Quake memories are a good thing to have. Last year, on May 27th (1997) I was chatting on-line with a few of the guys from Clan 311. Walter.311 lives about 5 miles away from me and he knew that I was a big fan of some of the well known UK Quake players.

During the conversation, I told him I would go to a UK server and see if I could get a player or two to come over and play on 311's server. I went to one of the Crystal servers in the UK and found Ettu (from Clan QL) and Adze from QPD (Adze ran the servers). They were practicing the GL/RL jump to the rafters on E1M7.

I had seen Ettu in some demos previously but I had never spoken with him before. I asked them if they would "come out to play" and they both agreed. On the US server, both of them had pings around 130-150.

Although none of the 311 lpb's were on the server, there was some decent competition in Walter and a few others. Needless to say, both UK players played well but, Ettu put on a show that would change QuakeWorld forever (literally). On DM4, Adze played 2 1on1 matches which he won and Ettu played 3 1on1 matches which he also won easily. There was also a 2on2 DM6 match which wasn't even close.

In one of Ettu's 1on1 DM4 matches, he stood at the bottom of the steps near the quad and with the help of sequential spawns, proceeded to get about 10 frags without moving from that spot. One of the spectators that evening was id's John Cash who is a member of Clan 311. Needless to say, Cash was very impressed with Ettu's talent. More than that, he had never seen the sequential spawns be used (abused?) in that kind of fashion.

Two days later (May 29th, 1997), Cash updated his .plan file with the following.

"I observed a game with a guy from the UK who plays as Ettu the other night. That guy was evil. Don't know how he is in a FFA, but he was damn good in a 1v1 and a 2v2. Those sequenced respawn points have *got* to go. Disruptor, Tokay, and I came up with a few ideas we'll probably test out on Underworld."

Soon after that, id released a new version of QW and a patch for Quake servers to enable random spawns. Ettu (the Evil one), who was pretty damn good at that time, went on to become one of the best Quake players in the world. Adze continued to run the most popular duel Quake servers in the UK.

Ettu and I became fairly close "Quake friends" for quite a while after this. He has since gotten married and retired from Quake. He was busy playing Ultima On-line for a while but I haven't talked to him in ages. If you see Doug, tell him I said "Hi" and to give me a shout. I still see Adze from time to time, he's still a pretty nice guy.

The nicest thing about this "meeting" of international players was that everybody was cool about it. Ettu and Adze didn't have the "kick some yankee ass" attitude and the 311 guys didn't have the "go home to your own country" type attitude. Walter and Ettu played quite a few times after that but his modem connection always restricted him. By the time he got his lpb status, Ettu had retired. Even with that, it was still a good day for the "Quake World".

is it just me or should someone collect all those random pages of quake history floating around... I get all watery eyed seeing pages like the above, know some of those people personally
probably on a country by country basis... there's little point in writing a global history of qw at least for the first 4 years.