FOR GAME PLAYERS, IT'S THE BIG ONE.

Byline: Glenn Gaslin Daily News Staff Writer

The demon can't rest. It's jumping up and down, smacking its knuckles on the floor. It's growling and drooling, pacing back and forth down the hall, looking for George Weller.

The demon wants to kill Weller. It wants to rip off his head and let it roll into a pool of stagnant water. And, best of all, the dumb beast roaming the dark cavern wants to do this in the most realistic, technically advanced way possible on a high-end home computer.

And Weller (plus a few thousand other video game fanatics) couldn't be more excited.

His only response, of course, is to blow the beast away. He uses the grenade launcher, the shotgun, the machine-loaded nail gun. He uses the mouse.

The 28-year-old recent graduate of California State University, Northridge, has no choice. He is already hooked on Quake, the sequel to the revolutionary gorefest Doom by id Software, which brought together virtual reality and testosterone to create just about the most popular video game in history.

Quake hasn't even been officially released yet (downloads are available on the Internet), but it has generated enough buzz to fill a Zip drive.

``I think it's because of the realism,'' says Weller, three-time Doom tournament champ at CSUN. ``You have to love the ambient sounds of the monsters. You can even hear one of the ogres when he turns around and drags the chain saw on the ground.''

New supersmooth 3-D software techniques and something called ``polygon-based texture-mapped graphics'' make cave-dwelling demons and bloodthirsty Doberman pinschers move as is if they were in your apartment.

A retail version of Quake won't be released until the end of the month, says an id Software spokeswoman, but hundreds of Internet sites have popped up over the past few months to exchange gossip and news about the company's progress.

As you read this story, hundreds of players are logged on the Internet, playing advance versions of the game, hunting each other down in massive Quake rooms, virtual-reality dens that feel more ``real,'' they say, than anything else a PC offers.

``You are in a true 3-D simulated world,'' says Weller, who was listed in the 1987 ``Guiness Book of World Records'' with the high score in a game called Karate Champ. ``There's one level with low gravity, so when you blow people away, their body parts float and bounce around the room for a while.''

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2 Photos

Photo: (1) ``You are in a true 3-D simulated world,'' sa ys Quake player and CSUN grad George Weller.

(2) Quake, a new video game by Doom creator id Software, is a hot item on the Internet even before its official release.

Gus Ruelas/Daily News