Some time ago, John Carmack, the 3d graphics guru and one of my heroes, released the source code for the Quake3 and Quake2 engines. The following links demonstrate some of the consequences of this noble action:
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Haskell Quake: The Quake 3 Engine using the Haskell functional programming language.
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Quake 3 Raytraced : Quake 3 rendered using real time ray tracing (powered by OpenRT). While you are at it, also check out Quake4 Raytraced.
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Quake on the Grid: In conjunction with IBM, a group of college students from the University of Wisconsin developed GameGrid to run a distributed version of Quake2.
And of course we got some great open source games like Tremulus. If you know of more examples of putting the Quake 3 engine to great use in pushing the State of the Art, please let me know by commenting to this article.