Back/Quake4Life

In 1996, id software released their next generation game, Quake.

What follows is my story...

I was living in Madison, WI (still am) at the time of the quake release. I owned a PowerMac 6100 and a 486/66 back then, so the first tremors of Quake past by without me ever noticing.

Then it happened. I was strolling down State St with a couple of my friends when we spied a small neon sign, beckoning us from a basement window. "Grand Opening of the Underground. Play vs your friends". Intrigued, we went forward, opening the door and trudging down the spiral staircase to a dimly lit room. There, a slack jawed fellow showed us the goods. Pentium 100s, with 27" Sony TVs and ethernet cables attached, sat about the room.

"You guys want to play a game?" he asked. It seemed such an innocent question. I felt compelled answer him affirmative. 5 years later, I still find myself quivering at this question, unable to respond anything but "yes".

We played there for hours. And I came back every weekend, playing down there in that dark dungeon of entertainment till my eyes were bleary and my hands numb. I met fellow users, RedBud, Paste, E-Dog. The Underground was a place where people like us could meet, and engage in bacchailian pursuits until....until we ran out of money.

And thats how my life went for awhile. Playing Quake was a luxury I gave myself whenever I could. Until oneday, those infernal coders at id software decided to up the ante. They released Winquake. No longer was I forced to trudge down to the Underground to receive my paltry, overpriced fix. No, now I could utilize the Win NT machines at my work. No timelimits, no cash expenditures, the whole internet was my playground.

It so happened that one of the first servers I visited was one local to UW-Madison. Qclan it was called. It ran off of a OC3 down in the engineering building. The pings were silky smooth, the server always full and it ran a version of CTF called Server Modules. I played there every day after work. Sometimes for up to 7 hours. I met people with needs similar to my own. Druvo, Oshea J, Biz, DevilDog.

I would continue to play quake almost daily for the next 4 years. The servers changed along with the players, but the community remained. I joined a clan, Xg, at the asking of a player named juice. I had seen him before on one of the more active servers, Quake.insync.net. He was trying to organize a clan to participate in a upcoming tournament between all players of ServerModules. I was thrilled to be asked. Finally, someone had noticed my skillz. Then he told me I would have to tryout against someone already in the clan, Imperium.

We found an empty server and warped it to Ogre (e2m2) and went at it. It was a fast and furious game, neither of us able to dominate the other. After winning 1 game apiece, it came down the the final tiebreaker. I had his flag and was geared up, ready to bring it home for the last cap. As I came up the elevator and spun towards home, I saw him. Standing there like some lone Grendel, ready to tear me to pieces. I swung my rocket launcher to bear at him when... CURSES! My mouse had slipped off the pad and I was looking at my feet. I braced for the impact of his kill shot but it never happened. Fortuna had it in for us both. He was stuck, spinning like a rag doll on the wall. I fragged his lagged ass and preceded to capture the flag. RAARRGGH! VICTORY IS MINE!

So anyways, I managed to make it into Xg. We went on to dominate the tourney and the entire community. Future leagues and tournaments would come and we placed first in just about everyone. I made many friends, as well as enemies. I improved my skillz and teamwork till they reached the pinnacle of human accomplishments (okay, maybe thats a bit much). I even wrote a new mod, which would allow the community to have real, competitive tournaments.