Review: Quakapalooza

QuakaPalooza - Ireland's largest LAN for players of the computer games "Quake" and "Quake 2" - was held in the Burlington Hotel, Dublin, from 24 to 26 October, 1998.

The original idea behind QP was that fifteen or so people would bring along their own PCs to play on, and each person would also have one or two invitees who would share the PC with the owner. A lot more than this actually showed up, I think it was somewhere between 100 and 150 people altogether!

Hype for QP had been growing steadily since it was announced in the summer. On the Friday night before the weekend, a couple of IRC regulars in the #quake channel started sending messages via the web to an LED display panel based in Netscape's offices, the results of which were transmitted back over the internet via a WebCam!

I left for QP on the Saturday morning. After getting trains, taxis and buses, I eventually made it along to the venue sometime around 4, picked up my weekend pass, and strolled on in past the numerous other GaelCon gaming and role-playing events.

An amazing sight met my eyes as I moved to the back of the room... Even by now, I was expecting the Quake section to be in a state of chaos with PCs, network cards and cables still strewn everywhere. But the place was in a happy state of organisation, people sitting at all the PCs and actually playing on a variety of QW and Q2 servers.

This was the best opportunity yet for the average Quake player to put faces to the aliases because nearly every big name in Ireland was there with a badge saying who they were. Wandering around the edge of the action for the rest of the day, I came across a number of familiar Quake players -

Ace Ventura, Beast, Bunny, Chaos, Carnate, DeVore, Earthworm Jim, Jaden, Kaile, Koloth, KoopaTroopa, Mickah, MindPhuck, Reaper, Reginald, Scary / OverLord, SeP, Slaanesh, Sniper, Steo, Thinker, toilet, Trojan, Zero.

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And there were quite a few people that I hadn't met before either -

Adrastea, Anjocan, Blade, Blaster, Cave, DonRon, Gandalf, FreaK_BrutheR, Greenbean, Kharn, Nemesis, Shank, Shock / Suds, Vexorg, Von Swine.

It was especially cool to meet fellow GI clan member, Euclid, who came all the way from England with two friends, surJeON and Muad, just for the event.

We were all kicked out of the hall at 8 PM, and the Quake players moaned and groaned and eventually moved a few feet off into the Burlo's bar, where game stories and mod URLs were exchanged freely over beer and complementary baskets of peanuts and crisps.

The next day, the competitions got underway, first of all a match between long-time rivals nD and CT, followed by the one on one tournament. Despite being woefully out of practice, I decided to take part, and actually got through MindPhuck and Reginald to the quarter finals where I was beaten by Mickah. The rest of the duel matches were held over until the Monday. At this stage I was all Quaked out, and after about a half an hour of goodbyes, I left to catch my return train to Galway.

A great weekend, I hope we have something similar again before this time next year. Thanks to all who gave their time to making it a success, especially the main organiser, Tom Murphy (AKA DeVore).