Windows 10 update (v1909 I think) broke Quake Live, making it nearly impossible to get the game to load through Steam. If it did load, it played normally, but getting that far was the trick.

In the unlikely chance there is anybody besides me still playing this game...

The very latest Windows 10 update (v2004, I think) released just a few days ago fixes it. You can force an update manually if you are really desperate for your Quake Live fix. I am a really serious gamer -- I have three whole games on my computer: DOOM, Quake III Arena, and Quake Live. Hey, they were good 20 years ago, they still are now!

tanstaafl.

I'm curious to know about the break, and the fix. I haven't played the Quake games in a while, though I did play through the most recent Doom release on Playstation 4. I'm curious mostly from an IT perspective.

Did Id Software publish any documentation of the problem?

I was very late in updating to v1909, so my game only crashed last week. By digging pretty deep into the user forum at Steam, I found I wasn't alone, and there were a lot of suggestions that some person would say worked, only to find out that others couldn't reproduce it. This apparently went on for weeks, perhaps months.

Today I found a person who said that it was Windows Update v1909 that broke it, and that update v2004 fixed it. I tried it, and it worked. For me, anyway. It wasn't an Id software fix, it wasn't a Steam fix. It was a Microsoft fix.

tanstaafl.