I spent most of my off-school time engaging with and supporting the Quake community in Sweden

Supposed to hammer through some vue.js tutorials to keep brain working, but got stuck in the way back machine when I got a renewal email for one of my oldest domain registered in 1998.

Back then I was playing QuakeWorld a lot. It all started a couple of years earlier with Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem and then Quake, which evolved into QuakeWorld, making it somewhat more playable for us HPW modem guys (ping around 180 with tweaked MTU string).

I spent most of my off-school time engaging with and supporting the Quake community in Sweden. Remember Quakenet IRC? For a while I even owned a couple of Quakenet TLDs. From what I understand QN is now one of the worlds largest irc communities. Pretty cool.

I also built, with help from friends, the great demo-dump page where we hosted hundreds of demos (recorded games) complete with rating system, descriptions etc. At the time it was one of the largest Quake demo sites. (I still have the demos saved on an external hdd).

When I turned 19 and moved to northern Sweden to start my computer science studies I alreadys knew how to develop most things.

That was lucky, because I ended up in a student room by myself. Felt isolated for a day or two, until a couple of members of Clan Dunno figured out I had moved to Sundsvall. I wrote with pecka and hewan on IRC and they asked me if i could hear the stomp on the roof. I could. Turned out most of the Dunno clan lived in the student apartment above me. Instant friends! Felt like I met with people I had already known for a long time. From isolated to included. I still get goose bumps thinking of this!

I had an amazing time. Spend so much time gaming on my newly acquired fibre connection, I was lucky that I already knew the basics of coding, skipping a couple of classes but managed to get the grades anyway.

I guess I learned a lot of coding, how to be part of a community, how to run online teams, participate in leagues, including setting up games and practices. It may sounds strange to some, but I value my gaming background a lot.

But, what happend with all my Quake friends? I’m afraid I lost track. In my career I have only met a few. I believe a couple of Quake players established Massive Entertainment (Now a Ubisoft studio) but other than that I dont know.

Did you play Quake? Or other online games?

My handle was Highone (not associated with drugs, I simply couldnt fit NoWay_Highlander in the games name field) 🙂

You would find me on Irc channels hashtag#flum hashtag#bufflarna_flyger_i_luften hashtag#quake.se