E3M6: The Rememberance

Quake is ten, long live Quake. It certainly doesn’t feel like 10 years ago that we were fighting with 14.4 modems to download the then enormous fifteen meg archive. Installing it and realising that perhaps it was time to pool the newspaper delivery money and upgrade the beast to something that pushed a little more water under the bridge.

To those that played: Remember the first time you kicked on +mlook and what a mind fuck it was? The first shambler. That level where the blocks fly up and open the door, and then the fiend leaps out of the darkness and your heart tries to jump out of your chest while you strafe wildly in circles and shoot at the roof. dm6. dm2. Timing the armor and the quad and dominating. Lans and then quakeworld. The six month build-up while people realised just what they could do now they had an audience of willing players. Rocket Arena. Threewave. Team Fortress. QRally.

Over the years, I’ve had a lot of fun with Quake, and it was pretty much the catalyst for my becoming interested in the Internet. The catalyst for learning how to put a page together and get it up so people could see it. The reason I got my first real job. I feel sad that I don’t think I’ll ever be as engaged in a game ever again, because Quake had a great community and it felt like we were all learning what we could do, together.

A couple of years ago, I tried to play a PC game (it was called Counter-Strike) online for the first time in ages. They have voice chat as standard these days, and in the first ten minutes I got called gay four times, a cheater twice and a “cunt-arse faggot dick” once, by what sounded like a room of irate thirteen year olds. I felt like slapping them and saying, “Hey, we built this. We were fucking with cvars and console commands and servers before there was even an option that said ‘Multiplayer.’ We fought with modems and telephones and netcode. We mailed suggestions to developers and they mailed back the next day. We huddled around racks of servers, fought for stability and bonded. We learnt the ropes, practiced, and improved when it was a community, not an industry.”

And that made me feel old. Really, really old.

I just realised I have a copy of Quake on my laptop. Anyone up for a game?

Posted in 8-bit on Saturday June 24, 2006.