Some of my best gaming memories are of quakeworld.

I guess this was around 1996 or 1997. My gaming went from the ultimate doom straight to single player quake, then to quakeworld.

The first server I played on regularly was Shrevenet - in Shreveport Louisiana. If memory serves me right, the IP address 208.206.76.3. Its funny how I remember that address all these years later.

In 1997 I attended the 2nd quakecon in Mesquite, Texas. In 1998 I attended the third quakecon and have not been back since.

There were several of us that played on a server hosted by Pernet communications out of Nederland, Texas. We even had a clan - 21+. No one under 21 was allowed to join.

There were several nights that I saw the sun come up the next morning, as I had played all night long. One night I remember very well. I was at the computer desk playing some quakeworld and I kept hearing music from the rock group metallica playing. Because winamp used so much memory and processor I could not play music and play quake at the same time, so where was this music coming from? Come to find out, the TV in the living room was on. Metallica was the guest band on saturday night live.

I never did like DM6 with the red armor and RL next to each other, that map usually turned into a frag fest in that one spot.

A couple of my favorite maps were E1M1, and e2M5. Just for your information, John Romero designed both those maps. And, if you pay attention, in a lot of his maps, you have to go to the left. In E1M1, you go down a hall and turn to the left to get on the elevator. In E2M5, turn to the right, then the base is on the left. Go into the main door and turn to the left to go to the first switch. John Romero being left handed designed a lot of his maps with the left side being dominate.

I had got to meet John Romero at Quakecon in 1997. He is a wonderful and super friendly person.

While playing QW, I always like to play the E1 or E2 series of maps, except a couple of the E3 series and M4 series.

Then there was QWTF, oh those were some fun days as well.

Sadly, all good things must come to an end as did the big days of QW. The release of Q2 spelled the death of QW as I knew it. And just as Q2 was losing shine, half-life was released.

Oh how I miss the days of quakeworld. Those were good days indeed.

www.nquake.com - who knows, you might still have some "frag" in you

Hell yeah! Stories like this win!
Some folks still play quakeworld. And as said above; go download ezquake!

I have discovered QW a bit late, but i couldn't agree more. This game is best multiplayer fps ever, and community is so much different from others communites around fps games. In a good way. In opposite to q3, cs, even netQuake - it's very rare to se flaming, whining, arguing in qw... i guess, when game is so old, people around it are more mature. I remember a quote from a guide (comes along with eQuake i think) i've read the day i've tried qw ffa with bots for the first time: "Quakeworld is gentelman sport".

I enjoy playing some QWTF when I get a chance. Great community of gamers!

Nice read. It inspired me to write a blog: http://quakeworld.nu/blogs/247/105/

Thx for the kind words guys and gals.

My memories of quakeworld are like a whole different life, and in a way they were. The internet was first starting to mature, dial up was just about the only internet service around and there was quake.

There were several nights I saw the crack of dawn while playing. I never did get into the hardcore claning thing. Even though I was in 21+, we were more like a bunch of buddies or friends then anything else.

Things would have been good if ID software would have never released that piece of junk called Quake 2 (Q2). Not only was it one of the worst games of all time, it helped kill the quakeworld community. But the true death blow may have been Counter strike and half-life.

In late 1999 I went through a bad divorce, changed jobs and moved. Several months later, when I got my life back on track and got back to online gaming - most of the quakeworld players I knew had moved on. Some of my old quakeworld buddies just disappeared during that time. Back then most of us used ICQ to stay in touch. Your contact list was stored on your computer. After the divorce and move, when I reinstalled ICQ, all my contacts were gone.

For some people quakeworld just faded away. For me, quakeworld ended at the same time I went through a major change in my life. That might be one reason why my memories are so fond.

who are some of the people you played with?

Yeah Kev, at least it explains why you were pwning so hard when you came back into qw scene out of nowhere :>

Besides playing in the 21+ clan, we were allies with the Epok clan. While at the second quakecon in Mesquite, Texas I met one of the players from the Muppet clan - http://www.muppetclan.com/q3/news.html

Its been 8 years since I played any real quakeworld, so lets see if I can spew out some names
Spacie - he was the leader of 21+
Shonuff - which is spacies step son. spacey and shonuff live about 30 miles from me
Revy - he had a clan but I can not remember the name of it. Him and his highschool buddies lived about 20 miles from me.
Jolie
Iceman
Vandy
Acid Breath
Wife Beater
Beer
Varmit - Epok clan
Zerker - Epok Clan
MRGrim - lived 9 miles from me.
Quagmire - spelling is wrong on that one. Lived 15 miles from me.

The 21+ server was hosted at Pernet communications, but that was 10 year ago. It looks like pernet got bought by SBC, not sure what happened to them though.

A lot of these people were from the Eastern side of Texas - Port Arthur, Orange, Bridge City, Little Cypress and Nederland. The cool thing, I met most of them face to face. Except for wife beater, varmit and Zerker - they used to play on the 21+ server.

Acid Breath lived in Plano, Texas. When I went to the second and third quakecon I stayed at Acids' house.

There was one guy from London I played with from time to time. He was going to some college for a degree in water treatment. If I remember right, he was from Japan - but dang it I can not remember his name.

I bet if if I could find my old quake back up CD, the screen shots would have thousands of names on it. Around 1998 I made a back up of my Quake directory, which at the time was a huge 200+ megs. During the divorce and moving around that CD came up missing. It had demos, screenshots - all kinds of stuff on it.

One of my favorite mods of all time was "Painskeep" - talk about a rush. It had bear traps, sentry guns, all kinds of really cool stuff. The sentry guns would shoot you as well. So you had to throw it out and run!!! You had something like a stash where you could pick stuff up, then use it later. Like the bear trap and sentry gun. You could get the bear trap off you by shooting it with your rocket - just look down and shoot like you were going to rocket jump. But, if you had quad, it was a different story. So you saved your bear traps until you heard someone get quad, then throw the traps out. The game also had some kind of warp or black hole gun, I never did figure that one out.

Then there were the rune games - man oh man, runes along with the grappling hook mod and it was one wild game. I liked to run through a door way, turn around and grapple to the ceiling, just above the door. When someone came through the door, start shooting and release the grapple. You had a 1/2 second were you were air born making you a really hard target. Fire a few shots from the ceiling, if the enemy did get turned around and fire, release the grapple, drop and keep firing.

Was this the mod with the item 'pork & beans' that made you fart-jump? Hahahahaha, if so, I've tested it from some game mag cd... really funny stuff indeed.

I almost completely missed the whole old internet times. I did tried it out, yes, but I was turned of by the lag. When I was 21, I moved out of my parents house and rented my own place, together with a friend of mine. It was an old little house next to a railroad track. We set up a LAN (with lot's of hassle 'cause we didn't know shit) and played Quake against eachother. Because I only played against him, I never learned how to play properly and Steven Polge's Reaper bots raped me again and again. Even so, I was glad to get the new version that had skin support, so I would at least have a mild illusion of online play.

One time, a friend came over with a cd full with Quake related stuff... the name of the cd started with an 'M' I think. It was a collection of maps, bots, and...demos. I spectated this demo of some guy who played the House of Chthon E1M7 as fast as possible, doing rocketjumps etc... I remember we looked in awe and wondered how the player could turn so fast... that's how I found out about using the mouse, hehe. Coming straight from Doom and Heretic I thought of using the mouse in Quake. I actually finished the whole game in SP by just using keys, Quicksaving all the way ofcourse

So I started practicing using mouse instead of keyboard only, and then, because of the transition period, my housemate figured he finally had a chance to beat me again (he didn't wanted to play against me anymore before that). Ofcourse, after the transition period it was game over for him

We probably played this map the most, a simple custom map called "Flooded Tele X", floodtel.bsp:



We liked it cause we were noobs and didn't want to wait for too long before running into eachother We also played that dm map in the Armagon mission pack... oblivion or something.


I also started mapping in that period and created the house we rented in the Quake universe:


The house got burned down soon after we moved out, but in Quake it still exists

I can understand you completely, Kev. To me (as to most others, who took the game seriously to at least some degree) QW was more than simply a game. Even though, I quit for good more than 4 years ago, I still have to think back sometimes. There were so many memorable moments. Not only in the game, on a map or something specific like a great frag (although there are a lot of memories regarding these topics, too). Quake was a people's game, and that made is so special to me. I remember so many great players I enjoyed wasting my time with, together on something stupid such as a computer game. And even take it farther and turn it into a competition!

I hope, that one day, someone will make a real movie or something, a documentary or similar. There are so many great stories, some of which are long forgotten or were never told.

Damn, I really miss the days when Sunday was UKCL-day :/

I've had a Painkeep server up for years.
http://weenieville.net/pkclassic.htm. (there is a Painkeep Arena area there also, for Q3).
I modded a bit, the Harpoon is now more like a slomotion railgun and instant death unless the victim has alot of health and armor.

Thanks to Vegetous for the server auto-record-mvd's code.

Thanks to Niborevoli for the tons of fixes to the original bugs plus the taunt code.

All I did (not being a coder) was tinker with weapon strengths mostly.

Great fun and many laughs.

[edit] Oh yea, you can google Painkeep 1.11 and get the mod (12mb) from the Teamevolve site. Grab the mappack at the bottom my page and you are good to go for some quad fart action.