The reason Boards.ie was born

Offy

Who is Boards daddy I hear you say?
Would Boards.ie exist if it wasn’t for Quake?
What brought about the birth of Boards.ie?

Fear not kids I have the answer. Back in the day before Boards.ie was even a thought is DeVore of Clouds mind there was Quake. You youngsters (also known as noobs, el gringos, techno weenies, etc.) might not know this but quake was a beast, untamed, scary and might I say it, addictive. Around ’97 sometime I bought myself a new Olivetti and it came with some free software. It was my very first Pentium, something you youngsters take for granted but let me tell you that it was a massive jump from the old 8086’s I was used to. Quake was hidden away on the hard drive. This pc had surround sound, something I later discovered would scare my more than any horror movie. I spent a few hours playing with the OS and then the file manager. It was then I found Quake, the original of the species. I double clicked as you did with windows 3.1. The screen was taken over to my amazement with the smoothest graphics I had ever seen on any game.

Instantly I was mesmerised. A first person shooter, I was elated. I ran through the start up and configured the keys. I was alone in the room. Lights dimmed. Kids in bed. Wife out with friends. Not a sound could be heard. I ran through a hallway into a big room. It was then I felt fear. I heard a groan. I looked over my shoulder expecting to see Freddy Krueger stood behind me. There was nobody there. I thought I was hearing things, perhaps it was madness? Ok hold it together Offy, back to the game. Then another groan, damn I gotta get out of this room. What was making that noise? Snap out of it. Then out of nowhere a zombie came at me. Thank GOD for that. Now you kids might say that’s not so scary but back then computer games made sounds like cheap mobile phone ringtones. Ok it’s the game, only the game. I continued through an old castle fragging everything I could see. At about 3am my wife came home and sent me to bed. It was too late, I was addicted.

A few weeks later while on night shift I build a crossover cable, installed quake on two machines and spent the night with another engineer lost in a fantasy world. 8 am came along and we were gutted that we had to disconnect the computers and enter reality again. My wife got very jealous of quake over the next few months but I persisted in my fragging. Soon after that I had the internet installed at home but connecting to quake games wasn’t easy. IRC was the best bet. I soon discovered that my addiction wasn’t exclusive to me. A whole new drug had been coded. This drug wasn’t sold on the streets. It didn’t get you into trouble with the law.

Two young chaps also wanted a piece of the action. They had a vision. A coded drug induced vision. That vision was boards, an online place to congregate. Computer nerds, geeks and dorks from all corners of the island flocked there to get their fix. Like any new drug it took hold of the population and grew, it grew bit by bit and byte by byte. New forums were added. With the new forums came new members. One of the founders decided to dedicate his life to this project. Would he have done all this if it wasn’t for quake? The other decided to dedicate his life to academia but also remained actively involved with this enterprise. Between them they build more than a bulletin board, more than a mere website, they build method of communication for all to enjoy. What started as a meeting place for gamers grew to an international level. So the next time you log on give praise to quake, the father of boards. Bow your head in appreciation of ID software. Thank all the uber geeks that make it possible for you to sell your car, talk to your friends, find out about your favourite musician, rant about your partner, check-out the best price of your favourite mobile phone and all the other things you use boards for. If it wasnt for quake would any of us be here?

Illkillya

My older brother came home for Christmas 1996 and brought the game with him. The local computer expert (i.e., only other guy in the town who hard heard of IRC) laughed and said it would never run on my old 486dx but he didn't know that my 486 had a "math coprocessor" and was running at 100mhz.

But I had no CD Rom drive, so I read the user manual cover to cover 1000 times while I waited for one. "Thou canst not kill that which doth not live. But you can blast it into chunky kibbles". On Christmas eve I managed to get Quake installed, booted up from Dos for better performance. The rest is a haze of dark corridors and pentagrams at < 10 fps without mouselook, glued to the screen and saving every 30 seconds any time I turn a corner because I was so engrossed. Vaguely remember getting dragged off the computer for a Christmas dinner that I wanted no part in. Somehow managed to beat the game without even realising how I killed Shub-Niggurath. I better stop thinking about Quake now or I might get addicted again...

freelancerTax

op are you offy_IRL in quake live?

SuperInfinity

Quake 1 will always be scary, and had great sound. What's scarier than a Fiend or Spawn coming at you about to kill you? I've heard people remark about old games like the original Resident Evil being the scariest.

Nobody is going to acknowledge being actually scared by a piece of media as an adult, but for making you jump, Quake 1 is definitely one of the best.

Zero

Best game ever.
lacerta.ucg.ie/wwwboard used to be the old quake boards that morphed into this. My user id used to be single digit on this when it started.
Killy whats the craic man? I'm currently addicted to BF3, if any of the old quakers are playing it add me, "namazani"

Ro.

Yakuza

I started playing Quake online in '97 (same username as my boards one). I was one of those HPW . When I got my first 3D card (a separate card with VGA passthrough) I thought I'd gone to virtual heaven when I fired up QuakeGL - it was sooooo smooth and realistic (for the time). I've known Devore since the 80's so he emailed me in Nov '99 saying I should check out a certain site, www.boards.ie, and the rest is history!

Finglas Incubus

Yakuza wrote: »

When I got my first 3D card (a separate card with VGA passthrough) I thought I'd gone to virtual heaven when I fired up QuakeGL - it was sooooo smooth and realistic (for the time).

I remember a similar experience after installing a Creative Labs 3D Blaster back in the day, OpenGL was where it was at back then. I also remember paying a fortune for running both channels of an ISDN line simultaneously in an effort to get into the HPB stakes. Raiding network kit from the job to help support QuakePalooza, LAN parties @ Vexorgs and Spacemans, being frowned upon for using the 'keys' rather than the mouse, continuously customising the hell out of the config.cfg - all good memories. Those of you that used to hang around the indigo.ie Quake servers at the time will no doubt remember many of the names on this list.

Yakuza

I'm second last on that list
I never knew there was "a list" :cool:

Mr. CooL ICE

The nostalgia is too much!

It was the first game I bought when my parents got a P166 (with MMX! woo!) back in 1997. I didn't even think to try it online until over a year later where I was just an annoying kid in the IRC channels and getting my ass kicked in FFAs

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup

I never played it much when I was young, just the single player which was kinda boring. Internet wasn't good enough for multiplayer. I started playing in 2006 in College because it's one of our mates favourite games. He was an unreal player, used to play online in the 90s. David Hehir was his name, handle was daa or walt0r. I heard he was a bit of a troll in the Irish Quake community

I first heard of boards on Irish newsgroups, ie.comp and ie.general. A lot of posters were on both but I always preferred usenet as you could download messages quickly and then read offline, with a forum you had to be on the phone-line the whole time. Those 2 groups are completely dead now, kinda sad.

the_syco

Went from Doom to Duke3D to CS. Kind of skipped Quake (until I was in college, then played it a lot more). CS would have been my first online gaming experience. Dialup ftl!

Popoutman

Played quake in UL - became by definition an LPB, even to the States where I played a few guys and had lower pingtimes then they had locally. Never got too deeply involved, as college work got in the way. Was friends with Osiris, Sonic, Marlyman, GuinnessMan, knew Zero for years. Good times..
There was also a time when I played CloudWarrior and got comprehensively whipped to the extent that he just went on an axe spree. Didn't help that I learned to play without sound so I missed all the sound location cues

My quake claim to fame was being probably the first person in Ireland (certainly in UL) to play Q3Test, stayed up all night waiting for the release of the files, as I had a p133 with voodoo1 running Linux at the time. q3dm17 at 12fps was sooo much fun!