By Dwight Silverman
Copyright Houston Chronicle
10-13-1997

`Quake' clans spring up all over the Internet

Sean Martin lives in two worlds.

By day, he's a high-tech recruit at Compaq Computer Corp., a systems analyst who recently moved to Houston from a job at Texas Instruments in Dallas.

By night, though, he's better known as Redwood, an online scribe whose World Wide Web site is part of the glue that bonds a vast, diffuse community in cyberspace.

As Redwood, Martin is a bona fide Internet celebrity. An average of 15,000 Web surfers each day come to his Quake Page, at http://redwood.stomped.com/. There, he regales them with news and gossip from the world of Quake, the 3-D action computer game from Mesquite-based id Software that is the successor to Doom. Even some of his colleagues at Compaq have been startled to find that they are working alongside "the" Redwood.

Martin's audience is fans who play Quake online against each other, logging in for free to hundreds of computers set up to run the game.

For hours at a time, they chase each other through elaborately crafted virtual worlds, blasting away at each other with rocket launchers, guns that spew nails or bloody axes. People play individually or in teams, adopting pseudonyms ranging from the melodramatic to the goofy.

Excited about the competition and the possibilities in the game -- which can be easily altered and extended -- Quake fans like to communicate with each other, bragging about their victories and keeping in touch about new developments. Martin's site is part of a complex Internet-based network that the group uses to keep in touch.

"Web pages like mine, and some of the others, bring players of Quake into contact with each other," Martin said. "It gives people a feeling that they are not alone out there on the Internet."

While Quake may be best known for its spectacular computer graphics, astounding 3-D gameplay and its bucket-of-blood approach to interactive entertainment, its most important impact may be what it has done to the notion of community in the online world.

The Quake community is unusual because it has no one place it calls home, unlike other virtual communities that are built around an online service, a Web site or computer bulletin board.

Instead, its members use a variety of technologies to connect with each other -- the Web, Internet chat, discussion groups and the game itself, which lets players send messages to each other.

The community has evolved on its own, spontaneously, without help or even the direct encouragement of id Software.

"Rather than being planned housing, it's like a neighborhood that just sort of started up," said Steve Heaslip, who runs a site similar to Martin's called Blue's News. "I wouldn't venture to guess how big it is now. Certainly tens of thousands -- maybe hundreds of thousands?"

The notion of virtual communities is as old as the first personal computer modems, which let individuals connect to bulletin board systems that featured online discussion forums.

Today, the notion of people with shared interests congregating in cyberspace has gone mainstream, with the success of such ventures as the 10-million-member America Online, built by founder Steve Case around the concept of virtual communities.

"People want to connect with each other," said Howard Rheingold, author of the book Virtual Communities: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. "And people want to entertain each other. It makes sense that if you can merge the two, it would be huge."

Rheingold said that usually a virtual community is built around a shared location, and that the Quake community is something different because it is decentralized. He suspects a single location may emerge yet out of the Quake community.

But, he added, its diffuse nature may be a lot like the rave culture.

Raves are all-night dance parties that are held in different locations, Rheingold said. Those who attend them send e-mail to alert each other as to the next rave's location and time.

"It used to be that, in order to have fun and hear music, you had to go to a rock concert," he said. "Now there is no star, only the DJ and a sound system. They send out e-mail, and a couple of hundred people show up in the middle of the night.

"They make their own entertainment."

Playing Quake against other people is done any of several ways. It can be played one-on-one via modem, with one computer user dialing another's system. It can be played over a computer network, with up to 16 machines connected to a single game.

It also can be played over the Internet, with one computer designated as a server, running software that lets others log in. Some of the server software that's available can host as many as 32 players, and requires that the computer be dedicated to Quake. Martin, for example, has a dedicated Quake server hosted by HAL-PC, the Houston PC users' group.

Exactly how many people play Quake online is not known, but a slick software program called Gamespy shows that, on any given evening there are more than 1,400 computers worldwide ready to accept Quake players for free games.

That doesn't include big, commercial systems such as TEN, Houston-based Dwango or Sega's new gaming network, Heat, which also host Quake games.

It also does not include "LAN parties," evening and weekend gatherings in homes, hotels or offices where players connect over a closed network. In some cases, players bring their own computers to be hooked into the network.

Barrett Alexander, id's director of business development, said the company has sold 1.1 million copies of the game since it was released in the summer of 1996 -- 700,000 retail packages and 400,000 shareware disks. That doesn't include the thousands who've downloaded shareware copies from various sites on the Internet or from online services.

Like Doom before it, Quake's premise when played alone is simple -- use a variety of intimidating weapons to kill anything that moves before it kills you. Reviewers have praised the three-dimensional aspects of the game -- players have almost complete freedom of movement -- and the realistically frightening graphics.

But it becomes a completely different experience when played against others, either on a computer network or over the Internet. It becomes a high-tech version of cowboys and Indians, where strategy and intelligence are just as important as a good aim.

Quake also can be changed and added to. As was the case with Doom, there are now hundreds of additional levels -- even complete replacements for the game's worlds -- crafted by devoted amateur designers who've offered their work for free on the Net.

Some of their work has not gone unnoticed by the companies that make and market the games. Alexander said id has hired two people, Brandon "Killme" James and Tim Willits, who had started out making levels for fun.

"Tim's sister got him interested in making Doom levels," Alexander said. Willits eventually landed a job at Rogue Entertainment, which makes games using id's software, and id hired him away after he "picked up the Quake editor and did some miracles."

When James was hired, he was working on a total conversion of all the levels in Quake called Zerstörer: Testament of the Destroyer. James was one of seven designers on the project, including Darin McNeil, a student at Southwest Louisiana University in Lafayette.

McNeil said the team was spread out all over the country, with one member in Austria and another now in Japan. They collaborated via the Internet, meeting in chat sessions to coordinate their efforts.

Their levels have won raves from game reviewers and praise from other members of the community.

"We did this just because we loved doing it," McNeil said. "We like giving something back."

Game industry observers say it is the extendability of Quake that inspires its most hard-core fans, who love building levels and then posting them on the Net for others to play. Particularly popular are levels designed with the strategy of multiplayer games in mind.

These death-match games often descend into random firefights, with players chaotically blasting each other into pixellated bits. But the game also can be played in teams, which have come to be known as Quake clans.

"We were kind of amazed that people use that word -- clans," said id's Alexander. "We had used it here. Someone said, `Wouldn't it be amazing if people starting forming teams with their own colors and logos -- kind of like clans?' But we never used it outside of id. It raised a few eyebrows when people started calling themselves clans."

There are thousands of clans, teams whose members in many cases are scattered across the country.

Martin, for example, plays with a clan called Dark Requiem. Among his teammates is American McGee, one of id Software's level designers, who plays out of id's Mesquite offices under the name Tokay.

The clans set up elaborate Web sites in which they solicit challenges from other clans, list their members, boast of their victories and bemoan their losses. They bear names that sound ominous, Medieval, absurd or obscene -- or a combination.

There are even women-only Quake clans, including the Clan CrackWhore, whose Web site is a mixture of in-your-face sexuality and swaggering braggadocio. The name comes from a 1995 Saturday Night Live routine about the 10 worst jobs in America -- No. 2 being "crackwhore" and No. 1 being "assistant crackwhore."

"Women form their own clans because they feel they have something common in the game," said Tamra Katic, a CrackWhore member who plays under the name Tease. "But it's kind of struggling -- this is male-dominated gaming."

Katic said women play Quake different from men.

"Women are gentler," she said. "If you get stuck, where your connection has problems, they won't walk up and kill you. They'll just stop and wait until the player becomes unstuck. Although, personally, I would just walk up and waste 'em."

The development of the Quake community has happened largely without the direct involvement of id Software -- other than its creation of the game. At first, said Alexander, id hosted a clan page but became concerned when some of the clans started using copyrighted logos.

"We had Clan KFC -- Kentucky Fried Chicken, and there was the Charlton Heston Clan," he said. "The last thing we needed was Charlton Heston -- the guy who played God in the movies -- suing us for copyright infringement." So id wound up finding a member of the community to host the clan Web site.

Alexander said having such a devoted and electronically connected group of fans has helped in the development of the company's games.

"They all have e-mail, and they are not shy," he said.

Some of their complaints about the first version of Quake, as well as suggestions for new features, have been taken to heart and are being woven into Quake 2, which Alexander said will be out before Christmas.

"Some people thought Quake lacked something in single-player gameplay," he said. "We have definitely addressed that in Quake 2."

The company also has reached out to the community to help it test its game. Martin recently drove from Houston to Dallas to spend a Saturday playing a demo version of Quake 2 that will be released over the Internet shortly.

The community also has begun to police itself and protect its own members, particularly after one female Quake player was harassed online. A part-time model in England, the woman -- who plays Quake under the name Hellkitten -- had posted some of her fashion shots on her own Web page.

Martin said one person or several people began sending her pictures of herself that had been altered pornographically. Her Web site was hacked into, he said, and eventually someone sent her a file that contained a nasty computer virus.

"The community responded with a lot of support," said Martin, who kept in touch with her through the ordeal. "They found out who was doing it -- or at least who sent her the virus. I know because they e-mailed me his name. I don't know what ever came of it, though."

Hellkitten did not respond to e-mail requests for an interview.

In reaction to the incident, several Quake fans have launched a campaign against online harassment. Many Quake Web pages now sport green ribbons -- clicking on them takes Web surfers to the campaign's headquarters page at http://grc.-quake2.com/.

David Donnelly, a professor of communications at the University of Houston, said the Hellkitten incident is a hallmark of community.

"They have developed policies and laws dictating behavior," Donnelly said. "But in virtual communities we are seeing new approaches of governance, new ways of establishing community regulations. Previously they were formed by a bureaucracy, but here you have something that people have communally agreed upon."

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