr. Elusive's 1999 game.dll source, included verbatim with attribution
• The runtime assets (assets/) — bot characters, voices, the things that make Adrenaline Hunk feel like Adrenaline Hunk
• The map-prep tool (tools/) — bspc, the utility that lets you teach the bots a new map

What you get

• 18 classic bot characters with distinct skins, names and personalities — Adrenaline Hunk, Laura Craft, Reaper, Maxine and the rest of the gang
• Smart deathmatch opponents that learn the map, hunt for items, dodge rockets and trash-talk in chat
• Capture The Flag and team play with bots that defend, attack and follow orders
• Mission pack support for The Reckoning and Ground Zero
• Adjustable difficulty so you can tune the bots to your skill level

Why this matters

The Gladiator Bot is a piece of gaming history. It marks the birth of the navigation technology that powers bots in dozens of games to this day. Reconstructing it preserves that history — and gives the Quake II community a maintainable, future-proof bot library for the decades ahead.

Status

The reconstruction is playable but a work in progress. Bots load, spawn, fight and chat. Some map features still trip them up, and rough edges remain. If you'd like to help test, report bugs or contribute, head to the issue tracker.

How close are we to the original?

To measure progress objectively we run an oracle check: we recompile our reconstructed C source with the same 1999-era Microsoft Visual C++ 6 compiler that built the original gladiator.dll, and then compare the resulting machine code against the bytes inside the real 1999 DLL — one small routine at a time.

Of the 787 routines in the original Gladiator Bot DLL, 591 (about 75 %) currently come out byte-for-byte identical to Mr. Elusive's original.

The remaining 196 are close but not yet exact: most of them are off by just a handful of CPU instructions — usually a tiny source-level detail we haven't pinned down yet — and none are missing (every routine in the original is paired with one in our reconstruction). Each remaining gap is a concrete, measurable target for further work.

A note on "version 0.96"

Mr. Elusive shipped two builds under the same v0.96 label:

• Windows (gladiator.dll + gamex86.dll) — released 1999-07-18.
• Linux (gladi386.so + gamei386.so) — released 1999-08-02, about two weeks later.

Despite the matching version number, the Linux build is the more advanced botlib. In particular, the Linux gladi386.so contains a roughly 7 KB moving-brush reachability builder (F149, for func_plat / func_train movers) that has no counterpart in the Windows DLL, and overall calls 11 reach-type handlers vs. the Windows DLL's 6 — about 2.5× more reach-handler code by byte count. In effect the Linux drop is a quiet point-release that the Windows binary never received.

The map-prep tool bspc is the exception: the version bundled with the Linux drop (bspc-linux-x86, v1.2, dated 1999-05-20) is actually older than the Windows bspc.exe (v1.4, dated 1999-07-18) — the opposite direction from the botlib. This reconstruction is grounded in the Windows DLL per the project's fidelity rules, so the extra Linux-only botlib code is deliberately out of scope for the byte-level match, but it is occasionally a useful secondary reference.

Credits

• Mr. Elusive — original Gladiator Bot author (1999)
• Squatt and Mr. Freeze — original co-creators
• The Yamagi Quake II team for keeping the engine alive

Licensing Rationale

This project is a reconstruction of the original Gladiator Bot source code from the Quake II era. The original source code was never publicly released, and only binary distributions are known to exist.

A substantial portion of the Gladiator Bot technology and codebase was later incorporated into the Quake III Arena bot system. The Quake III Arena source code was subsequently released under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2), making many of the underlying bot components and algorithms available under GPLv2 terms.

Based on the significant code lineage between the original Gladiator Bot and the later GPLv2-released Quake III Arena bot code, this reconstruction project is distributed under the GPL. Our intention is to preserve, study, and continue the development of this historically important software within the open-source community and in a manner consistent with the later GPLv2 release of related code.

This project does not claim ownership of the original work. If additional information regarding copyright ownership, licensing history, or rights transfers becomes available, the project's licensing and distribution terms may be reviewed and updated accordingly.