Zapp: So tell us about how it all started, what was it that made you guys suddenly decide to create the worlds largest demo archive?

DonKing: 10 years ago I had my own Demo site "Old Skull Quake" it was hosted on all of these free websites like fortunecity, geocities, xoom etc... I got tired of them always deleting my account because I only used the ftp accounts. I was a fan of the Challenge Network and asked Hoony if he would be willing to host my site.

He looked at it and said that he thought it was great and was actually in the beginning stages of creating a demo site for the Challenge Network and said that if I wanted to run it I could. Agent (code), dethkultur (money man) and myself began creating and running the site.


Right, what was it that motivated you in the first place to start Old Skull Quake?

I was a big fan of Methos' site and thought I should start my own. I have always been a huge fan of demos, watching the best players in the world was amazing to me. I actually used to watch every single demo I added to CHTV. I saved the Quake 2 demos till night time so I could fall asleep easily.


Back in the day there were several challenge sites and now only Challenge-TV is alive, what was it that made CHTV survive while the others died?

It is because people love to watch demos and people love to be watched. I put so much into CHTV that I was not going to let it die. I eventually turned it into a community driven site where you could upload all the demos you wanted with no restrictions. This of course gives people a lot more demos to watch but the quality of demos on CHTV has also dwindled because of it.


Yea, well I still love giving the site a search and finding old stuff by clans like 9 and Deathrow. Is that possible as a result of the relaxed attitude?

Well I've always kept the classics there.


So later in the interview we will talk about your current vision for CHTV, but back then, year 2000, what vision did you guys have for the future of Challenge-TV?

The vision was to be the #1 site on the net to get demos from. We did succeed in that regard. CHTV was never meant to become a money earner. I believe we should have a lot more demos than we do right now. I know that I personally lost a lot of demos. Early on I actually deleted thousands of NQ CTF demos and in recent years have lost all of the Challenges demos.


Whats the cause of these losses?

With the NQ CTF demos, I was given all of these demos from Stayne (SHOD) when his site shut down (I used to work for SHOD adding demos before CHTV). Anyway... I ran out of space and just began deleting demos that I thought were the least popular. We ran CHTV on a 17 gig hard drive for multiple years. With the Challenges demos I do not remember what happened to those.

This is a tournament i am very proud of running and I do not know what happened to the demos, I think I was low on space and did not backup the demos when I erased them from the FTP. It sucks that i lost them!! If anyone has them please let me know.


Some claim that you were responsible for killing several active Challenge sites in the past, whats your take on this?

I talked to Jjonez about once a year regarding the Challenge sites which he was supposedly in charge of according to Hoony. The Smackdown site was around for years. All of the other CH sites just eventually died off. If I took the sites offline it was because they were dead and I found evidence that people were using the ftp's for warez.

I was not responsible for the other Challenge sites until Hoony retired and by that time the sites were dead. CHTV was mine and of course I was going to put all of my effort into keeping it alive. I do have the web files for all of those old CH sites if Jjonez wants the responsibility of starting them up again.


Before we start discussing more recent topics I just wanted to touch on CH-Smackdown a bit. I don't know how involved you were in the project but some time ago you organized a duel events between Milton and Reppie. Do you ever consider reviving Smackdown in some form or other?

I was only involved in the demo aspect of SD and I helped Admin the North American divisions. Jjonez was in charge of Smackdown. The Milton vs Reppie matches were part of my challenges series where I would have 2 good players duke it out. This was more for the community, the fans than the 2 players.

The second part deals with the present situation of CHTV and the last part talks about DonKings vision for the site.