Speedrunning is currently a huge an active community at the time of this posting, but it definitely wasn’t always this way. Far from it – speedrunning owes its very existence to two very influential titles – Doom, and Quake. Today, we will be covering Quake, which is responsible for popularizing speedrunning initially and forming a huge, yet tight-knit community.
Both games not only revolutionized the gaming industry during their respective golden ages, but they also are responsible for, in a sense, kick-starting speedrunning.
Quake was released in June of 1996, and soon after its release, many people began to try and finish its levels as fast as possible. In this time, when the internet was in its infancy, they didn’t have YouTube, or Twitch, or Open Broadcast Software, or any fancy methods of recording like we do today. Instead, they recorded files called demos, and shared those files with others. When someone downloaded a demo, they would simply open quake, and view the demo in the game from the startup screen (the demo replaced the default startup screen).
Quake also set the definitive categorization for speedrunning for years to come – beat the game as fast as possible, or beat the game while killing every monster, and finding all the secrets. Keep in mind that mostly individual level runs were done, there were not many full game runs at this time. This is a precursor to the any%/100% standardization across many different games to come, but Quake took it one step further – the only runs that were accepted were ran on Nightmare difficulty.
And now, for some key points in the following year:
April of 1997 – a man by the name of Nolan Pflug started a leaderboard website for keeping track of the fastest Quake demos. This site was known as Nightmare Speed Demos, and soon after was migrated to PlanetQuake, which consequently became the new standardized resource for speedrunning.
June 1997 – Nolan and a small group gave birth to Quake done Quick, which was a project aiming at organizing the fastest full-game runs. The idea of carrying over one level’s statistics to another was interesting, and even revolutionary at the time. It sparked many a quake runner’s interest, and even fostered new people to start going fast. There was debate around this time, on whether full game runs should be run on the hardest difficulty, or whichever difficulty was fastest. There was a dichotomy of how the game was viewed – one side valued skill and difficulty, the other valued tricks and technical movement. Of course, they weren’t mutually exclusive, but it was very much a newbie vs old timer debate, and it reflects many attitudes even seen now in many speedrunning communities.
This is the famous original Quake done Quick video recorded by Yonatan Donner, Matthias Belz and Nolan Pflug:
August 1997 – Two men, Gunnar Andre Mo, and Muad’Dib, created a Quake page specifically for Easy runs. Whether this divided the community or made it stronger, and this site’s actual name is all but lost in time.
April 1998 – By now the Quake community is well established, but once again seeking to grow even more. Nolan and Gunnar collaborated and merged their pages, titling the site we all know and love today, the Speed Demos Archive, or just SDA for short. Of course, then, the URL was http://planetquake.com/sda. Initially, this site only accepted Quake runs (both Easy and Nightmare, both individual levels and full game runs).
Around this time, as well, Quake 2 was recently released, and a section for that game was added to SDA. Unfortunately, there were some issues. Quake 2’s physics and its engine did not allow for easily recorded demos as Quake did, and as a result, it was difficult to implement. It was then put on a long hiatus, and finally re-added in February of 1999. Quake 2 never reached the levels of popularity that Quake did, however.
The rest, of course, is history. Speed Demos Archive continues to exist today, and is home to a variety of different high quality runs of many different games, as well as Forums that are still even used to this day.
Credits go to SDA for the huge majority of this information. Credit goes to pricklyrabite for linking the very first Quake Done Quick video.
