According to The Inquirer was ati.
ON FRIDAY, WE POINTED at a bundle of screenshots collected from the leaked demo of much awaited gore-fest Doom III that had wibbled their way onto the wobbly web.
There are a number of places your can get hold of the demo, it seems, eDonkey having been recommended to us. (It's 380Mb big).
The alpha demo was shown at games expo E3 and includes three levels and the intro movie. And you'll have noticed from the screenshots that this Doom is graphicaly a step or two on from the previous incarnations. And graphics card makers will pleased to note that it requires the very latest hardware to be viewed in its full glory. Indeed tweak guides have already wibbled their way webwards too. Here.
The leaking of the demo has caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth we hear, with the Doomfather John Carmack himself entering the fray. He says the leaker will find himself (itself?) in id Software's bad books. And it appears from a thread at Slashdot that the clever chaps at id watermark their software when they send it out, so they know exactly who leaked it. Here.
Anyhow, a reader writes: "Since we lack more info on the watermark, our imaginations are free to dream up schemes, plots and conspiracies. The hot gossip is that ATI leaked the alpha - the only support for this accusation seems to be an IRC chat log published on a French hardware site (but since removed). The abridged log goes like this and appears to have been written by one Xian of id - Xian is the handle of Christian Antkow - but his alias is well known and so this doesn't mean he wrote this:
Xian> ATI leaked it
Xian> John sent them a flame mail yesterday basically saying "This has hurt our relationship"
Xian> yeah, well, ATI has clearly violated our NDA
Xian> ATI is on our shitlist right now
Xian> we are not dealing with them until further notice
Xian> We know ATI leaked it. We watermark all releases
Xian> Squiggle: ATI has a relaxed policy about pre-release software. Remember, they gave us a laptop that had Unreal Warfare loaded on it 3 months ago
Xian> They don't seem to care about strict enforcement of NDA's Xian> on a positive note, people seem to *REALLY LIKE* the leaked shit
Anonymous Slashdot message posters offer more juicy theories from here. Here's a nice example:
'...here's my conspiracy theory: ATI's next gen cards are out now but doom 3 isn't out yet. They leak the doom3 alpha to get high end consumers thinking about doom3 cards at a time when they still have the lead against NVidia. Throw in some 9700 ads all over the web to make sure people know where to get their high end cards.'
Of course, a certain other video card company has a product coming out soon that you may of heard of. The RADEON 9700 series at 60fps in 640*480 hardly seems like 'the card' for Doom III - this alpha proves it and not even the most ardent ATI fan-boy is likely to disagree. I can't see how this helps ATI, in fact it very clearly hurts them, who wants to pay $350 to play games at low resolution? If they did leak this it must have been unintentional. The reasoning goes, 'if I can't play Doom III with a super fast CPU and RADEON 9700 Pro, perhaps I should wait a few months before upgrading.'
We wonder what interesting video card products will appear on store shelves in the next few months..."
Looks like Doomgate could be quite a runner
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