2023-04-13: The Quake Club And Its Consequences
That is not dead which can eternal lie...
My high school, in the late 2010s, had a Quake club. That's a bit of a stretch — by "Quake club," I mean me, two or three of my friends, and anyone else we could rope in on any given day. At first we played by using the Chrome extension port of WebQuake. This worked well enough — it was easy to set up, all the PCs had Chrome (whether we liked it or not), and it was easy to pick up and play. Eventually, though, the "core" club (read: me and two or three of my buddies) wanted something more robust, more permanent, and, probably most importantly, something that could easily be connected to outside of the school.
In our school's computer science classroom, there were shelves upon shelves of old, junk computers, probably nearly 100 of them. One would occasionally be pulled down and used for a demonstration or a student's project, but by and large they simply sat there and collected dust, waiting to eventually be shipped off to an electronics recycler. I believe it was early in my junior year when I had the bright idea of pulling one down and turning it into a server. Conveniently, I also had a "TA" period that overlapped with a slot that that teacher didn't actually have a class in, right after lunch — in short, I had two hours of largely unsupervised access to the lab. So naturally, I took those hours to set to work on my plan…
Looking back, it's hard for me to imagine being so driven to do something, but I spent a solid couple of weeks teaching myself how to effectively use that old computer as a server — I think it was an old Pentium 4 or Core 2 Duo box. Sooner than later, though, I had it all up and runnning — I figured out how to use SSH to control it from the outside, get unattended updates and reboots going, had nQuakesv to keep the game server online 24/7, I even had the bright idea to use Hamachi to connect it to the outside world without port forwarding. There was even a web server running on it, at one point. I probably learned more about computers through this little scheme than I did in the rest of the class.
Naturally, IT caught wind of this, and was pretty pissed off. I should have known it would happen sooner or later. One night, in the middle of a game, the server went offline for no apparent reason. The next day, we arrived to class to find that the computer had vanished. One earful from the computer science teacher later and I knew that I'd have to find a better solution. I did, eventually, setting up an PC of similar vintage at my father's house to act as a permanent server, and once again life was good. Fast-forward to 2020, and the coronavirus pandemic hit and fucked up everything, effectively dissolving the "club".
At some point during this period, a few of us dabbled in map creation - this sweet-looking new map editor called TrenchBroom had just hit the scene, and we were eager to use it to put our own little spin on the game. Nearly none of our attempts got anywhere, but eventually I did actually complete one map - metal2, pictured above.
The goal of metal2 was to be the "Final Destination" for Quake. No bullshit, no downtime, just a fair fight. In practice, it rarely was, usually resulting in whoever got the first frag steamrolling the duel. 4-player Deathmatch, while more fair, was a complete clusterfuck. In short, not an amazing map. It was retired quickly in favour of dm4, dm6, aerowalk, and other normal maps designed by competent mappers — and so there it languished, a world sealed away on an clicking hard disk in a dusty tower.
The other day, I remembered that it existed. Egged on by autistic hyperfixation, nostalgia, and curiosity, I logged back into that server to see if it was there and sure enough, right where I left it. Warts and all. For the hell of it, I threw it into the /files/games/ directory on this site, and posted it to my Cohost page. I was surprised to see that it got much of any response at all. I was absolutely shocked when someone else went to the trouble of making a bot navmesh for it.
It's weird to think of all the ripple effects that ultimately came from just wanting to explode my friends with rockets over the internet. From my fascination with old tech, to my server-maintenance hobby, to some random stranger picking up some crappy map I made and doing something with it, it kinda blows my mind to think about it all at once. Life is weird like that.
If you really want to, for some reason, you can download metal2 here. It includes adorablesergal's botmap, and installation instructions. The map source has been lost to time, but it can't be that hard to recreate a map this simple by hand if you really want to.