There are a bunch of reddit users leaving reddit comments but I'm not seeing any info from reputable sources. As of now no public commentators seem to know what these keys are truly for - I'm sure whoever extracted them knows so we'll have to wait to find out...
Q3 was from times without trivially available persistent internet connections. You had to hunt down the patches and mods yourself manually, hoping not to get malware instead. It was a different time. The updates also were much more spread out - last 3 were from 2001, 2002, 2006.
It's just not comparable to how things work today.
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